The discussion here about Foone's preferred pronouns and desires for linking is pretty bad by HN standards I must admit, but frankly I've never seen it done better on any tech forum. Usenet was and is an endless hostile flamewar ground. Larger Reddit tech subs talk about the same topics constantly. Lobsters is stuck in a loop of evangelism, gatekeeping, and pushback against both. Mastodon in its more toxic parts is just as bad, often worse, than Twitter. The same personality ticks that makes people wrong deeper in the comments here repeat in spades on every tech news site I've been on. Dan Luu says as much on his page about HN comments.
Tech people are neurodiverse, have a long culture of being strident (Torvalds, ESR, et al.), and often tend to be in their own heads. That combination is probably just what all of this is. But one thing I try to remind myself of is that busy builders often don't have the time, or desire, to write detailed HN comments about what they build all the time. So comments here are probably, disproportionately, written by people not building things.
There was a recent point in time where I could feel myself getting a headache from passing over all the regular cynicism in the comments. Every bit of negativity I passed my eyes over physically felt like poison, but I kept coming back because I was addicted.
This kind of routine sounds familiar - it's the same kind that's brought up when applied to other forums on this forum itself. I kept thinking I could escape that cycle by finding the place away from "the other mindless information hoses". The impression I got from reading comments here makes me want to believe this, but I don't think it's true. And the false sense of superiority that got into my head from thinking I'd found the nicer place led me astray.
There are a lot of comparisons of this site to others, but regardless of what HN is labeled, I think that despite the engaging conversations that do take place, the comments are not always a comfortable place for me to return to. It's to the point where I've seemingly overestimated the many pronouncements of better moderation, or that it's less toxic than that other place, or that there's insight to be found in lots of places. The catch is that all those things might be true, and yet one can still feel worn out by everything in this place besides the unequivocal good. I can count on one hand the times in the past five years where an article or comment I read on HN meaningfully changed my life.
Additive firehouse sites can still house valuable information, and said sites are unlikely to go away in the long term from scores of people bickering at them from a distance. The world is far larger than what a single orange site can encompass.
Except for some very technical topics, I find myself skipping the comments more and more, despite the fact that was one of my favorite parts of the site.
I'm just using this as "term of art". I would never want to use a non-preferred pronoun, that would be hurtful. If I offended, I'm sorry, I can't edit it now.
Honestly there are a few bad apples that show up around here, but I think that's just a reflection of our industry as a whole. If you have open signup and light-ish touch moderation, you're bound to end up with whatever HN is.
I see "the orange site" phrase used a lot over at lobste.rs, and they obviously followed a different path - you need to be invited or somehow known to get on board. So they've got less of what they think of as toxicity and everyone's supposed to be pals with each other. Except little conflicts and tantrums do happen every now and then, and there's less activity overall (current top story has 26 comments on it, 10 of the 25 stories on the front page have no comments at all).
For me it’s a lot more than a few bad apples. It’s the general state of discourse and empathy from a reasonably large chunk of the user base.
HN was never perfect (since I found it), but it’s much worse now.
To be fair this has happened in general to a number of sites/thing in the exact same timeline. It’s not an HN specific problem, other than the degree to which such people may be attracted to the usual HN spheres.
