zlacker

>>babelf+(OP)
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors.

He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.

I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.

All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.

But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.

>>shalma+Ho
The "sour grapes" attitude has IMO really started crowding out other content. Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is. And if you don't want to pile on the commentary, which is all pretty much the same thing regurgitated in different ways, then your content just kinda languishes at the bottom of the page. I don't really know why this kind of content is so engaging but I guess it is. Kinda like a sports match where everyone just shouts at how bad the other team is or something.

EDIT: My pet theory is that it has to do with the general aging of the users here. There's a kind of well-to-do, Western, mid-40s (usually male) social opinion I see upvoted a lot here that I feel like hits the sweet spot of the folks who still read this site regularly. But it's just a theory really.

>>Karrot+Sq
> Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is.

I've noticed a similar general trend for some kinds of posts. (the more technical ones tend to escape this) The fix is that when you see posts with that kind of social signaling, downvote and flag them.

The downvote is because these posts are always extremely uninteresting, low-effort, and detrimental to HN as a whole.

The flag is because these posts almost always break the HN guidelines in multiple ways, e.g. "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.", "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.", "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread."

This is one of the few ways that we can continue to avoid HN from turning into Reddit - by self-moderating. Dang seems to take a light touch to moderation and does almost zero curation, so it's up to the users to help keep HN about intellectual curiosity and avoid degenerating into Reddit.