4 ms·
The core point of this (people are jerks, especially on HN) has been a recurring theme ever since the new mods have showed up on HN, trying to clean up our act.
by rtpg 11y ago
The core point of this (people are jerks, especially on HN) has been a recurring theme ever since the new mods have showed up on HN, trying to clean up our act. Things seem a lot better than a year ago, and I try extremely hard to assume good faith from people on the other side of the screen when replying to comments (helps my mood a lot).
But this suffers from the same thing everything I read from Shaw: such strong language. I can't comment for him (I think I've seen him post before, would be interested), but my impression is that he's genuinely hurt by these people. Is he trying to change anything, or just venting?
> I’d like to point out that one of the reasons most of your moronic baby penis followers hate me is because I wiped out epic amounts of Ruby on Rails with one blog post full of truth.
This doesn't make me want to agree at all. I like HN and don't give 2 shits about RoR. I care deeply about making the internet slightly better by convincing people to stop being assholes. But hey, this is pretty rude! I won't quote the entire thing, but it's a lot of crass imagery.
Maybe this is satire, but I don't think so. I don't have a witty conclusion to reading this, just a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach
- scrollaway 11y agoIt's very inconsistent. Replace "Paul Graham" by "John Doe", "Hacker News" by "Kernel driver" and "Zed Shaw" by "Linus Torvalds" and the commentary becomes "hihi oh my, that is some funnily crass imagery". Language is just language. Crass language exaggerates a point, an emotion. If the underlying point is poor in the first place, the only thing swearing does is amplify how stupid the whole thing is.
- rtpg 11y agoFor the record, I think Linus' usage of crass language is just as pointless. It's totally possible to show that you're pissed without demanding that someone be shot or aborted. Language is not "just" language, there's underlying nuance, history in usage of an expression, and overall context. There are degrees, of course, but when you start offending a large portion of your potential audience _solely_ because of the words you choose, it might be important to consider how you say things. Though that language usage might be part of one' objective, I think Linus' objectives is furthering the development of Linux, not the advancement of cutting-edge English language insults.
- scrollaway 11y agoI think Linus' swearing is pointless as well, but people don't get turned off from his posts because the underlying point he makes tends to be true, which is what I'm trying to say here.
- rtpg 11y agohaving a hard time parsing your comment, and I don't want to do too much back and forth, but: If you go back to some HN posts linking to mailing list stuff with one of Linus' rants, there's often more than one person saying "I do not want to work on Linux because of how Linus talks". This could be exaggeration, but it's turned off people and it turns me off. Though I agree that Linus does gets brownie points due to his usual rightness on the technical domain. In the words of the Dude: not wrong, just an asshole.
- adventured 11y agoRather than satire, it comes across as rage. That's certainly how you can tell his feelings were hurt significantly. The extremism of his language, and his need to lash out, tells you the extent to which he feels wounded.