Your framing of all of this, including narrowing it down to just a few things and asking “do you think the combination of factors above is problematic?” is emblematic of the kind of subversive pidgeonholed discord that’s very useful for adversaries to control narratives (see f.e. “Nerd Sniping”).
I’ll answer by saying this: HN, for example, is already taken over. There are nationalistic and politically-inclined shill groups (paid, and useful idiots) already in here and have been here for some time. The upvoting/flagging system is broken as a result since opposition can be easily quashed by downvoting/flagging without manual intervention. Daniel is one lad, he can’t keep up with all of this (but kudos for trying, really). The shit faucet diameter is just too large. My thinking? We’ll need to take a page out of 4chan’s book because placing speech silencing tools in front of users is a dead end. Whatever you do to try to control things, an adversary will gain control of and use it to control the narrative. It’s right there on Reddit.
Don’t take my word on it. Foundations of Geopolitics spelled this out long before most of the internet as we know it today was a thing.
Just earlier today, I walked out of comma in solidarity with Hotz. They didn’t even have to tell me I was being laid off. You’ll read it about it in the WaPo soon.
> This is sort of a defining part of his personality.
No it isn’t. Your perception of him is warped because you read the Hotz Haters Digest on HN and elsewhere. Go read his blog posts and you might learn a thing or two about what he’s really like. Go watch his interviews on YouTube. He may not be the most impressionable individual (nerds rarely are, even Carmack is criticized for being robotic sometimes). He’s opinionated and he likes to say provocative things for the interviewers to throw them off guard and not be so monotone, but that doesn’t make him a person worthy of being scorned in every thread on HN. He’s far more capable and far more nuanced than people give him credit for. It’s just shitty watching this community eat people who brought it up to what it is today (referring to hackers and crackers alike).
Exactly. I’m not referring to what’s upvoted the most (don’t care). I’m directly referring to the tone of the over all thread, the volume of comments en masse.
Voting one way or the other doesn't change this.
Of course, I’m not surprised that HN is bashing Hotz - any amount of tangible success will bring about negative rhetoric from people who don’t like seeing others succeed. It’s just that HN keeps having its own slashdot iPod moment on a weekly basis, and it’s awful to see it in a tech community (I hope it’s still a tech community). Really tone deaf and petulant takes by people who should think twice before hitting the reply button.
I think it would behoove you, given how easily they bent over for Bezos and have silenced opposition against him, to reflect back on the last two decades and compare various outlets (including the ones you don’t like because they don’t align with your political stance) and see just for how long they’ve been corrupted.
They didn’t wake up in 2013 and suddenly decide they won’t have any integrity.