New Yorker on Hacker News
I love this. Something that I love, talking about something that I loathe to love (or love to loathe?). So many gems here, such as:
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions.
and:
> Recently, an essay in the New Atlantis titled “Do Elephants Have Souls?,” from 2013, hit the front page. The piece generated immediate resistance. Commenters responded literally to the question posed in the title and bickered about the word “soul.” Conversation spiralled, with users making arguments about Cartesian metaphysics and quoting Socrates. “Why is such an unscientific question so high on HN?” one commenter asked. “Or to rephrase, if we don’t know what a soul is, how can we hope to answer it WRT elephants? So how and why should a reasoning person rate an article like this?”
Beyond the beautifully written disparagement of traits and mindsets common in the industry, there is a thoughtful look into what moderation on
Hacker News looks like and the challenges involved. Admittedly, this is supposed to be the whole point of the article, which was a little lost on me as I read through trying to find aspects of tech culture I dislike and descriptors I could co-opt into my own language. But bringing a more human side to moderating an online forum is difficult and not something commonly seen, and to see how well-received and appreciated the moderators' work is was neat.
I may identify more with
The New Yorker than with
Hacker News, but in many ways I am closer to the latter than the former; I did find this article on
Hacker News, after all. To read this, then, feels like both an acknowledgement of these differences and a closing of the gap of sorts. And that, I am content in.