For a while I thought that everyone on hacker news was just a contrarian, but now I realize that there is a culture of one-up manship that permeates every facet of the site. Anyone else notice this? Is this just how tech people are? Why does it have to be that way? It gets kind of annoying after a while.
I actually love this about HN. It feels to me like experts who are vetting and criticizing articles for me. They often save me clicks.
Sometimes the criticism is off-base, but you can usually count on someome pointing that out just below it.
I can see why it might rub you the wrong way, but I just want to point out that it's not objectively bad for everyone. For me, it's the point of coming here.
Yeah, I can see what you mean now that I think of it I actually feel the same way.
At the same time I will occasionally run across a post thats pretty much self explanatory but nevertheless the top post will still be someone trying to massage some angle to get a one up, which I find irritating. For some things I think its just best to appreciate it for what it is and not try to find the inner flaw. I find myself falling into this line of thinking (finding the flaws in everything) and I find i'm happier when I'm not constantly like that.
How does one even define contrarian? This is a vast oversimplification, and OP has not provided any evidence to support their claim. This being Hacker News, I would expect a simple sentiment analysis model trained and run against a database of posts and top responses, and the data made available for independent analysis. Even if that is the case, who's to say that this is suboptimal? Current popular discourse is all too often an echo chamber of self-aggrandizing charlatans patting each other on the back for every meaningless...
Yep, think this is often the case. One interesting habit is to distort the intention or cite an extreme example of the original post to something ludicrous and then ridicule it as... ludicrous.
Another common mistake (I'm sure I make it) is to sidetrack and then get lost in a critique of a side track. I often remind myself that first order effects and second order effects do not have equal weight.
I do think many first comment are snark or one uppers but sometimes it's the quick path to a bullshit detecting outcome. Any cryptos deserve a big cluestick whack, many machine learning and AI more so!
Can you provide some examples? It's hard to discuss this in general terms.
I think people just like to share their experiences because there's rarely a "one size fits all" answer to most problems. One of the ways in which we grow and develop our ideas is by discussing them with our peers. It also seems likely that people who disagree with a post are more likely to comment and write a rebuttal.
Sometimes the criticism is off-base, but you can usually count on someome pointing that out just below it.
I can see why it might rub you the wrong way, but I just want to point out that it's not objectively bad for everyone. For me, it's the point of coming here.