I get the general sense that people debate in good faith on here. I rarely see comment chains devolve into name calling and personal attacks like on Reddit.
Sometimes you come across a comment on here that seems a little whackadoodle, but even the weirdest takes I’ve seen at least includes some amount of reasoning behind a particular position. I mostly attribute these types of comments to the nerdy tech filter bubble we’re all living in.
I think "debate" is the key feature of HN (indeed, most online discourse) that the author has identified. It's easy to base a comment on a flaw in an article, or someone else's comment on the article, so HN discussions can seem very contrarian, almost adversarial.
Randall Munroe may have said it best with his "Duty Calls" comic:
"My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically)."
I catch myself doing this, without realizing it far too often. It's good to catch yourself and try to change.
The problem in those examples is not rejecting the premise, it's doing so in a dismissive, arrogant way.
I've had customers, friends, and family members tell me time and time again that they can't do some common, everyday thing on their computers because it's "not compatible", or it "won't let them", or it "doesn't work". If they're wrong, I show them where they're wrong, what they need to do to fix the problem and avoid similar ones in the future. No need to be dismissive, or berate them for not knowing something. It ends up being a nice "today I learned" situation for them, and we all win.
Never helping anyone with technical stuff unless you're getting paid (or whatever similar thing you can think of) is over-correcting for the doormats that can't say no
I stopped helping people, in general, when there were several instances of people telling me that whatever I did the last time I touched their computer caused some random problem 6 month later. That, and it seemed that people were getting upset when I would show them how to do things, within a couple of minutes (from just knowing where to navigate), that they had been struggling with for hours, or that they were, in fact, typing their password wrong. Maybe they weren't upset with me, but it was usually a negative experience for me, and it slowly chipped away at the glee I used to have for helping people.
Case 1: the person learned and became more autonomous. Fewer questions like this will be asked in the future. You have developed good will.
Case 2: the person expects someone else to do their work. That won't fly for long with me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I will react. Friends and family members can land on the no-contact list. Employees can get fired.
Assume the best, but always prepare for the worst.
Or they're like my father and can't remember things long term anymore because he's too old. I have to walk him through how to join a Discord server every single time I want to use it with him. He used to be good at this stuff, but I guess IQ studies are right that crystallized intelligence (which includes long term memory) goes down after 60.
I enjoy teaching people new things in general, but what I win specifically depends on the situation. With friends and family, it's the personal satisfaction of helping someone I care about.
With customers there's the added benefit of improving business relationships and building trust. If someone contacts me with a question, and I withhold the answer until they pay me, they're gonna feel cheated when they realise the answer was pretty straightforward. It doesn't matter if, technically, I'm providing a service and I'm within my rights to ask for compensation. That customer is going to hesitate to return in the future, because they now feel I just care about their money.
Being open, transparent, and helpful has the opposite effect, in my experience. The customer feels at ease with me, they trust my judgment, know that I'm looking out for them, and so are happy to return to me when they need something, and pay for the job.
Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information. I don't mean this as complaint, just saying that it's so extremely common and so simple it can be a part of curriculum or a social campaign that has potential to save a lot of human-hours (and lots of frustration) just by spreading a simple meme/idea.
Also, I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone. Those two short sentences feel like a very brief excerpt from beginning of a conversation so it's hard to gauge, but I feel that it's an exclamation of surprise that's non-committal and lacking an explicit offer to proceed with details, rather than dismissive (or worse). Circumstances, tone, body language, relationship and other things may make it vary, of course. Can't say it's arrogant either, "no way, it must work" is a legit exclamation that doesn't imply incompetence (unless, again, tone etc).
I'd say it's just passive, not taking any initiative to troubleshoot and communicating just the assurance that the problem must be solvable, then bouncing back to the inquirer. In my understanding, it's more of a lazy/not being in the mood, not dismissive (and I'd have a really hard time trying to call it "toxic").
> Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information.
Couldn't agree more. My first step when troubleshooting anything for someone else is to extract as much information as possible to understand what I'm dealing with. Having that information from the start would save me a lot of time.
>I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone.
True, the quote alone is not necessarily dismissive or arrogant, and your interpretation could very well be correct. I'm assuming it was dismissive because the author seems troubled by his own response, which he interprets as "I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing". That's where my interpretation comes from.
A bit off-topic but I've actually got an inverse problem... Before contacting support I'm trying to collect as much diagnostics as possible, so my first message tends to be a long detailed list of what's the problem, what I did, and what possibly useful (to best of my awareness) supplementary diagnostics I've already performed. This frequently confuses first-tier support folks who're used to people reaching out with mere "nothing works pls help!!1one" and going through checklists.
Yup, I do the same thing. I guess I'm lucky because I rarely have issues with my own gear and the services I use, so contacting support is not something I've needed to do frequently. But when I do, I spend a good amount of time doing research and making sure the issue actually merits bothering someone else and isn't something I can eventually fix on my own. Tier-1 support people are invariably caught by surprise :p
I try to avoid doing that now. It's like going to the doctor and spending 1/2 hour explaining anything that could possibly be related to the issue for which you came. I've found that it is much more helpful to give a concise summary, and be ready to answer very specific questions as they go through their logical process to figure out what actually is the problem. In some cases they need clues but don't know which ones, and then you need to tell everything (e.g. rare diseases, or bugs that happen once in a blue moon at 10:53 when the wind comes from the North). But then, they ask for it explicitly.
I've also had humbling experiences, particularly one with me going through what I thought was relevant and a very nice tech support lady telling me the equivalent of "but did you make sure you turned it on?", and she was right.
Overloading tier-1 techs with too much information rarely does any good, from my experience.
> Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information.
One problem is that most people are socialized heavily against going into these kinds of details in almost every situation they will experience. Only engineers are frequently around other people who want to know specifically what "it doesn't work" means. And even in those cases, you've got to tailor your level of detail with care. It's no wonder people learned to just say "it doesn't work", in the same way that they learned to reply to "how are you" with something vague rather than something extremely specific.
It's the type of response a younger me would have said before I found out how wrong I can be even on subjects I think I know a lot about. My response now to such a question would be "That's weird, mySQL should work on all laptops. Let me take a look." From that point on I'm expecting it to be an error the person didn't understand, but I'm open to the idea that it might be a failure of their install script due to an odd configuration of the laptop, or even a symptom of another problem somewhere else, such as limited disk space, incorrectly installed drivers, or even a hardware issue.
It's entirely possible that it's correct depending on the specifics.
Say for example one is trying to install MySQL 8.0 on a laptop with Catalina, which is still supported by Apple and getting security updates. This is actually unsupported and won't work. A somewhat unlikely situation but definitely not impossible.
Exactly what the crafty older person wanted. Get you to do the work. "It doesn't work on my computer" or some other claim of trouble or ignorance is an easy way to trick a smart energetic young person to do something for you.
Young smart people don't like to say "I don't know how" or "I can't get it to work." An older person will say that without hesitation if it will prompt someone else to do something that he doesn't want to do himself.
My help comes at a price; they are going to sit there with me and listen to me blather on about what I'm looking at and what I find and what the solution was :)
This is an uncharitably suspicious inferring of the other person's motives. Is it required that the "older person" self-identify their technical limitations every time, before you will read their verbalization of the situation as a basic statement of frustration and/or admission of technical defeat?
For many people, the notion of debugging a MySQL installation on Windows so that it works seems about as plausible as summitting K2 - they don't expect others nearby can simply do it, either. (Also, the suggestion of inter-generational manipulation is not attractive.)
I don’t think it’s uncharitable. It just recognizes that there are always energetic problem solvers out there who will jump at the chance to prove someone wrong.
It’s kind of like the well known technique: “If you want the right answer to your question, confidently post the wrong answer and wait for the replies.”
> This is an uncharitably suspicious inferring of the other person's motives.
Agreed.
The charitable interpretation is a lot more reasonable: a parent/elder wants to spend time with their child/younger, and is even taking an interest in their career/hobbies.
I'd say the implied request for help or at least ideas for troubleshooting or alternatives is so obvious and natural that it doesn't merit this level of suspicion about ulterior motives. It's completely normal to say "I can't reach the top shelf" and mean "can you help me get something off the top shelf?"
As an aside, commonplace implicatures like these are a kind of what's called "pragmatics" in linguistics.
There's a far more charitable interpretation (and explanation) of this: broadness.
People who know too little don't know how to get to the happy path, let alone stay in there.
People who know too much know extensively where the happy path lies, it's neighborhood, how to go off-road out of the happy path and the dangers that lie therein.
People in the middle know how to get to the happy path and remain there, and know that steering away from the happy path leads to trouble and ambiguity. As they mastered the happy path then they feel unlimited confidence and arrogance.
Sometimes I wish I were a little more like that. Instead I agonize over wording so I don't sound impolite / stupid and often choose to say nothing, even where my input might be useful. I guess there are worse things.
That's a really unhelpful response, because it just seeks to deny what that user has just experienced! A better approach is to say that MySQL just being incompatible with stuff is not something that's supposed to happen, but as part of asking for clarification on how the supposed incompatibility came about (or even simply as offering to look into it, if appropriate), so as to helpfully root-cause and troubleshoot the issue. The basic facts you're relying on are exactly the same, but the underlying attitude could not be more different!
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to maintain the capacity to be surprised. And they didn't mean maintaining the capacity to be surprised by someone exceeding expectations, but rather being surprised that the facts are not at all what I currently think they are.
I don't even understand the premise. My answer would be "There's no chance it's not compatible with your laptop. Tell me what happened."
If I wasn't ready to argue, I wouldn't have said anything. Arguing in this case means to troubleshoot with him. Sometimes I think that other people think the purpose of argument is to hurt people. The purpose of argument (for me) is to make the people who are arguing smarter than they were before the argument. I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father. If anything, I want to make him feel smarter than he is, and I hope he feels the same about me.
edit: Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop. I'm not a MySQL scientist. After finding that out, though, I'm a tiny bit closer to being one.
This. I don't get it either. In my view, the "no way, it must work" is a non-optimal but perfectly valid conversation starter (please explain me why not if I'm wrong). As long as that's not the whole conversation (which would mean there are way worse problems than lack of explicit inquiry in that response) and there's at some sort of follow-up from either party, I don't really see the problem here.
(Disclaimer: I'm explicitly not thinking up circumstances, tone, gestures or anything else not included in that short snippet. Obviously. It's well possible same exact words spoken in different contexts or with different tone or body language may have quite opposite meanings.)
Yes, there are better responses. But it's definitely not a "well, that sucks and you're wrong, go try some more" either.
I think the issue is how people approach the purpose of conversation.
Many internet forum conversations take the form of arguing or debate. That is to say, the goal is getting to the bottom of a dispute showing someone that they are wrong (or learning that you are).
People who do this often fall into the habit of defaulting to this mindset and goal in conversations where this is not the purpose.
"no way, it must work" is a non-optimal but perfectly valid conversation starter. The problem is when there isnt follow up on the real point of the conversation (helping dad), because they treated the interaction as an argument to be won.
>My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically).
The other example is even more telling:
>my ex-girlfriend once told me that hospitals can’t require their staff to wear N95 masks at all times -- only regular masks. I immediately said "I don’t believe that. They can probably do whatever they want." Instead of being empathetic toward a nurse after a 12-hour shift, I was more concerned over hospital policy.
The ex-girlfirend isnt looking for a spirited argument or debate after a long day. They dont care about who is right or wrong, or getting to the factual bottom of things. The author is dragging this mindset into a conversation where it is unwanted and doesn't belong.
I think this is the sentiment that they are fighting back on and calling toxic. I tend to agree. I don't want to argue and don't think it is a very good path to learning or improvement. A better alternative IMHO is conversation or joint exploration.
I think the biggest challenge is the format of internet dialog is conducive to argument that it leads people to forget or skip other modes of conversation.
If I asked for help with a problem and someone tried to argue with me, I would think they are toxic and look for help elsewhere. I didn't ask for help because I was looking for a fight.
The Socratic method and debate is good if you want to find the errors in your thinking. But I'm not trying to philosophically debug my thought processes and world view. I just want to fix a damn program.
> I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father.
Sure but there's way to say something that may hurt someone... even if you don't intend to.
I think it's something that happens more on the web as we forget there's someone on the other side.
> Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop.
You started with "There's no chance" though... You may be ready to change your stance, but your first sentence didn't have that possibility. What someone understands by your sentence is that "I am the problem" instead of "there may be a problem".
I don't think OP example was the best to illustrate the issue, but I don't have a better example either, still struggling with that myself too.
This is typical programmer behavior. We end up in tech because we have more interest in thing than people. Empathy is not as developed as technical aptitude. I don't think it's a result of an online forum. Perhaps gathering with like minded people doesn't help but the problem goes deeper. Ultimately this sort of issue is about personal development. I say this as someone with plenty to work on myself.
Use whatever strategies you think will result in the personal growth you desire. One strategy might be to avoid HN. However HN is not the problem you are. Taking responsibility will help you grow. You're influenced by your environment but you're responsible for how you respond to your environment. You always have a choice.
If people want to collaborate, sure. I play 3 instruments, have stripped multiple cars to the frame, and rebuilt them, grown food, cooked everything. Lets collaborate on something worth connecting over.
Please don’t make me collaborate over copy-pasting a bash script or a one line Docker command.
I find those issues have nothing to do with the complexity of figuring it out but belief in division of labor. A sad, functionally fixed idea of what a person can do.
I've noticed myself doing this in the last year or so. I've done it all my life, I'm sure, but it's the first time I really recognized the behavior. I wish I had caught it sooner because it definitely comes across as rude and a bit condescending.
I think for so many of us, we desire to be correct, or to correct people or the world, so much that we miss out on the true "signal" someone is sending us with their message. In this case, the author's dad wanting help in getting into programming.
I don't know if it's 100% true, but for me it feels like correcting people is partly wanting validation that I'm smart or know things. It's sort of performative, and can be very selfish.
“Congrats, your first lesson in programming is troubleshooting a MySQL installation”. I would help him logically troubleshoot, and understand how to enjoy* the problem rather than be frustrated by it, but no way would I do it for him. He’ll have many harder problems soon enough. Make it a teachable moment.
* I’m not saying it will always be enjoyable - nothing sucks more than things that should work but don’t when you’re on a schedule, but if it’s your first foray into taking technical “ownership” of your system, ya better learn to be interested in the new problems, understanding the clockworks, and learning to think as the machine does.
You know, I think that is not toxic, and I would argue it is not smart or dumb ( so to speak ) as the author tries to put it.
It is simply youth and inexperience, or age and wisdom depending on the situation and how you view it.
And that is a problem in online discussion because I dont know people's age. ( And that is going to get drawn into ageism discussions but let's ignore that for now ) If I know you are only 20ish. My first instinct wouldn't be try and correct you it "really" isn't working. It is to convince you to take a look. And give you directions. You cant give people answer to questions or problems they have. They have to figure it out the answer themselves. The experience of real learning.
And online discussions misses a lot of these context. Or at least very hard to do it correctly.
You should, in most cases grown out of it in your 30s, or about 10 years after you start working in the society. And laugh about the stupidity of it in your 40s or 50s.
My biggest concern is somehow there are increasingly number of people, especially in tech ( I have no idea why ) that dont grown out of it.
I recognize myself in this story, but I wouldn't say that I mean to be mean or dismissive or superior. Usually it's that I fall into the trap of being 'too literal'. We spend all day being very precise about the conditions and cases where we are making changes, amendments, or extending capabilities. It drives me crazy when people won't just get to the point of the story or ask that can be scoped-out if-and-as necessary. I'm not talking about interacting with inexperienced people either, they're otherwise very intelligent and articulate but have a way of speaking that seems all so inefficient or ineffective, often adding lots of emotional embellishments that don't change the problem statement.
Now, I'm not usually as unaware of insensitive as that description may sound, but you may be able to see some truth in the patterns.
[I kind-of feel like I'm on a rant, so I'll add this too. The worst is when engineers at a meeting debate the 'root cause' theorizing all the permutations and possibilities to identify the correct one, taking as long as that takes. Often a simple search through the source-code or log files would have narrowed it down to but a few to easily verify--but they'd rather be playing RCA golf out loud.]
I struggle with understanding this viewpoint. I don't think the son is being harsh or dismissive, in fact it strikes me as utterly guileless. He has a reaction . o O (That can't be right...) and voices it without artifice or manipulation.
On the other hand, the father presumably knows that the son is technically inclined, but dismisses his expertise out of hand. He's struggling, but he doesn't say "I'm struggling getting this to work." The author presumes that the father wants him to help, and I defer to him on that, but the father doesn't ask for help. Instead he stakes out an extreme position (it's incompatible!). In some cases, people do this in an intentionally manipulative way! (See comment in this thread about the timeless technique of confidently stating a wrong answer to goad people into jumping in.)
I don't know the author or his father, so I don't know what their actual intentions or interactions are. Please don't read my comment as impugning them or their motives in any way. But the hypothetical situation as presented does not lead me to the conclusions that I think the author intends readers to reach.
Trying to remove judgement from my comments has made a huge positive change. I think your comment is true, and I think most of those people mean well. I just don't know that they understand the implications. I sure didn't.
Not to blatantly "pick the most controversial part of the article", but this explains a lot. Being analytical and having a skeptical attitude about things is not "toxic". But doing the same things and being insufferably rude about it can often be. The rest is just a matter of how you fix that state of things. Once you are so far gone as to even wear the "techbro" moniker as a badge of honor, I'd kinda suggest that you might want to change that attitude.
Do they though? In most of those scenes 99% of the audience is other, less-famous starlets who want to improve their status by being seen in connection <big shot name in the respective industry>. They don't care at all about what the big shot is actually doing or saying.
The audience for "celebrity gossip" is billions of people. The audience for fashion (and related magazines) too. And the audience for influencers is tons of people who are not influencers and rarely any "less-famous starlets".
> It's second only to my all time favorite of "I left a company, and here's a blog post about why you should care" post.
As a counterpoint, one of my genuinely favorite post is Michael Lynchs "Why I left Google" post and his yearly solo developer updates. A lot of people simply blog as a way to organize their thoughts, not because they believe people care and need to hear what they have to say.
"Why I left Google" quoted returns 7790 results. It conveys nothing of status and says more about the environment of the person who thinks it does.
I might as well read "Why I left Wal-Mart," except that I expect those articles, were they ever to be written, would show a wide latitude of interesting personal experiences, and not the self-promoting pablum that particular genre of LinkedIn fluff provides.
Personally I love the bouquet of a nice "One of my twitter posts was popular for two days, now let me spend ten pages telling you about the revelation that internet fame isn't that great".
Dunno, I fell like I've ever read 2 or 3 of those in years of HN.
And those I remember were mostly about the issues with hosting something popular and getting hit on HN or virality (e.g. the guy who made the "is it stuck yet" about the ship in the Souez canal).
I disagree. My experience with many engineers - suggest there are different engineering types.
There are the exacting, detailed oriented, pedantic, focused engineers who just cannot think big picture. They're great at rules based / systems following work - and love picking apart anything not based in 'immediate reality'
There are the strategic, forward thinking, open minded who cannot execute a project to save their life.
There are the directive, steam rollers who bully a team - but great at getting stuff done.
Etc. Etc. Other types, but for brevity I cut it short.
I'm suggesting not all are rude; I see many uplifting comments. A number are rude - and maybe those who are pre-oriented to replying in text on a partially anonymous board with a pedantic nature are pre-inclined to be more rude.
Engineers by design are used to problem solving or working through the problem solving. If they're not solving the problem - then they would be in "what's wrong with this approach" mode and some may see it as rude.
One can come into contact with many of the same "rude" type, but it's generally due to the fact that hiring in any given organization is generally based, at least in part, on "cultural fit". This means the various types of engineers will tend to segregate a bit over time. For instance someone who is a bit more contemplative may not meet the "cultural fit" requirement at a crypto defi shop, but might do well at a national laboratory. (And vice versa). This is why we shouldn't meet a group of, let's say "strong personality types", and assume that all engineers in other places are similar in nature. That's not at all how it works.
This is a good application of various behavior/personality type systems (DiSC, etc) to engineer profiles. In these systems there are personalities that will usually clash against one another unless one or both are aware of the problem, perhaps that is what the OP is experiencing and in that regard it’s not just a tech problem.
Is there a possibility that some people are unusually sensitive or have a persecution complex causing them to perceive the slightest push back as a personal attack?
As an ex-20-something-year-old human, it comes a day when you look back at when you were 20-something and invariably think "oh boy I was just a grown-up child back then".
But 20-somethings haven't yet got there and sometimes think they are in the top of their maturity and wisdom.
I guess it's life. One day they might look back and cringe on the idea of calling themselves "techbro" like if it was cool or something. And might say "what was I thinking?" Oh well :-)
But, I was surprised that techbro has such a negative image too and used as an attack. Only found that out when I moved to Seattle. Sometimes it helps to adapt it, because for sure the community/locals on some level really do push it to a label.
Meanwhile, across the country in Florida - everyone encourages everyone to do what you want, learn, succeed and it wasn't rare that in university, outside university events IT/coders/artists and such all hung out together.
But, certain environments affect the meaning and acceptance of words. I still am flabbergasted that my experience in Seattle is still like that and that I was "shamed" for doing what I love. Seattle was the only place also that people in tech would also omit they work in tech and do anything, everything else.
There's a subset of ideas and culture associated with "techbro" beyond just being interested in technology. Obnoxiously Libertarian, overly analytical (lack of holistic perspective), crypto pumping, sometimes pretty racist/sexist (though I would say that's a subset). It's a particular cultural strain of people interested in software, not all young men who code.
These people were "finance bros" working in hedge funds before the VC/startup industry took off, and crypto became the most popular way to scam people.
Edit: actually the "overly analytical" might fall more into the stemlord category, who routinely get mislabelled as techbros.
So much work to keep up with the labels, I just do what I enjoy and so do many other people. It's sad that people just acost and label it as some sort of "bro" label and try to make it negative.
I don't think anybody "keeps up with labels" as such, and it's not about people doing what they enjoy - it's about certain abrasive personality types that are drawn to programming.
Calling yourself a tech bro is intentional ironic humor. Guys doing this are likely aware of the negative connotations but also the fact that if you are a young man in tech, other people will label you a tech bro regardless. It's just a harmless joke imo.
Yeah, the last mature adult brain functions that deal with like, higher level moral reasoning and stuff, don't come fully online until age 25 or so.
Your early 20s are still late puberty. And even as an adult, you've still so much to learn.
But I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say that he was calling himself a techbro at least semi-ironically. Of course in five or ten years' time, that too may become unacceptable, like ironically calling yourself a racist.
I actually agree with the message. I'm just saying that there's more than one way to pursue niceness (or, if not 'niceness' however defined, at least proper respect, empathy and decorum), and expecting people to be less analytical (which quite literally means to "pick shit apart") might not be the best.
I studied psychology after I studied math, and the most funny thing that happened to me after the second: I become less concerned about truths and more about people, about what they say and why they say it.
There are two examples in the article. The first one is about nurses and masks, when author's girlfriend evidently tried to convey her compassion to nurses who need to wear masks all the day long, but the author didn't pick this message, he stumbled over untruth and was unable to just let it be. The second example is about his father, who probably tried to ask for help nicely, to ask in a way that doesn't feel obligatory to conform. But unfortunately the author saw an untruth in a message and was unable to resist an urge to start a holy war against falsehoods, so he missed an opportunity to help without realizing it.
The second example is illuminating: he missed an opportunity. Maybe he was not interested in it, in this case he lost nothing. But maybe he was interested (or rather would be interested if he picked it from conversation), and in this case his loss was very real. It is not about niceness per se, it is about seeing world around you as it is. You can be nice then, or to be not nice at all, but if you do not see where are opportunities to be nice, you are losing an opportunity to choose.
If being more analytical leads to the less understanding of the world around you, and therefore you are missing opportunities, than maybe an analytical approach is overrated?
Though I feel very empathic to STEM majors who was trained to fight a holy war against untruths and cannot resist it even when this holy war sidetracks them from the core of a conversation. It is not easy to overcome this training and moreover it may be not just training, but a natural disposition too: maybe people who are less concerned about people are attracted to (or pushed into) STEM carrier paths. I do not see their behavior as toxic, one just needs to clarify his/her message when STEM major stumbled over an untruth. It is just like talking with kids, they also tend to react to a wrong part of a message.
> I become less concerned about truths and more about people, about what they say and why they say it.
But, but... but ¡¿¡¿por qué no los dos?!?! You can be concerned about people, and even learn to let harmless and irrelevant untruths slide, without in any way diminishing your concern for things that might actually have important consequences. When I see people like the OP advocating for HN users to be less analytical or less critical about things (and there are many of them in places like Twitter), it's really hard to tell whether they're taking that difference seriously.
> You can be concerned about people, and even learn to let harmless and irrelevant untruths slide, without in any way diminishing your concern for things that might actually have important consequences.
Yes, of course. And I didn't lost an ability to see untruths, it is just my reaction to untruths became more voluntary and conscious. And as I see the argument of the OP, he says that if you didn't learn how to step over untruths, you cannot avoid being sometimes "insufferably rude about it". Unintentionally rude, but nevertheless rude. He doesn't say that one should let untruths flourish every single time.
> it's really hard to tell whether they're taking that difference seriously.
Does it have important consequences? I personally am not bothered with it much, it doesn't hinder my ability to talk with them. I can deal with it on a case by case basis, when it becomes important.
> He doesn't say that one should let untruths flourish every single time.
The point is that people who make this argument will often let that implication stand. This is clear, given how the argument is phrased - and clearest of all, I would argue, when places like HN are called "toxic" or "bad/awful" in the process. And of course the distinction has consequences. Letting untruths fester can be dangerous or detrimental to the public in some cases, and this is precisely where a hardnosed "no BS" attitude is most helpful.
Perhaps he's self-identifying as a tech bro defensively? That is: based on his age / appearance / employment, other people might dismiss him as just another tech bro, so he's just going ahead with a self-label to get it out of the way before moving on to his point.
"Bro" is a strange word, because it has gone through quite a bit of semantic shift. It used to refer to a certain type of entitled, right-wing young male associated with some college fraternities (not all frats are like that, but a lot of them are) and tech-company management. Now, "bro" has just become a synonym for "man" and doesn't really have the sting it used to have.
then maybe you're too young to remember that for decades it was just an abbreviation for 'male sibling' mixed with a little "close male friend who's like a sibling". 'bro' has basically completely supplanted 'dude', which waxed and waned before it, and like all fashion, it too will wane.
Oh my god it isn’t ironic. These people read it and thought it was just tech and bro in the cool sense.
Gather round children and let me tell you a tale about a time before it was broadly trendy and profitable to do technical work, when bros sold mortgages and stayed in sales, and we were all geeks and nerds (whether we identified as that or not).
I generally find HN to have a level of civil discourse that is unheard of on most other platforms online, to the point that I sometimes find myself behaving a little better here than I would elsewhere because it's just how it's done around here. I'm curious what community you'd point to that is not toxic if HN is considered toxic.
Well, for one, the corvette racer dudes I know aren't at all like what you see here with people telling you you're straight out wrong, dumb, etc. And they actively help each other when things happen. I've cut my track time short to help a dude I didnt know fix his car when it broke (we're friends now). Dude last year crashed his car and caught fire - was massively burnt to a crisp and almost died. People came together and almost $60k to help him. Then, another one of our crew had a stroke. The first guy donated to him (along with the rest of us), despite dealing with his own medical issues.
> HN is filled with toxicity, especially if you have a thought that runs counter to the normal accepted way.
So what. The world shouldn't be gentle padded walls and protective headgear. That's part of what's wrong with US and Western European culture: extraordinary, pathetic intellectual weakness and cowardice rather than mental fortitude and strength. The West is soft and weak mentally - constantly crying like a spoiled brat to be protected from ideas, arguments, debates, anything disliked or disagreed with - and it's only getting worse.
This isn't that; discussion and debate is promoted here. What's not is exactly what you've just demonstrated - vitriolic language that only serves to provoke hostility and muddy the waters of real conversation.
You could have gotten across the same message by saying something like "Sure, being rude is bad, but you shouldn't let politeness descend into agreeableness to the point where people are shying away from real conversations in order to avoid upsetting people". Same message, much better tone.
HN is filled with toxicity, but most of it is projected forth by people who lack the ability to take constructive criticisms, and misconstrue them as hostility. Same problem as all other social medias, except at not nearly the same scale.
You might well be right about this, however the OP's post is all about relating their personal experience in a way that somehow ends up painting the whole HN userbase with a very broad brush. It just does not seem very feasible to answer that in a way that's on point, without incidentally "dipping" into the same kind of attitude.
You're probably right about the post (I haven't read it), but this is a needle we all need to learn how to thread. It's feasible, though not necessarily easy.
Thanks, I understand your remark better now. But I'm still not sure that the right choice is then to shy away from a mere rephrasing of things that are literally or almost-literally stated as such in the OP (and I don't just mean what I quoted, that was almost beside the point!), lest they then be perceived as a personal attack on OP themselves. That just seems like an especially insidious sort of projection.
You really have to separate your life from comments on hacker news. Did a website really make you decide to be a dismissive jerk to your girlfriend and father? I'm glad you are at least recognizing your behavior and hopefully taking steps to improve.
> You really have to separate your life from comments on hacker news.
Except, that's not how human brain works. You learn whatever you see often. That's why it's considered counterproductive to learn by bad examples. The common brain learns by repetition - it doesn't distinguish if what's being repeated is good or bad.
> Did a website really make you decide to be a dismissive jerk to your girlfriend and father?
You'd be surprised! If you're not influenced by regular behavior you encounter, then lucky you. Most of the rest of us do get influenced by simple things like the people's accents, to how they deal with anger and other emotions (e.g. learning passive aggression from a co-worker).
The point is, that the author is trying to point out Hacker News - a discussion forum - is toxic for having a reflex to give contrarian opinions. Wheras the author is doing it in real life in settings where not both parties agree it is a discussion in the first place. That is the toxic behavior, but he tries to paint HN as being toxic.
I'd concur with another post way up-thread that there's a kind of "HN voice" that gets you a pass on moderation, but you can be very nasty while staying within that, and usually threads are full of that kind of thing.
HN is a great place to learn to put the "aggression" in "passive aggression".
Sometimes you turn over a rock and there's beauty beneath it, sometimes the revealed snake bites your hand. There is still value in turning over the rock for when the diamonds are found.
> there's a kind of "HN voice" that gets you a pass on moderation, but you can be very nasty while staying within that
That is what they call social skills. Knowing where the line is drawn and how to say things without being too offending is social skills, they navigated the social environment to get the results they wanted.
I like this kind of post. Here we've got somebody thinking it through trying to be a better human. Nothing wrong with that. We're all better for having done some of that work.
I don't know, I think there are all sorts of things that can influence our behavior, why not an online forum? A random example, in the past when my friend and I were doing some manual labour work in construction, some of our family friends noticed how we started swearing more. I think this type of social chameleon behavior is very common. We adapt to fit the groups we are a part of. And I think it's totally reasonable to say that a community like HN would influence your behavior if your spend a lot of time interacting with it.
Besides, I think the author's point is less that HN made them act a certain way and more that they've noticed a lot of negativity here and that we should be aware of that.
Definitely agree. If I ever did get brilliant one day and make something useful or simply exist, I don't think I would post it here. Inevitably the comments would scar me.
I get that founders quickly learn to get past that stuff, but I'm probably too much of a softy.
There are definitely cliques of thought on HN, it is probably good that politics is largely off limits.
I do not like Microsoft being of an age that saw the anti competitive behaviour and trashing of open source but there is a large group of pro Microsoft people on HN (It is OK).
What would you like to see more of or less of?
I know I'm being negative like your article says but your font / background color absolutely obliterated my ability to see for about 30 seconds after closing.
I had the same thing happen. I thought it was just me and my old eyes, but I imagine there is some sort of afterimage effect occurring. (Although I am sure my eyes are not without some amount of blame.)
But seriously, thew world is toxic, rejoice if you ever find a place you feel is not toxic, and then lament that it will invariably become so. Or recognize that the simple happenstance that led you to find it will also be it's downfall because other people will find it via the same means and either you or them are not welcome by a portion of those already on the platform.
If you're still looking for something to fill the void, I'd suggest an RSS reader like NewsBlur. I've been bringing in blogs that I've seen on HN into my feeds. I could easily see myself snoozing the feed (a feature of NewsBlur) for HN for a few days if they have a bad day and start repeatedly throwing fits about cryptocurrency again. There's plenty of content in my other feeds that holds my attention.
Also, hey, I hope you add an RSS/Atom/JSON feed to your thoughts section. Remember to put the meta tags linking to the feed in the HTML!
There's been a few threads asking for blogs, most of which probably have feeds, here's the one most readily available from my browser history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30245247
> The article explains that people who are "intelligent," or just over analytical in nature, end up being less happy. They see through the BS of everyday life and are able to spot the negatives faster than any positives. This is the problem with HN: The community is too smart for its own good.
Starting from the position "this article's POV is true, and a relevant POV here" and jumping to "and therefore HN is too smart for its own good" seems a bit under-justified. Also the whole "if you're so smart, then why..." thing has always had its own "I'm clever, check this out" signaling aspect too. It's a subjective hand-wave of its own and it kind of muddies the waters here.
I think it's interesting to keep in mind that some people here have shared that they are measuring their happiness using third-party tools and methods, and checking out just fine. Or they have made huge strides to overcome challenging mental illnesses and taxing life lessons. Those events can even become so exciting that they obscure one's ability to effectively attend to others' pain and suffering, when that is appropriate.
So I'd add that despite your best efforts, you can be very happy and also come off completely toxic, which highlights the POV that toxicity is a very subjective perception.
If you really want empathy and kindness to happen more often in an informational community, IMO it's a good idea to separate that informative effort (which is laudable on its own) from your effort to critique the community at large. Such info-driven communities often have signs and guides all around which signal that more community critique has been received than can be meaningfully processed.
(P.S. The "People get so smart that they see through all the BS and therefore become unhappy for all their intellect" trope can be really damaging to personal growth. It may be a stage of exhaustion reached after a period of growth-stress, and it may be a stage of imminent breakthrough. We also may not have the right socio-cultural tags and memes to help people understand how to contextualize and mine the follow-on stages for resilience and improved mood levels. So I wish we could be gentler and more nuanced with our analysis of this particular issue. There are some hints that such stages can even lead us to see our ideals reached meaningfully without wearing ourselves down so much, and that's a huge mood lift by itself.)
The key to HN is not to take non-tech-specific controversial things (like this thread) seriously.
If the author wants only the non-toxic parts, stay with threads on Boeing plane safety (where aeroengineers chime in), startups (where the CEO answers), Zig (the language designer is always here), Rust (some folks from the core team are always hanging around), or some weird detail of a processor/GPU/TPU/AWS/low level M1 processor reverse engineering.
Also don't talk about cryptocurrencies, no matter if it's good or bad.
Yeah, that's been my approach. I definitely steer clear of anything politics or politics-adjacent here, because I've found a lot of the conversation pretty disappointing and often toxic.
Anything about crypto, Apple, Google, Tesla, etc all have a mixed bag of good content and hater-type comments that make me eye roll and move on.
But for all of that, this is still my favorite social media site.
The original threads on the Boeing 737-MAX safety incident had plenty of toxicity. Many people here were outright angry that such a massive screwup could be allowed to happen, and made sure to let everyone else here know about it, in the strongest possible terms. Arguably, that "toxic" anger helped save lives by making it apparent to outside observers just how serious the problem was.
I think you're blaming your own personality problems on HN. I'm sorry that you wrote your Dad off without helping him, but it's completely appropriate that a commenter here will tell you you're wrong without sitting down and helping you. We're not your "Tech Brothers", but your Dad is your Dad, so treat him as such.
Stepping back a bit: why are you telling people they are wrong if the goal is not to help them? Why are you commenting on this site if all you want to do is say people are wrong without providing further feedback? Serious question, not intended to be snarky at all.
Being told you're wrong is helpful. It helps you build up a correct view of the world and figure out the right direction to go. If you're driving in the wrong direction it's better to be told that sooner rather than later, even if that doesn't tell you what turn to make.
For a community as diverse as Hacker News, I've found it to be anything but toxic. The quality of posts is generally high and the people who comment tend to keep things on topic and impersonal. Personal attacks and jabs are not common and people don't just say things for the sake of winning arguments.
Of course, I don't click on every single story - I stick to the things that interest me, which admittedly are narrowing as of late, unlike in my early 20s.
It can be a little more toxic than I'd like, but I don't find the issue to be how nice people are about correcting others' mistakes. Instead it's the undercurrent I occasionally see of reactionary politics and weird misinformation. It's not usually horrible, but I tend to stay away when the subject turns to politics or social justice.
The main thing I've noticed on HN is that having a contrarian mindset is rewarded, even in situations where it doesn't add to the conversation. If you read the two examples the author gave, he's actually being reflexively contrarian, not a know-it-all. In my opinion, that's the "toxic" behavior he's trying to identify, not personal attacks or glib jabs.
> The main thing I've noticed on HN is that having a contrarian mindset is rewarded, even in situations where it doesn't add to the conversation.
Is it really being contrarian, or supporting multiple views in intellectually stimulating discussions?
A few days ago there was a discussion on CORS where some people defended the thesis it made sites less secure, and others stepped in and defended that CORS in fact improved security. Both sides posted their rationales. Arguably neither position was right or wrong. It just depends on perspective.
A glass can be half full and half empty at the same time.
Is anyone being contrarian to point out either interpretation?
I think in a _discussion_ forum like hacker news, being contrarian can be very much adding to the discussion. That these comments end up on the top is just showing that it is appreciated by the community. It doesn't mean that _all_ comments are contrarian.
IMO the line the author did not seam to make clear in his blog post, which leads to some confusion in the comment section, is that being contrarian in a _discussion_ format - where all parties agree it is a discussion - is something else entirely than being contrarian to proposals from random people in real life.
The toxicity is there it's just subtle and disguised. Here's a typical one you see on HN that is used directly to escape moderation:
"I find it odd that even when someone tells you the logical outcome you still deny it."
"It's baffles me and is so interesting to see someone behave this way even though it's not logical."
It's this intellectual arrogance where the commenter acts like he's some sort of hyper intelligent savant observing creatures of lower intelligence that is completely toxic. Whenever I see that type of garbage comment, I think dude... the other person just disagrees with you stop talking about him like he's some animal your observing in a laboratory.
> It's this intellectual arrogance where the commenter acts like he's some sort of hyper intelligent savant observing creatures of lower intelligence that is completely toxic. Whenever I see that type of garbage comment, I think dude... the other person just disagrees with you stop talking about him like he's some animal your observing in a laboratory.
Enlightenment ensues when the meta loop is closed. All criticism winds back on itself, including this comment and the next comment commenting on it...they keep wrestling to get outside or on top of each other.
The singularity of meta-commentary is a deep belly laugh.
Did HN do any kind of survey to demonstrate their user demographics?
And it is absolutely toxic on certain topics, particularly anything economics related or that challenges capitalism and the "line go up" mentality of the VC culture. If you offer anything that criticizes that at all, you're in for an earful.
Everyone with strong ideological passions thinks that HN is stacked against them ideologically. People routinely say that not only about the community, but about the mods. These perceptions are entirely predictable from the passions of the perceiver.
Who's right? Neither. It's exactly the same perception, just with opposite polarity, because the polarity is coming from inside the person.
More precisely, both are right in the sense that HN generates enough data points for everybody to run into whatever they dislike the most; and both are wrong in that they dramatically overweight that sample, because that's what the brain does with samples like that.
What makes this perception so common on all sides is that HN doesn't partition the site into like-minded siloes (e.g. follow lists or social graphs or subforums). Everyone is in the same big room, so everyone is frequently bumping into views they dislike and normally don't have to deal with as much, at least not in their home base. The irony is that this is actually a step closer both to reality (society is divided on divisive topics) and to genuine tolerance (bearing the presence of what one dislikes). There's more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
I don't think HN is stacked against me ideologically, quite the contrary, my views are fairly pedestrian and middle of the road for the West Coast tech industry.
I do think that when it comes to politics and social justice HN is content to let people who aggressively hold certain viewpoints have an outsize role in the discussion, despite engaging in toxic behaviors that wouldn't be tolerated on other threads. This may be because the people running the show here are sympathetic to such views, or maybe they're just naive.
No we are not "content" to do that, and generalizations like this are notoriously unreliable. I'd like to see specific examples, and I'm sure interested readers would appreciate links as well, so they can make up their own minds.
dude the fact that you are sooo touchy about this and jump immediately to the defensive with this sea lion shit the second someone impugns the conversational style of hn. it really undercuts that sense of detached impartiality you like to front with otherwise.
anyway man we made up our minds already that's kinda the point. hn has a lot going for it but it also sucks pretty hard, in some ways that are very difficult to quantify but nevertheless are real! I'm sorry that hurts to hear and I'm more sorry that you're so sure it can't be the case that you can't see it.
This comment is far below the expected HN standards of civility and decorum ("you are sooo touchy about this" and pointless accusations of "sealioning" in response to a reasonable question would not be generally OK here). I point this out not so much to engage in foolish 'tone policing' and purposely ignore its substantive points (such as they may be - the OP is actually more helpful here! And you have quoted a New Yorker description elsewhere in this thread that also provides a valuable outside perspective; we of course appreciate that) but rather to point out that HN takes criticism of itself very seriously, to the point of routinely giving comments like this one what amounts to special treatment. As a user base, we really, really want to avoid the tone-policing trap. And we'd like to see accurate information about these things even when that's hard to quantify.
that is the point I'm trying to make. we judge comments on how well they adhere to our standards of civility and decorum, but not by their actual effects.
having a mod jump on you demanding peer-reviewed validation if you criticize the place is bad, even if they do it civilly.
hn surely does "take criticism seriously" in the sense that when any is detected, it is fully and publicly focused on. but in all the cases I've seen it comes with a hostile degree and intensity of interrogation that makes it hard to believe it is a good faith exercise in organizational-self improvement. it just puts such a high burden and consequence on publicly pointing out the faults that people don't want to do it.
shit I try not to do it on purpose because it's such a draining unpleasant experience to be the center of attention of dang and whoever has decided to be his crew for the day.
being civil doesn't protect you from these arguments! these things are bad, no matter how civil people are being about them. and I am sometimes not that civil about them, but that doesn't make me wrong, or a moral inferior to people who can keep their cool.
On the contrary, I think HN is trying its best to be a broadly appealing place for intellectually curious folks, especially those who might be interested in tech and the business environment around it.
HN demands other things beyond civility and respect for others of course; we're all well aware that civility alone does not suffice. But it helps enough that doing away with it is clearly unwise, most of all during the sorts of vigorous debates that arise quite naturally in any discussion-focused platform. (Including very mainstream ones like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) This is not a "moral" point of view, but one that's driven by solid observation of what happens to overall quality when incivility and personal attacks are allowed to fester. Many of us have been on Usenet after all, and can draw from that experience.
> demanding peer-reviewed validation if you criticize the place
This is not what has happened here, and long-time HN users should be well aware of that by now. No "demand" was made backed by mod privileges, least of all any sort of "hostile interrogation", what I saw was gentle pushback, most likely aimed at trying to find ways of making any criticism actionable and part of a potential "exercise in organizational-self improvement".
I also take some issue at the implication that I share dang's outlook on these matters, to the point of acting like his "crew". What I did was merely to point out that your comment was phrased in a way that may well have turned many HN users off from its relevant points, but that it did nonetheless have substantive points to make.
I can't even really engage with this because it's not what I was talking about? any political issues here are far downstream from the larger ones mentioned in that new yorker quote above. which are, sorry to say, completely on display in those two comments.
the point I guess I'd like to make here is that you can be either ruthlessly rational data-bound defender of hn's honor OR impartial mod who applies the rules as written. but not both. or if you have to try to be both at least use an alt or something because these really should be separate roles at this point.
I think it's more important to be as I am, with whatever messy contradictions show up. Partitioning that into abstract roles feels weird and false to me. I wouldn't like to work that way, and it would make the relational aspect between mods and the community much harder. Since the relational aspect is the most important thing, that would be a bigger mistake.
A particular user is aggressively confrontational towards every queer/POC person who makes a negative comment about the Midwest possibly not being safe for certain groups. In a conversation about a technical topic, this type of behavior wouldn't be tolerated. In this case, it was, and possibly valuable discourse was derailed.
For purposes of comparison, there's a critical discussion about MS Teams today with a hundred comments. I wouldn't expect posters who respond "what are you, some kind of Slack shill???" in such a thread to last long here without moderator action.
Seen this double standard consistently over the years and it's one reason myself and others keep their distance from this site.
If it seems to you like there's less moderation happening on that sort of comment than there is on comments complaining about corporate product, I can see how that would lead to resentment about how HN is moderated. I wouldn't want to be part of such a place either.
Because there's a degree of randomness in what we happen to see, and we can't moderate what we don't see, there are some comments on every topic that end up not getting moderated. If it's a topic that's particularly important to you (I don't mean you personally, but any reader), bad comments going unmoderated on that topic are going to make a more painful and deeper impression. This perhaps leaves the sense of a double standard because more pain has been caused by those comments than by others.
I don't know what to do about this other than remind people that we don't see everything, that the likeliest explanation for egregious comments going unmoderated is that we haven't seen them, and that we welcome heads-ups about egregious comments that we're missing. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Without knowing any statistics on the demographic of HN, I would assume that it really isn't that diverse speaking from a cultural ground, but rather that we have a place that accepts disagreement a lot (or at least doesn't punish you as hard compared to other places). Which can be seen as a form of diverse-ness I guess?
I made the same realization in myself, but unfortunately in my 30s rather than my 20s. Engineering, whether software or hardware, is all about thoroughly understanding a problem and dissecting it to the nth degree. The better you are at this, the quicker you notice the problems with an initial, creative idea.
"It's easy to be a critic."
If left unchecked, all that is done is the refinement of a skill that is able to find the potential hurdles/blockers in any problem space.
However, when part of a balanced team this attribute can save time going down dead-end paths. But it requires a yin to the yang - a perpetual optimist that won't take no for an answer.
For those of us that are on the analytical end of the spectrum, it is important to realize that noticing an early issue does not equate to the problem space being a waste of time that is unsolvable.1 Instead, use your super-power for good to accelerate finding the efficienct solution to the problem that some has identified and clearly expressed (which is itself itself a super power; and you may have just found your startup founder).
Well said. It is often better to “learn it” later I think. You may have higher standards for learning and instead really mean integrating and internalizing it.
When someone writes a blog post, in my experience, they are often only expressing an idea or reaction that they will soon leave behind.
I get a lot of interesting ideas from HN, the comment quality here is unprecedented if you can look past some of the more invested perspectives.
But, for the most part, HN is my way of keeping up with trends in tech/development. And, lately, we have been seeing a lot more articles that aren't strictly tech but also science and life. And honestly, I welcome those.
HN reminds of what IRC used to be like back in the day. You make the discourse what you want it to be. I'd honestly not take a platform like this for granted.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 437 ms ] threadLeave hacker news out of this man.
Sometimes you come across a comment on here that seems a little whackadoodle, but even the weirdest takes I’ve seen at least includes some amount of reasoning behind a particular position. I mostly attribute these types of comments to the nerdy tech filter bubble we’re all living in.
Randall Munroe may have said it best with his "Duty Calls" comic:
https://xkcd.com/386/
I catch myself doing this, without realizing it far too often. It's good to catch yourself and try to change.
I've had customers, friends, and family members tell me time and time again that they can't do some common, everyday thing on their computers because it's "not compatible", or it "won't let them", or it "doesn't work". If they're wrong, I show them where they're wrong, what they need to do to fix the problem and avoid similar ones in the future. No need to be dismissive, or berate them for not knowing something. It ends up being a nice "today I learned" situation for them, and we all win.
Never helping anyone with technical stuff unless you're getting paid (or whatever similar thing you can think of) is over-correcting for the doormats that can't say no
Case 1: the person learned and became more autonomous. Fewer questions like this will be asked in the future. You have developed good will.
Case 2: the person expects someone else to do their work. That won't fly for long with me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I will react. Friends and family members can land on the no-contact list. Employees can get fired.
Assume the best, but always prepare for the worst.
With customers there's the added benefit of improving business relationships and building trust. If someone contacts me with a question, and I withhold the answer until they pay me, they're gonna feel cheated when they realise the answer was pretty straightforward. It doesn't matter if, technically, I'm providing a service and I'm within my rights to ask for compensation. That customer is going to hesitate to return in the future, because they now feel I just care about their money.
Being open, transparent, and helpful has the opposite effect, in my experience. The customer feels at ease with me, they trust my judgment, know that I'm looking out for them, and so are happy to return to me when they need something, and pay for the job.
Also, I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone. Those two short sentences feel like a very brief excerpt from beginning of a conversation so it's hard to gauge, but I feel that it's an exclamation of surprise that's non-committal and lacking an explicit offer to proceed with details, rather than dismissive (or worse). Circumstances, tone, body language, relationship and other things may make it vary, of course. Can't say it's arrogant either, "no way, it must work" is a legit exclamation that doesn't imply incompetence (unless, again, tone etc).
I'd say it's just passive, not taking any initiative to troubleshoot and communicating just the assurance that the problem must be solvable, then bouncing back to the inquirer. In my understanding, it's more of a lazy/not being in the mood, not dismissive (and I'd have a really hard time trying to call it "toxic").
Couldn't agree more. My first step when troubleshooting anything for someone else is to extract as much information as possible to understand what I'm dealing with. Having that information from the start would save me a lot of time.
>I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone.
True, the quote alone is not necessarily dismissive or arrogant, and your interpretation could very well be correct. I'm assuming it was dismissive because the author seems troubled by his own response, which he interprets as "I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing". That's where my interpretation comes from.
A bit off-topic but I've actually got an inverse problem... Before contacting support I'm trying to collect as much diagnostics as possible, so my first message tends to be a long detailed list of what's the problem, what I did, and what possibly useful (to best of my awareness) supplementary diagnostics I've already performed. This frequently confuses first-tier support folks who're used to people reaching out with mere "nothing works pls help!!1one" and going through checklists.
I've also had humbling experiences, particularly one with me going through what I thought was relevant and a very nice tech support lady telling me the equivalent of "but did you make sure you turned it on?", and she was right.
Overloading tier-1 techs with too much information rarely does any good, from my experience.
One problem is that most people are socialized heavily against going into these kinds of details in almost every situation they will experience. Only engineers are frequently around other people who want to know specifically what "it doesn't work" means. And even in those cases, you've got to tailor your level of detail with care. It's no wonder people learned to just say "it doesn't work", in the same way that they learned to reply to "how are you" with something vague rather than something extremely specific.
It's entirely possible that it's correct depending on the specifics. Say for example one is trying to install MySQL 8.0 on a laptop with Catalina, which is still supported by Apple and getting security updates. This is actually unsupported and won't work. A somewhat unlikely situation but definitely not impossible.
https://www.mysql.com/support/supportedplatforms/database.ht...
Exactly what the crafty older person wanted. Get you to do the work. "It doesn't work on my computer" or some other claim of trouble or ignorance is an easy way to trick a smart energetic young person to do something for you.
Young smart people don't like to say "I don't know how" or "I can't get it to work." An older person will say that without hesitation if it will prompt someone else to do something that he doesn't want to do himself.
"want"?
For many people, the notion of debugging a MySQL installation on Windows so that it works seems about as plausible as summitting K2 - they don't expect others nearby can simply do it, either. (Also, the suggestion of inter-generational manipulation is not attractive.)
It’s kind of like the well known technique: “If you want the right answer to your question, confidently post the wrong answer and wait for the replies.”
Agreed.
The charitable interpretation is a lot more reasonable: a parent/elder wants to spend time with their child/younger, and is even taking an interest in their career/hobbies.
As an aside, commonplace implicatures like these are a kind of what's called "pragmatics" in linguistics.
People who know too much about a topic also know they are often wrong.
It's the people in the middle who have unlimited confidence and arrogance.
People who know too little don't know how to get to the happy path, let alone stay in there.
People who know too much know extensively where the happy path lies, it's neighborhood, how to go off-road out of the happy path and the dangers that lie therein.
People in the middle know how to get to the happy path and remain there, and know that steering away from the happy path leads to trouble and ambiguity. As they mastered the happy path then they feel unlimited confidence and arrogance.
If I wasn't ready to argue, I wouldn't have said anything. Arguing in this case means to troubleshoot with him. Sometimes I think that other people think the purpose of argument is to hurt people. The purpose of argument (for me) is to make the people who are arguing smarter than they were before the argument. I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father. If anything, I want to make him feel smarter than he is, and I hope he feels the same about me.
edit: Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop. I'm not a MySQL scientist. After finding that out, though, I'm a tiny bit closer to being one.
(Disclaimer: I'm explicitly not thinking up circumstances, tone, gestures or anything else not included in that short snippet. Obviously. It's well possible same exact words spoken in different contexts or with different tone or body language may have quite opposite meanings.)
Yes, there are better responses. But it's definitely not a "well, that sucks and you're wrong, go try some more" either.
Many internet forum conversations take the form of arguing or debate. That is to say, the goal is getting to the bottom of a dispute showing someone that they are wrong (or learning that you are).
People who do this often fall into the habit of defaulting to this mindset and goal in conversations where this is not the purpose.
"no way, it must work" is a non-optimal but perfectly valid conversation starter. The problem is when there isnt follow up on the real point of the conversation (helping dad), because they treated the interaction as an argument to be won.
>My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically).
The other example is even more telling:
>my ex-girlfriend once told me that hospitals can’t require their staff to wear N95 masks at all times -- only regular masks. I immediately said "I don’t believe that. They can probably do whatever they want." Instead of being empathetic toward a nurse after a 12-hour shift, I was more concerned over hospital policy.
The ex-girlfirend isnt looking for a spirited argument or debate after a long day. They dont care about who is right or wrong, or getting to the factual bottom of things. The author is dragging this mindset into a conversation where it is unwanted and doesn't belong.
I think the biggest challenge is the format of internet dialog is conducive to argument that it leads people to forget or skip other modes of conversation.
If I asked for help with a problem and someone tried to argue with me, I would think they are toxic and look for help elsewhere. I didn't ask for help because I was looking for a fight.
The Socratic method and debate is good if you want to find the errors in your thinking. But I'm not trying to philosophically debug my thought processes and world view. I just want to fix a damn program.
Sure but there's way to say something that may hurt someone... even if you don't intend to.
I think it's something that happens more on the web as we forget there's someone on the other side.
> Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop.
You started with "There's no chance" though... You may be ready to change your stance, but your first sentence didn't have that possibility. What someone understands by your sentence is that "I am the problem" instead of "there may be a problem".
I don't think OP example was the best to illustrate the issue, but I don't have a better example either, still struggling with that myself too.
Use whatever strategies you think will result in the personal growth you desire. One strategy might be to avoid HN. However HN is not the problem you are. Taking responsibility will help you grow. You're influenced by your environment but you're responsible for how you respond to your environment. You always have a choice.
Getting it to work is a Google search.
If people want to collaborate, sure. I play 3 instruments, have stripped multiple cars to the frame, and rebuilt them, grown food, cooked everything. Lets collaborate on something worth connecting over.
Please don’t make me collaborate over copy-pasting a bash script or a one line Docker command.
I find those issues have nothing to do with the complexity of figuring it out but belief in division of labor. A sad, functionally fixed idea of what a person can do.
I think for so many of us, we desire to be correct, or to correct people or the world, so much that we miss out on the true "signal" someone is sending us with their message. In this case, the author's dad wanting help in getting into programming.
I don't know if it's 100% true, but for me it feels like correcting people is partly wanting validation that I'm smart or know things. It's sort of performative, and can be very selfish.
* I’m not saying it will always be enjoyable - nothing sucks more than things that should work but don’t when you’re on a schedule, but if it’s your first foray into taking technical “ownership” of your system, ya better learn to be interested in the new problems, understanding the clockworks, and learning to think as the machine does.
It is simply youth and inexperience, or age and wisdom depending on the situation and how you view it.
And that is a problem in online discussion because I dont know people's age. ( And that is going to get drawn into ageism discussions but let's ignore that for now ) If I know you are only 20ish. My first instinct wouldn't be try and correct you it "really" isn't working. It is to convince you to take a look. And give you directions. You cant give people answer to questions or problems they have. They have to figure it out the answer themselves. The experience of real learning.
And online discussions misses a lot of these context. Or at least very hard to do it correctly.
You should, in most cases grown out of it in your 30s, or about 10 years after you start working in the society. And laugh about the stupidity of it in your 40s or 50s.
My biggest concern is somehow there are increasingly number of people, especially in tech ( I have no idea why ) that dont grown out of it.
Now, I'm not usually as unaware of insensitive as that description may sound, but you may be able to see some truth in the patterns.
[I kind-of feel like I'm on a rant, so I'll add this too. The worst is when engineers at a meeting debate the 'root cause' theorizing all the permutations and possibilities to identify the correct one, taking as long as that takes. Often a simple search through the source-code or log files would have narrowed it down to but a few to easily verify--but they'd rather be playing RCA golf out loud.]
On the other hand, the father presumably knows that the son is technically inclined, but dismisses his expertise out of hand. He's struggling, but he doesn't say "I'm struggling getting this to work." The author presumes that the father wants him to help, and I defer to him on that, but the father doesn't ask for help. Instead he stakes out an extreme position (it's incompatible!). In some cases, people do this in an intentionally manipulative way! (See comment in this thread about the timeless technique of confidently stating a wrong answer to goad people into jumping in.)
I don't know the author or his father, so I don't know what their actual intentions or interactions are. Please don't read my comment as impugning them or their motives in any way. But the hypothetical situation as presented does not lead me to the conclusions that I think the author intends readers to reach.
Not to blatantly "pick the most controversial part of the article", but this explains a lot. Being analytical and having a skeptical attitude about things is not "toxic". But doing the same things and being insufferably rude about it can often be. The rest is just a matter of how you fix that state of things. Once you are so far gone as to even wear the "techbro" moniker as a badge of honor, I'd kinda suggest that you might want to change that attitude.
It's second only to my all time favorite of "I left a company, and here's a blog post about why you should care" post.
Only in this industry can people lack the self-awareness and realization that nobody cares.
but then it occured to me that there, people, sadly, do care...
The audience for "celebrity gossip" is billions of people. The audience for fashion (and related magazines) too. And the audience for influencers is tons of people who are not influencers and rarely any "less-famous starlets".
As a counterpoint, one of my genuinely favorite post is Michael Lynchs "Why I left Google" post and his yearly solo developer updates. A lot of people simply blog as a way to organize their thoughts, not because they believe people care and need to hear what they have to say.
"Why I left Google" quoted returns 7790 results. It conveys nothing of status and says more about the environment of the person who thinks it does.
I might as well read "Why I left Wal-Mart," except that I expect those articles, were they ever to be written, would show a wide latitude of interesting personal experiences, and not the self-promoting pablum that particular genre of LinkedIn fluff provides.
Your comments is written as those were somehow a trope...
And those I remember were mostly about the issues with hosting something popular and getting hit on HN or virality (e.g. the guy who made the "is it stuck yet" about the ship in the Souez canal).
Don't look into the Influencer industry then...
(Though, there, the audience DOES care!)
There are the exacting, detailed oriented, pedantic, focused engineers who just cannot think big picture. They're great at rules based / systems following work - and love picking apart anything not based in 'immediate reality'
There are the strategic, forward thinking, open minded who cannot execute a project to save their life.
There are the directive, steam rollers who bully a team - but great at getting stuff done.
Etc. Etc. Other types, but for brevity I cut it short.
Engineers by design are used to problem solving or working through the problem solving. If they're not solving the problem - then they would be in "what's wrong with this approach" mode and some may see it as rude.
Tl;dr: they aren't all being rude, sometimes it's just different styles of communication and sometimes they're compatible, and sometimes not so much.
(And sometimes they are being rude, and sometimes they maybe can't help it...)
One can come into contact with many of the same "rude" type, but it's generally due to the fact that hiring in any given organization is generally based, at least in part, on "cultural fit". This means the various types of engineers will tend to segregate a bit over time. For instance someone who is a bit more contemplative may not meet the "cultural fit" requirement at a crypto defi shop, but might do well at a national laboratory. (And vice versa). This is why we shouldn't meet a group of, let's say "strong personality types", and assume that all engineers in other places are similar in nature. That's not at all how it works.
But 20-somethings haven't yet got there and sometimes think they are in the top of their maturity and wisdom.
I guess it's life. One day they might look back and cringe on the idea of calling themselves "techbro" like if it was cool or something. And might say "what was I thinking?" Oh well :-)
But, I was surprised that techbro has such a negative image too and used as an attack. Only found that out when I moved to Seattle. Sometimes it helps to adapt it, because for sure the community/locals on some level really do push it to a label.
Meanwhile, across the country in Florida - everyone encourages everyone to do what you want, learn, succeed and it wasn't rare that in university, outside university events IT/coders/artists and such all hung out together.
But, certain environments affect the meaning and acceptance of words. I still am flabbergasted that my experience in Seattle is still like that and that I was "shamed" for doing what I love. Seattle was the only place also that people in tech would also omit they work in tech and do anything, everything else.
These people were "finance bros" working in hedge funds before the VC/startup industry took off, and crypto became the most popular way to scam people.
Edit: actually the "overly analytical" might fall more into the stemlord category, who routinely get mislabelled as techbros.
Your early 20s are still late puberty. And even as an adult, you've still so much to learn.
But I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and say that he was calling himself a techbro at least semi-ironically. Of course in five or ten years' time, that too may become unacceptable, like ironically calling yourself a racist.
You are very smart, that is a clever way to illustrate the point.
There are two examples in the article. The first one is about nurses and masks, when author's girlfriend evidently tried to convey her compassion to nurses who need to wear masks all the day long, but the author didn't pick this message, he stumbled over untruth and was unable to just let it be. The second example is about his father, who probably tried to ask for help nicely, to ask in a way that doesn't feel obligatory to conform. But unfortunately the author saw an untruth in a message and was unable to resist an urge to start a holy war against falsehoods, so he missed an opportunity to help without realizing it.
The second example is illuminating: he missed an opportunity. Maybe he was not interested in it, in this case he lost nothing. But maybe he was interested (or rather would be interested if he picked it from conversation), and in this case his loss was very real. It is not about niceness per se, it is about seeing world around you as it is. You can be nice then, or to be not nice at all, but if you do not see where are opportunities to be nice, you are losing an opportunity to choose.
If being more analytical leads to the less understanding of the world around you, and therefore you are missing opportunities, than maybe an analytical approach is overrated?
Though I feel very empathic to STEM majors who was trained to fight a holy war against untruths and cannot resist it even when this holy war sidetracks them from the core of a conversation. It is not easy to overcome this training and moreover it may be not just training, but a natural disposition too: maybe people who are less concerned about people are attracted to (or pushed into) STEM carrier paths. I do not see their behavior as toxic, one just needs to clarify his/her message when STEM major stumbled over an untruth. It is just like talking with kids, they also tend to react to a wrong part of a message.
But, but... but ¡¿¡¿por qué no los dos?!?! You can be concerned about people, and even learn to let harmless and irrelevant untruths slide, without in any way diminishing your concern for things that might actually have important consequences. When I see people like the OP advocating for HN users to be less analytical or less critical about things (and there are many of them in places like Twitter), it's really hard to tell whether they're taking that difference seriously.
Yes, of course. And I didn't lost an ability to see untruths, it is just my reaction to untruths became more voluntary and conscious. And as I see the argument of the OP, he says that if you didn't learn how to step over untruths, you cannot avoid being sometimes "insufferably rude about it". Unintentionally rude, but nevertheless rude. He doesn't say that one should let untruths flourish every single time.
> it's really hard to tell whether they're taking that difference seriously.
Does it have important consequences? I personally am not bothered with it much, it doesn't hinder my ability to talk with them. I can deal with it on a case by case basis, when it becomes important.
The point is that people who make this argument will often let that implication stand. This is clear, given how the argument is phrased - and clearest of all, I would argue, when places like HN are called "toxic" or "bad/awful" in the process. And of course the distinction has consequences. Letting untruths fester can be dangerous or detrimental to the public in some cases, and this is precisely where a hardnosed "no BS" attitude is most helpful.
So now any level of criticism is "relentless"?
Gather round children and let me tell you a tale about a time before it was broadly trendy and profitable to do technical work, when bros sold mortgages and stayed in sales, and we were all geeks and nerds (whether we identified as that or not).
HN is filled with toxicity, especially if you have a thought that runs counter to the normal accepted way.
Compared to the real world, HN is still a bowl of cherries.
so yeah, by comparison HN is rude as hell
So what. The world shouldn't be gentle padded walls and protective headgear. That's part of what's wrong with US and Western European culture: extraordinary, pathetic intellectual weakness and cowardice rather than mental fortitude and strength. The West is soft and weak mentally - constantly crying like a spoiled brat to be protected from ideas, arguments, debates, anything disliked or disagreed with - and it's only getting worse.
You could have gotten across the same message by saying something like "Sure, being rude is bad, but you shouldn't let politeness descend into agreeableness to the point where people are shying away from real conversations in order to avoid upsetting people". Same message, much better tone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thanks, I understand your remark better now. But I'm still not sure that the right choice is then to shy away from a mere rephrasing of things that are literally or almost-literally stated as such in the OP (and I don't just mean what I quoted, that was almost beside the point!), lest they then be perceived as a personal attack on OP themselves. That just seems like an especially insidious sort of projection.
Except, that's not how human brain works. You learn whatever you see often. That's why it's considered counterproductive to learn by bad examples. The common brain learns by repetition - it doesn't distinguish if what's being repeated is good or bad.
> Did a website really make you decide to be a dismissive jerk to your girlfriend and father?
You'd be surprised! If you're not influenced by regular behavior you encounter, then lucky you. Most of the rest of us do get influenced by simple things like the people's accents, to how they deal with anger and other emotions (e.g. learning passive aggression from a co-worker).
But I've also met very smart people who helps others a lot and cares about how they feel.
I think it's about emotional intelligence a lot. Do you have it or don't you.
I'd concur with another post way up-thread that there's a kind of "HN voice" that gets you a pass on moderation, but you can be very nasty while staying within that, and usually threads are full of that kind of thing.
HN is a great place to learn to put the "aggression" in "passive aggression".
That is what they call social skills. Knowing where the line is drawn and how to say things without being too offending is social skills, they navigated the social environment to get the results they wanted.
It's good to want to be a better person, though.
But, I do not find it compelling given my own experiences and how online discourse does influence me.
The big win was recognizing that and then taking an active role in managing it toward what I see as better, or good.
Besides, I think the author's point is less that HN made them act a certain way and more that they've noticed a lot of negativity here and that we should be aware of that.
I get that founders quickly learn to get past that stuff, but I'm probably too much of a softy.
But seriously, thew world is toxic, rejoice if you ever find a place you feel is not toxic, and then lament that it will invariably become so. Or recognize that the simple happenstance that led you to find it will also be it's downfall because other people will find it via the same means and either you or them are not welcome by a portion of those already on the platform.
Also, hey, I hope you add an RSS/Atom/JSON feed to your thoughts section. Remember to put the meta tags linking to the feed in the HTML!
Starting from the position "this article's POV is true, and a relevant POV here" and jumping to "and therefore HN is too smart for its own good" seems a bit under-justified. Also the whole "if you're so smart, then why..." thing has always had its own "I'm clever, check this out" signaling aspect too. It's a subjective hand-wave of its own and it kind of muddies the waters here.
I think it's interesting to keep in mind that some people here have shared that they are measuring their happiness using third-party tools and methods, and checking out just fine. Or they have made huge strides to overcome challenging mental illnesses and taxing life lessons. Those events can even become so exciting that they obscure one's ability to effectively attend to others' pain and suffering, when that is appropriate.
So I'd add that despite your best efforts, you can be very happy and also come off completely toxic, which highlights the POV that toxicity is a very subjective perception.
If you really want empathy and kindness to happen more often in an informational community, IMO it's a good idea to separate that informative effort (which is laudable on its own) from your effort to critique the community at large. Such info-driven communities often have signs and guides all around which signal that more community critique has been received than can be meaningfully processed.
(P.S. The "People get so smart that they see through all the BS and therefore become unhappy for all their intellect" trope can be really damaging to personal growth. It may be a stage of exhaustion reached after a period of growth-stress, and it may be a stage of imminent breakthrough. We also may not have the right socio-cultural tags and memes to help people understand how to contextualize and mine the follow-on stages for resilience and improved mood levels. So I wish we could be gentler and more nuanced with our analysis of this particular issue. There are some hints that such stages can even lead us to see our ideals reached meaningfully without wearing ourselves down so much, and that's a huge mood lift by itself.)
If the author wants only the non-toxic parts, stay with threads on Boeing plane safety (where aeroengineers chime in), startups (where the CEO answers), Zig (the language designer is always here), Rust (some folks from the core team are always hanging around), or some weird detail of a processor/GPU/TPU/AWS/low level M1 processor reverse engineering.
Also don't talk about cryptocurrencies, no matter if it's good or bad.
Anything about crypto, Apple, Google, Tesla, etc all have a mixed bag of good content and hater-type comments that make me eye roll and move on.
But for all of that, this is still my favorite social media site.
Or Covid.
For a community as diverse as Hacker News, I've found it to be anything but toxic. The quality of posts is generally high and the people who comment tend to keep things on topic and impersonal. Personal attacks and jabs are not common and people don't just say things for the sake of winning arguments.
Of course, I don't click on every single story - I stick to the things that interest me, which admittedly are narrowing as of late, unlike in my early 20s.
Is it really being contrarian, or supporting multiple views in intellectually stimulating discussions?
A few days ago there was a discussion on CORS where some people defended the thesis it made sites less secure, and others stepped in and defended that CORS in fact improved security. Both sides posted their rationales. Arguably neither position was right or wrong. It just depends on perspective.
A glass can be half full and half empty at the same time.
Is anyone being contrarian to point out either interpretation?
IMO the line the author did not seam to make clear in his blog post, which leads to some confusion in the comment section, is that being contrarian in a _discussion_ format - where all parties agree it is a discussion - is something else entirely than being contrarian to proposals from random people in real life.
"I find it odd that even when someone tells you the logical outcome you still deny it."
"It's baffles me and is so interesting to see someone behave this way even though it's not logical."
It's this intellectual arrogance where the commenter acts like he's some sort of hyper intelligent savant observing creatures of lower intelligence that is completely toxic. Whenever I see that type of garbage comment, I think dude... the other person just disagrees with you stop talking about him like he's some animal your observing in a laboratory.
Enlightenment ensues when the meta loop is closed. All criticism winds back on itself, including this comment and the next comment commenting on it...they keep wrestling to get outside or on top of each other.
The singularity of meta-commentary is a deep belly laugh.
And it is absolutely toxic on certain topics, particularly anything economics related or that challenges capitalism and the "line go up" mentality of the VC culture. If you offer anything that criticizes that at all, you're in for an earful.
I just happened to write a long comment about this to a commenter who sees HN in just the opposite way to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30346954.
Who's right? Neither. It's exactly the same perception, just with opposite polarity, because the polarity is coming from inside the person.
More precisely, both are right in the sense that HN generates enough data points for everybody to run into whatever they dislike the most; and both are wrong in that they dramatically overweight that sample, because that's what the brain does with samples like that.
What makes this perception so common on all sides is that HN doesn't partition the site into like-minded siloes (e.g. follow lists or social graphs or subforums). Everyone is in the same big room, so everyone is frequently bumping into views they dislike and normally don't have to deal with as much, at least not in their home base. The irony is that this is actually a step closer both to reality (society is divided on divisive topics) and to genuine tolerance (bearing the presence of what one dislikes). There's more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
I do think that when it comes to politics and social justice HN is content to let people who aggressively hold certain viewpoints have an outsize role in the discussion, despite engaging in toxic behaviors that wouldn't be tolerated on other threads. This may be because the people running the show here are sympathetic to such views, or maybe they're just naive.
anyway man we made up our minds already that's kinda the point. hn has a lot going for it but it also sucks pretty hard, in some ways that are very difficult to quantify but nevertheless are real! I'm sorry that hurts to hear and I'm more sorry that you're so sure it can't be the case that you can't see it.
having a mod jump on you demanding peer-reviewed validation if you criticize the place is bad, even if they do it civilly.
hn surely does "take criticism seriously" in the sense that when any is detected, it is fully and publicly focused on. but in all the cases I've seen it comes with a hostile degree and intensity of interrogation that makes it hard to believe it is a good faith exercise in organizational-self improvement. it just puts such a high burden and consequence on publicly pointing out the faults that people don't want to do it.
shit I try not to do it on purpose because it's such a draining unpleasant experience to be the center of attention of dang and whoever has decided to be his crew for the day.
being civil doesn't protect you from these arguments! these things are bad, no matter how civil people are being about them. and I am sometimes not that civil about them, but that doesn't make me wrong, or a moral inferior to people who can keep their cool.
On the contrary, I think HN is trying its best to be a broadly appealing place for intellectually curious folks, especially those who might be interested in tech and the business environment around it.
HN demands other things beyond civility and respect for others of course; we're all well aware that civility alone does not suffice. But it helps enough that doing away with it is clearly unwise, most of all during the sorts of vigorous debates that arise quite naturally in any discussion-focused platform. (Including very mainstream ones like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) This is not a "moral" point of view, but one that's driven by solid observation of what happens to overall quality when incivility and personal attacks are allowed to fester. Many of us have been on Usenet after all, and can draw from that experience.
> demanding peer-reviewed validation if you criticize the place
This is not what has happened here, and long-time HN users should be well aware of that by now. No "demand" was made backed by mod privileges, least of all any sort of "hostile interrogation", what I saw was gentle pushback, most likely aimed at trying to find ways of making any criticism actionable and part of a potential "exercise in organizational-self improvement".
I also take some issue at the implication that I share dang's outlook on these matters, to the point of acting like his "crew". What I did was merely to point out that your comment was phrased in a way that may well have turned many HN users off from its relevant points, but that it did nonetheless have substantive points to make.
I'm curious how you'd tear apart the argument in the GP (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30351677 and its cousin, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30346954), because what I describe there is probably the single most consistent phenomenon I see on HN. Do your worst?
the point I guess I'd like to make here is that you can be either ruthlessly rational data-bound defender of hn's honor OR impartial mod who applies the rules as written. but not both. or if you have to try to be both at least use an alt or something because these really should be separate roles at this point.
A particular user is aggressively confrontational towards every queer/POC person who makes a negative comment about the Midwest possibly not being safe for certain groups. In a conversation about a technical topic, this type of behavior wouldn't be tolerated. In this case, it was, and possibly valuable discourse was derailed.
For purposes of comparison, there's a critical discussion about MS Teams today with a hundred comments. I wouldn't expect posters who respond "what are you, some kind of Slack shill???" in such a thread to last long here without moderator action.
Seen this double standard consistently over the years and it's one reason myself and others keep their distance from this site.
If it seems to you like there's less moderation happening on that sort of comment than there is on comments complaining about corporate product, I can see how that would lead to resentment about how HN is moderated. I wouldn't want to be part of such a place either.
Because there's a degree of randomness in what we happen to see, and we can't moderate what we don't see, there are some comments on every topic that end up not getting moderated. If it's a topic that's particularly important to you (I don't mean you personally, but any reader), bad comments going unmoderated on that topic are going to make a more painful and deeper impression. This perhaps leaves the sense of a double standard because more pain has been caused by those comments than by others.
I don't know what to do about this other than remind people that we don't see everything, that the likeliest explanation for egregious comments going unmoderated is that we haven't seen them, and that we welcome heads-ups about egregious comments that we're missing. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
"It's easy to be a critic."
If left unchecked, all that is done is the refinement of a skill that is able to find the potential hurdles/blockers in any problem space.
However, when part of a balanced team this attribute can save time going down dead-end paths. But it requires a yin to the yang - a perpetual optimist that won't take no for an answer.
For those of us that are on the analytical end of the spectrum, it is important to realize that noticing an early issue does not equate to the problem space being a waste of time that is unsolvable.1 Instead, use your super-power for good to accelerate finding the efficienct solution to the problem that some has identified and clearly expressed (which is itself itself a super power; and you may have just found your startup founder).
When someone writes a blog post, in my experience, they are often only expressing an idea or reaction that they will soon leave behind.
But, for the most part, HN is my way of keeping up with trends in tech/development. And, lately, we have been seeing a lot more articles that aren't strictly tech but also science and life. And honestly, I welcome those.
HN reminds of what IRC used to be like back in the day. You make the discourse what you want it to be. I'd honestly not take a platform like this for granted.