He links it at the end, life imitating art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817280
See here's the thing - to get the ability to downvote / flag articles, you have to say stuff in public enough times to get the 200 (400?) karma to unlock that. Well, how do you get that karma? You say the things that people on that site want to hear so they click upvote. Spot the curricular bias problem? It was intentionally designed this way.
I think HN is one of the most rigged websites I encountered.
Some posts there look clearly botted regarding the score.
Not a single soul can tell me that it's normal that the 345th "new AI model"-post get's 1k upvotes within like 3 hours while articles like "I can steal Mastercard transactions" barely have 800 after an entire day.
Years ago, in the early 20-teens, I had posted on HN in protest to some new web property that aimed to tie yet another aspect of life to cell phones. I said something like "I work in software but I still don't have a cell phone, I don't like them, I don't want one, I don't want yet another aspect of modern life to encourage dependence on some subscription service like a phone." Which was all true.
This attracted rather more reaction than anything else I posted on there. The reactions fell into a few categories:
Any illusion I had that the HN people were software-loving geeks like me kind of dissolved after that, and I stopped visiting. I suppose that's exactly what they wanted.
I used to read HN and find interesting stuff, but stopped when it became ever more flooded with startups and AI this.
In its place I have the RSS feed from lobsters, which surfaces plenty of interesting articles.
I've also noticed the HN community has been on an accelerating train of lower quality discussion since some time before COVID.
Some of the community has always had a bit of a silicon valley libertarian brain rot, but it used to be balanced out by the open source crowd and just normal professional engineers across the world. The latter demographics have mostly evaporated leaving some of the most braindead takes completely unchallenged, until they've become the only noise in the room.
It's a bit of a shame really, because it used to be a pretty good resource for keeping on top of the comings and goings of the software engineering industry. Combined with Reddit shitting the bed just after COVID, I've yet to actually find a decent replacement for what I got out of browsing it, really. Here does a fairly decent job, but as with many subjects, the breadth of content and opinions isn't quite the same.
Perhaps I need to give Mastodon another go despite not really enjoying microblog social media as a format in general (any recs for follows are greatly appreciated)
Politics and society are bifurcating, and Hacker News is taking the fork on the right. “Apolitical” is an excuse to favor the status quo, a resistance to change, and therefore a re-enforcement of the existing biases and power structures of society.
Quote of the day right there.
Agree with all of this, but why then does the author stay on HN? It's as with Xitter, at some point staying on the platform makes you complicit.
It's funny and sad how many people that consider themselves apolitical and above the quarrels of the left and the right are completely oblivious to how they let the political devils pipeline bias straight into their brain.
And how people that consider themselves centrist seem to have a genuine hate against anything actually centrist. Centrism today is anything from market liberalism and rightwards straight into fascism it seems.
That site has always been the feckless asshole version of Slashdot.
Reminder that Drew DeVault is a pedophile.
He also wrote a smear piece about Stallman and then pretended it wasn't him.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41838124
He is the problem. Ignore him.
Depends on when you read HN. Right now, I see a fierce debate about the evils of AI at the top. On the one hand there are folks defending AI and dreaming of the end of human labour, pointing at Wall-E as a utopia. On the other hand, there are others pointing out that the ultra-rich in the tech industry have openly expressed a desire to build a techno-feudalism with themselves living as kings, while the masses die in unemployed squalor.
HN does read like its full of jerks. Altman, Thiel, Curtis, YC connection tells a lot.
It's pack full of gouhls
People in positions of privilege very often tell on themselves when they dismiss anything that challenges their worldview as "political," and therefore inappropriate for whatever "no politics, please" forum they're in. It doesn't mean they're stupid, but it does mean they're stunted. They would be better leaders if they had broader horizons.
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