Ask HN: What's going on with the angst on Hacker News?

[Fr0styMatt88]

Possibly going to word this wrong, or blow my small amount of karma, or whatever. Right at the beginning I want to say this isn't meant as an attack on the HN community. The discussions on this site are some of the best on the web and I read it every day, probably too much :)

Yet something is off lately. It seems as if there's a very deep angst building in this community and it feels like it's starting to self-reinforce, to 'go off the rails' a bit.

Someone suspicious might say there's a concerted anti-Google campaign going on, if you were to look at the stories making the front page lately. I don't think it's quite that simple - assuming there is no campaign being driven by any group of people in particular, I think this is a symptom of some deep-seated frustrations. Frustrations about being early-adopters who aren't in the mainstream market; frustrations about not having privacy-respecting options; frustrations about the metrics-driven, impersonal way that products are developed by big Silicon Valley tech companies; frustrations about simply not being able to vote with your wallet when it comes to vendor lock-in, privacy, etc.

Do other people feel the same?

Some of the discussions lately, while really engaging, make me feel drained, frustrated and like I've just finished reading a mainstream news site.

For my own part, it's probably time to step away from Hacker News for awhile. Right now, it doesn't feel like a healthy place to spend a lot of time.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, be careful of falling too far into an echo-chamber. Be suspicious in a good way. Step away and broaden your perspective when it all starts getting a bit too much.

[badrabbit]

> Do other people feel the same?

I don't.

> Someone suspicious might say there's a concerted anti-Google campaign going on, if you were to look at the stories making the front page lately. I don't think it's quite that simple - assuming there is no campaign being driven by any group of people in particular, I think this is a symptom of some deep-seated frustrations. Frustrations about being early-adopters who aren't in the mainstream market; frustrations about not having privacy-respecting options; frustrations about the metrics-driven, impersonal way that products are developed by big Silicon Valley tech companies; frustrations about simply not being able to vote with your wallet when it comes to vendor lock-in, privacy, etc.

Google and FB are both increasingly doing even more terrible things. Normal users can play the part of the frog that gets boiled slowly over time but people who understand to a degree the implications of technology abuse find it rather concerning.

You seem frustrated a lot yourself. I don't see why HN would frustrate you but do be sure to take care of yourself. I am very concerned about many things but not so much frustrated.

[mindcrime]

There is an awful lot of negativity lately. And while quite a bit of it is arguably justified, it does seem a little over the top at times. And even more disturbing, to me, is that the anger sometimes seems very misplaced, and/or the proposed alternatives (if any) are very misguided.

Most notably you see a lot of calls for "more regulation", and demands for more government intervention in things. This is almost always a bad idea, and it saddens me to see this kind of thinking infecting the HN community.

We're hackers, we can do better. We could be putting out minds to work coming up with clever and elegant solutions to hard problems, instead of falling into the comfortable trap of "let the government fix it". Governments rarely, if ever, "fix" anything. And their actions almost always have unintended (negative) consequences.

So sure, be negative if you want. I can be pretty negative at times myself. But for crying out loud, let's channel our rage towards coming up with insightful solutions instead of abrogating our responsibility to help and just crying "more regulations".

[_lffv]

I think I might step away as well. There is a very large amount of frustration, it seems, at the lack of privacy concerns, the failures of governmental power to stop it, and the fact that "mainstream media" (I really don't like using the term) doesn't report on privacy nearly enough. There's a lack of transparency that's been apparent for years but has been tacitly approved of. As for a timeline, to me the "privacy war" if we're calling it that began when the US made it legal for ISPs to sell data. Google is just a very large target for collateral damage.

[badrabbit → _lffv]

I've seen first hand people.I know getting exploited and abused by Google,fb and other bigtech. How bad should things get? Google isn't just a large target,they are an extremely hostile and abusive company.

I'll say this,tech can't fix these companies. 1984 is supposed to be fiction. Even most of HN crowd underestimates how bad things are.

[greenyoda → badrabbit]

Except that in "1984", the people were living under a brutal, totalitarian regime and had no way to escape the pervasive surveillance. We, on the other hand, are free to stop using Google and Facebook, install ad/tracker-blockers in our browsers, use Tor, VPNs, etc. and urge our friends and families to do the same.

We're also free to fight back against pervasive surveillance by our government by supporting civil rights organizations like EFF, voting for candidates who favor more freedom, etc. It's harder to fight the government than the tech companies, but possible.

[SmirkingRevenge → greenyoda]

We really aren't free to stop using google or facebook. To think otherwise (IMHO), is to underestimate the reach these companies really have.

If you are on the internet, you are using facebook. You are using google.

Sure, there might be brief periods where ad blockers and similar tools black-out the info gathering capabilities of these tech giants (but only for the most privacy-conscientious among us), but they'll leap frog you in short order, one way or another. If they can't do it technologically, they'll do it politically (if we let them).

Market incentives dictate that the tech giants spend their vast resources to track and predict your behavior, in ever more accurate ways. And beyond that - to dictate your behavior. They have billions of dollars, and the worlds smartest programmers to make it reality.

The entity that learns how to predict/control human behavior the best, first, basically wins the universe. The common folk are stuck trying to figure out who the least shitty entity is to get that crown: time warner... china... google...

[SmirkingRevenge → SmirkingRevenge]

Re-reading this the next day, I realized my above post is exactly the type of woeful chatter the OP was talking about.

I'll take that as my cue to lighten up! =)

[badrabbit → greenyoda]

This is what I meant by how even hn users are unaware.

Whether you use google or fb they will still spy on you. You the tech savvy hn users might make it a tad bit harder for them but 90% of people can't.

You can fight government surveillance but a very large majority of people don't care because they don't understand the extent and implications of what's happenning to them. In many(not all) ways 1984 was better

[potatocompiler]

I've felt it too.

Anyone care to do a +/- sentiment analysis over time of HN posts?

[gus_massa]

Avoid the post with more than a hundred of comments for a while. The post with a docent of comments usually have some interesting technical discussion.