We've had these types of threads posted several times before and they've always been fun, though it seems like /g/ are really struggling for material this time around.
That said:
> [600 points] Why only web development matters (http :// nautil.us medium wordpress theverge gawker .com)
[1000 points] Some hot-button political issue that we know nothing about
[-1 points] An O(n) time algorithm for multiplying matrices
And that's why I have been phasing my tech news away from HN.
It's really enjoyable watching the 4chan folks take the piss out of here--though a lot of the posts are, I suspect, newfags (in the vernacular) posting purposefully bigoted things in language that isn't typical to /g/.
Lobste.rs is a good place, sometimes 4chan (though it's mostly garbage, at least it's honest and obviously garbage), sometimes the relevant project issue trackers and website myself, sometimes twitter.
For all its immaturity, 4chan can be surprisingly clever. A lot of the commenters on that thread were complaining about having had accounts banned here, though.
I've never been a part of a comments section quite as dry as this one. I feel afraid of a shadowban if I make the slightest mistake. That sort of environment doesn't really foster the risk-taking that humor often requires.
I get your fear, but it was a while back that the shadowbanning was really out of hand, with perfectly sensible people continuing to spend time and effort writing thoughtful comments, oblivious to the fact that only a handful of the userbase could even see them.
For that reason I've had `showdead` on since ever. There used to be so many normal comments grayed out because of some unrelated misstep of that user elsewhere.
But, roughly about when we got new mods (dang and the other one), that things started changing. Recently, I've pretty much only seen grayed out comments that were actually inflammatory, in some sense. Not that I'd always agree with the fact they got downvoted, but at least I could see it had to do with the content of that particular post.
So posting a joke risks downvotes, but not shadowbans.
I do agree that HN is one of the most dry, humourless discussion boards I have ever seen. While megablast says "humour is allowed here", while technically true, I really have to say there is pretty much no space for humour on HN, at all.
The only reason why there are even a few funny posts or jokes on HN at all is because you can't put a stop to humour, it'll find a way.
I started frequenting HN because I kept encountering these kinds of problems everywhere else. Certain subjects just have more gravity as it were, and when present will inevitably take up all the oxygen in a room. The only way I know to manage it is to isolate it in sub-fora, and be very strict about containment.
An important difference between HN and other fourms I frequent(ed) however is that instead of taking offense and going on the defensive when 'attacked' by 4chan, they recognize the joke and find it funny. That alone puts HN lightyears ahead of those other organizations.
And regardless of why, it's exactly this kind of self-awareness and identity that enables people to discuss ideas without feeling threatened by them, something which has held back both social and scientific progress in the past.
"An important difference between HN and other fourms I frequent(ed) however is that instead of taking offense and going on the defensive when 'attacked' by 4chan, they recognize the joke and find it funny. That alone puts HN lightyears ahead of those other organizations."
This. This comment could just as easily have been on that 4chan thread as a great example of HN think to be laughed at.
Not sure what you mean by that. If you are asking if they are a joke, a parody on real racists/sexists would say, then no. The complaints are serious. If you mean that people who complain about social justice warriors are really racists/sexists, well that's hard to answer, because it depends on one's definition of social justice warrior and one's definition of racism and sexism.
I think that people are now using overt racism and sexism as protest against Social Justice. Since a Social Justice Warrior will define anyone who doesn't agree with them as a racist or sexist anyway, people make it as obvious as possible because there is no escape. The only thing left is to piss them off.
I agree, although I find it to be a copout. It's like when someone is losing an argument so they say "oh, I'm not talking about morality, I'm just saying how the world is".
The task for anti-progressives is to deconstruct the progressive narrative. Just as anti-racists aims to deconstruct "Whiteness", we need to deconstruct "racism". That doesn't mean claiming racism is good, or racism doesn't exist, but rather showing that the way progressives conceptualize racism is wrong and exaggerated.
The inverse happens too. Racists and sexists define everyone who they don't agree with as Social Justice Warriors. Of course, neither end of the spectrum think that the corresponding label applies to them.
Since a ____ will ____. Do you not understand what is wrong with that? This whole SJW concept was made up by people who were being accused of being socially inept. Ie, sexist. Inept!
HN community VS 4chan community ? Really ? What if we'd stop pretending for just 1 sec, and just admit that many, many people are just the same here and there ?
Where does this lead ? As many here pretend to play the game, and play hardly, because they're aware of the rules, at least a small part of them, deep in their brain, also hate it. The feeling that most of time, crazy VC and tech race just lead nowhere is real. The worm is in the fruit already, and really, I'm pleased to record so.
The complaints about "SJWs", while indelicately phrased, aren't completely off-base. Hacker News has gotten way more PC over the past 5 years, much to its detriment. I remember what the site was like before the big reddit influx in 2010, and the actual political center wasn't that different, but the quality of discussion was a lot higher. People were forthright, analytical, and thorough. Conversation wasn't so prone to being dominated by groupthink, memes, and keeping up appearances.
Some of this doesn't come from HN itself but from the overall tech culture. But I think a big part of the story is that the site saw a massive expansion in users, thus becoming more generic and "public", meaning people have to be a bit more reflexive about what they say on here. When your audience is a trusted community of people with a shared understanding of the rights and protections that discussion participants grant to one another, you can cut through the bullshit a lot easier.
I've observed that the SJW hive think has skyrocketed over the last year on HN. I used to be able to predict ridicule in the comments, but instead I find pandering and PC nonsense. It's pretty depressing overall.
I know people that don't read HN because it's too virulently sexist, so having 4chan see it as too SJW is interesting.
Will we end up with two "social justice" realities, like we have with vaccination, creationism/evolution and climate change, where it's entirely possible to spend your entire browsing time on sites that agree with your opinions on everything?
Even after many HNers read this thread and appreciate the points being made, I'm sure we'll still see the same "Site I made in unique2me.js" garbage headlines in the top feed. Hopefully what we all take away from this is that we need to better spot patterns of articles/blogspam and self-moderate those submissions.
I actually like this layout. It's fast and easy to read, renders ok on mobile and is lightweight. I'm grateful that the maintainers didn't switch to an over-the-top look-at-my-framework.js thing just to make it look modern at the detriment of usability.
Just going to point out that that link contains hate speech directed at women, people of color and the LGBTQ community. I know YCombinator's been talking up diversity as of late, so maybe a good idea to not be linking to hate?
I've been reading HN for 4+ years now, and I think that practically every post in that thread is spot-on. HN has turned into the very thing that I thought the guidelines were designed to prevent. The internet doesn't need another reddit, it's bad enough as it is.
HN has become host to feminist shilling and corporate endorsements, on top of the already flawed content model that encourages disengagement to the point where people are just reposting headlines and treating HN as a comments section for the article itself.
Either way, there's something to be said for constructive criticism like this, and HN can potentially learn from this.
I hate to tell you this but HN has always been about "corporate endorsements" - this is primarily a startup site, which means you're going to see a lot of VC and SF culture around here.
Learn what? The whole thread is basically a fond pop at HN, with the usual 4chan dribble thrown in (like the faggot/nigger shock commentary).
I'm not sure how the vein of commentary about the headlines being business/startup oriented is a negative criticism, since that's the point of HN - and if anything, the business side of the forum has been dying off for quite a while.
Perhaps people became more aware of the causes of feminism? Whenever a belief of mine is very convenient for me I always try to tear it down just in case there is some hidden bias or other logical fallacy.
what are you talking about? how does that article have anything parodying this statement? i think you misunderstood the statement. what did you think my statement meant?
That said:
> [600 points] Why only web development matters (http :// nautil.us medium wordpress theverge gawker .com)