It's been interesting the past few years to see this same stereotyped critique of HN coming up over and over. The consistency of certain aspects recurring together in them is interesting to me. Here's a few I've noticed:
1) They tend to at least in part be rooted in a problematic stereotype of the 'toxic HN reader,' which is inappropriately generalized to cover the entire community. The stereotype is generally of a rationalist bro/"man child" who thinks he (choice of gender intentional) is much smarter than he really is, with no comprehension of his privilege in society, or any awareness of the arts and humanities, with poor social skills, etc.
> "...the end result is that arguing on HN feels like passive-aggressively LARPing as scientists, but not with any of the good stuff."
Observe the key ingredients: generalizes to all of HN not just to certain users, implication that readers are insecure scientist-wannabes, implication of stunted growth (the choice of "LARPing" here is characteristic), poor social skills, and lack of taste ("but not with any of the good stuff").
2) The critique ends up being vacuous because any online community of sufficient size is going to have negative aspects to it. This fact leads to a necessary reading style where you seek out the best stuff among the less good stuff. I view it like panning for gold, filtering out a bunch of dirt in the process. I think most people are aware it's necessary to use sites like HN in this way.
Once you consider that, the critique starts to sound a little funny: it doesn't make much sense sense to characterize a large online community by its most boring parts if those parts are easily skipped over in accessing the interesting parts. So what's the critique really about?
3) The other aspect almost always present is that they're structured to make HN a foil for the speaker's own intelligence and enlightenment—and even more importantly, it's often used as a shibboleth to communicate that one is part of the group who has transcended HN.
Spend some time in certain Twitter circles (often made up of accomplished developers and/or researchers) and you'll see that this is so common it's developed abbreviations and can be communicated almost with something like a wink or a nod: snide comments disparaging HN can be tossed out in just about any context for a laugh and shared feeling of superiority.
It's interesting though because I've also noticed the critiques tend to have defensive roots: oftentimes the critic produced something that was not well-received by HN, at which point they become aware of all its problems.
In any case—it's a pattern I think HN readers should be aware of. The parent comment, for instance, is much more insult than substantive critique if you look closely—and yet it was the top comment on the article.
1) They tend to at least in part be rooted in a problematic stereotype of the 'toxic HN reader,' which is inappropriately generalized to cover the entire community. The stereotype is generally of a rationalist bro/"man child" who thinks he (choice of gender intentional) is much smarter than he really is, with no comprehension of his privilege in society, or any awareness of the arts and humanities, with poor social skills, etc.
> "...the end result is that arguing on HN feels like passive-aggressively LARPing as scientists, but not with any of the good stuff."
Observe the key ingredients: generalizes to all of HN not just to certain users, implication that readers are insecure scientist-wannabes, implication of stunted growth (the choice of "LARPing" here is characteristic), poor social skills, and lack of taste ("but not with any of the good stuff").
2) The critique ends up being vacuous because any online community of sufficient size is going to have negative aspects to it. This fact leads to a necessary reading style where you seek out the best stuff among the less good stuff. I view it like panning for gold, filtering out a bunch of dirt in the process. I think most people are aware it's necessary to use sites like HN in this way.
Once you consider that, the critique starts to sound a little funny: it doesn't make much sense sense to characterize a large online community by its most boring parts if those parts are easily skipped over in accessing the interesting parts. So what's the critique really about?
3) The other aspect almost always present is that they're structured to make HN a foil for the speaker's own intelligence and enlightenment—and even more importantly, it's often used as a shibboleth to communicate that one is part of the group who has transcended HN.
Spend some time in certain Twitter circles (often made up of accomplished developers and/or researchers) and you'll see that this is so common it's developed abbreviations and can be communicated almost with something like a wink or a nod: snide comments disparaging HN can be tossed out in just about any context for a laugh and shared feeling of superiority.
It's interesting though because I've also noticed the critiques tend to have defensive roots: oftentimes the critic produced something that was not well-received by HN, at which point they become aware of all its problems.
In any case—it's a pattern I think HN readers should be aware of. The parent comment, for instance, is much more insult than substantive critique if you look closely—and yet it was the top comment on the article.