I recently started contributing on another online community, a Slack, and I've found the rhetorical habits I've unwittingly cultivated creating a weird sort of mood. Nothing I'm saying is wrong, but HN has managed to make me somewhat oblivious to tone.
It's exactly as she describes, 'reckless'. I dare to go places that will rile people up. The silence that met my initial posts was deafening.
I initially wanted to retreat back to my familiar communities, Quora, HN. But I've never backed down from this kind of challenge before and I'm not about to now. I'm slowly managing to discover better 'hygiene' so I can fit better into this particular community of wonderful people.
But I wouldn't give back my participation in HN for anything. More than any other place I've ever found, HN makes me feel like I belong.
Case in point: a few days ago an article about India/Kashmir shortly made the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20612461)
The ensuing discussion is entirely obsessed with the legalistic details of India's action: what sort of law is it/who has the authority to recind it/etc.
Read any news report on the topic and those questions are secondary to the intentions and actual effects of the policy, i. e. "is this intended to allow resettling a majority-muslim province with Hindus and thereby dilute it's culture as part of a nationalistic campaign?"
That sort of superficial legalism is rather prevalent. Any discussion of a public protest will include some people complaining about protesters not staying on the sidewalks. Discussions on law frequently find really clever "cheats" relying on too-literal a reading of the text ("Freedom of 'Speech', not of 'Writing', the New York Times doesn't have a case").
If I were to over-psychoanalyse, this approach seems to gell with a certain type of uber-rationality that denies the value of anything that cannot be measured. Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
Sure, that critique is all over the piece, and quite valid. So valid that calling attention to it again feels like beating a dead horse.
It was the 'performative erudition' part I wanted to share my experience with. HN has changed the way that I communicate and think, in ways that I couldn't put a finger on until I started reading the article. It's changed how I come across at work, how I interact with my friends and family.
> Hence, I've seen repeated suggestions that web fonts shouldn't exist because nobody needs more than one readable font or, more generally, that "design" is superfluous wastefulness at best and often akin to lying.
Why do people insist on things being pretty? Obviously they're overcompensating for deficiencies in some other area. I'll stop now before you start thinking I'm serious.