

Ask HN Old-Timers:  Are there Phases of Existence on HN? - evo_9

And have you gone through them to?<p>I've noticed lately as my Karma nears 3k that my generally tone is becoming more, how do I put it, 'honest'.  I find I'm much less likely to hold back on making a comment I would have otherwise not posted or even deleted before. Things like comedy, which clearly has no place here, is an automatic downvote.  Likewise, anything pro MS get's downvoted, while virtually anything about Apple goes up-up-up. But I digress.<p>So it seems to me that there are probably some form of stages of HN life. Just wondering what the old-timers that have been around here a long time think, and have you gone through similar?<p>The stages so far as I have experienced them:<p>1. Excitement: holy crap this place rules! It's like having lunch near Stanford for the first time and hearing other nerds conversing about cool tech stuff you'd never hear out randomly anywhere else on earth.<p>2. Addiction: It seems nothing at first, I mean I hit [f5] and while it's compiling/launching I can quickly check out the front page, and my karma...<p>3 Karma Exaltation: My karma is going up... I like that... I have a sense of accomplishment even though I am not doing much of anything. It's like WOW except I actually learn something most days I'm on HN.<p>4 Karma Fear: I must not lose ground. I must always go up. I must not comment on things I know might cause my karma to go down.<p>5 HN Burn-out: I have decided to change my homepage back to Google; I am getting worn out by the constant flow if excellent information, articles I have queued up when 'time permits' and generally the need to feed the karma-beast and grind onward and upward.<p>6 ? Perhaps this is where I'm at now... karma high enough to withstand some downvoting here and there, I generally like stick with the game-plan but occasionally I'll through out an alternative view just to see the reaction - negative or positive. Freedom, glorious freedom...
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PaulHoule
My impressions is that the politics of HN have changed drastically in the last
nine months or so.

Back then, the orthodoxy was an odd kind of left coast right-wing politics.
You know, the young people who've never worked a real job and think Ayn Rand
is really awesome, but they don't hate gays or mexicans.

If you went against that orthodoxy back then, you'd get viciously downvoted.

It seems that the politics of HN is much more diverse and tolerant now, and
you can actually express the opinion that there might be some drawbacks of an
extreme inequality of wealth.

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veb
That's why I fell in love with this place (and the reasons the OP outlined).

It's also the same reason I left Reddit. Ugh.

~~~
PaulHoule
Reddit is too left wing for my taste. The people in the programming section of
Reddit seem completely indifferent to the business of software, and just can't
seem to understand why some of us might be in it for the money.

