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HN is becoming increasingly pro paternalism and censorship (largely invalidating the "Hacker" in its name). I'm not sure if this is natural / organic or some ki

HN is becoming increasingly pro paternalism and censorship (largely invalidating the "Hacker" in its name). I'm not sure if this is natural / organic or some kind of astroturfing, but it sure is odd and doesn't really match the rest of the overall (historical) ethos of the site.

OrangeMusic 8mo ago
Over generalizations of what HN "is" or what HN "does" are always meaningless. It's a large group of different people who don't act as a single individual. For instance the comments and opinions in this post are very diverse.
- D-Machine 8mo ago
  Generalizations are just doing better than random guessing by just paying attention to base rates, or, equivalently, describing the majority / bulk of distributions. This isn't meaningless, it is just simple statistical summary in common language. Also, with modern tools like sentiment analysis and other semantic analysis tools enabled by LLMs, it is pretty trivial to do empirical tests of claims like this (further proving how empty the claim that generalizations about a thing are "meaningless"). Being for paternalistic, censorious policies that restrict software behaviour so broadly is very obviously not "Hacker" (even if you agree with these policies), and this would have been far more surprising 10 years ago to see on HN. This is a "generalization" of the ideological shifts of HN, yes, but a meaningful one (which of course people are free to agree or disagree with).
- tsoukase 8mo ago
  The comment voting is very opionated though. It's like the same person up/down votes consistently. Obviously the people who vote are of the same opinion group.
comboy 8mo ago
I've been wondering about that yesterday quite a bit, I've came to the conclusion that a big part is kind of anti-China sentiment on HN. I think the discussion would be quite different if we were talking about instagram reels/youtube shorts. Plus there seem to be not many users, most crowd here gets dopamine elsewhere (like coding), tiktok seems to be mostly associated with brain-rot and not learning and diving into new topics.

OrangeMusic 8mo ago

Over generalizations of what HN "is" or what HN "does" are always meaningless. It's a large group of different people who don't act as a single individual. For instance the comments and opinions in this post are very diverse.

D-Machine 8mo ago
Generalizations are just doing better than random guessing by just paying attention to base rates, or, equivalently, describing the majority / bulk of distributions. This isn't meaningless, it is just simple statistical summary in common language. Also, with modern tools like sentiment analysis and other semantic analysis tools enabled by LLMs, it is pretty trivial to do empirical tests of claims like this (further proving how empty the claim that generalizations about a thing are "meaningless"). Being for paternalistic, censorious policies that restrict software behaviour so broadly is very obviously not "Hacker" (even if you agree with these policies), and this would have been far more surprising 10 years ago to see on HN. This is a "generalization" of the ideological shifts of HN, yes, but a meaningful one (which of course people are free to agree or disagree with).
tsoukase 8mo ago
The comment voting is very opionated though. It's like the same person up/down votes consistently. Obviously the people who vote are of the same opinion group.

comboy 8mo ago

I've been wondering about that yesterday quite a bit, I've came to the conclusion that a big part is kind of anti-China sentiment on HN. I think the discussion would be quite different if we were talking about instagram reels/youtube shorts. Plus there seem to be not many users, most crowd here gets dopamine elsewhere (like coding), tiktok seems to be mostly associated with brain-rot and not learning and diving into new topics.