This was from 2013. The general climate here has turned pretty hostile to startups since then. The prevailing advice here is now to land a FAAMG job and slack off with a high standard of living, rather than slaving away at a startup to boost someone else’s capital. What remains is people sharing their side projects, going off-topic and wasting their time one way or another.
> The general climate here has turned pretty hostile to startups since then. The prevailing advice here is now to land a FAAMG job and slack off with a high standard of living
Some times I stumble upon really old HN threads in Google searches and end up missing the quality of old HN discourse. It was never perfect, of course. Nor is the modern version without upsides, as there are often good pieces of wisdom if you sift through enough noise in the comments.
However, modern HN just feels so deeply cynical, angry, and negative with much less of the entrepreneurial tech optimism of the older posts. It’s also starting to feel weirdly disconnected from reality in the way that the extremes of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook have become echo chambers after consuming non-stop bad news. It’s like people read so many outrage tech stories here that they forget there is an upside to the tech industry.
Big Tech hangs in a weird balance where we’re simultaneously supposed to hate and distrust FAANG companies but also at the same time we’re told to seek out FAANG jobs where we can maximize compensation.
The key to enjoying HN is to ignore any thread remotely related to politics, FAANG, social media, economics (where the comments are actually just about politics), drugs, or open-source drama.
Sadly, the most interesting content links (great blog posts, writings, knowledge, new projects, and so on) generally get fewer upvotes than outrage topics. I try to make a point of actively upvoting the content I want to see here every time I visit.
>However, modern HN just feels so deeply cynical, angry, and negative with much less of the entrepreneurial tech optimism of the older posts. It’s also starting to feel weirdly disconnected from reality in the way that the extremes of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook have become echo chambers after consuming non-stop bad news. It’s like people read so many outrage tech stories here that they forget there is an upside to the tech industry.
I dunno, I think the current atmosphere is more closely aligned with the zeitgeist of society writ large than it was previously.
That famed entrepreneurial optimism was born of a belief that technology is inherently good, and that startups can change the world.
The veil has been lifted and we see that most startups, internet startups in particular, exist to provide lucrative exits for the owners while abusing their users by harvesting data and selling ads.
The promise of a tech-led utopia is a hollow farce. It's a facade for the surveillance dystopia that big Internet companies are creating.
With every iteration, user experience takes a back seat to developer convenience, and devices are more powerful yet feel sluggish because of the mountains of shitty abstraction layers piled on. The companies that wield inordinate power are giant faceless corporations acting with impunity and whose decisions have no recourse.
Being a tech user is an exercise in frustration. The world sucks and Tech is making it worse.
The zeitgeist of society writ large sucks. This has been true in almost every society in almost every era. It's not a happy thing to align oneself with.
The bubbles of optimistic outliers are the places that affect society writ large. That's where to be.
Optimism and pessimism are both biases. Technology is amoral, and has the potential to be wielded for both 'bad' and 'good' - in whatever moral framework you live by. I think it makes sense to at least be vigilant about emerging and present technologies so that proper attitudes/policies can be developed towards their better potentials, and maybe mitigate some negative outcomes. That's not to say you can't acknowledge the 'good' outcomes.
Tech has its bad apples, but overall, it's been a huge boost, not only to productivity, but quality of life for everyone.
Just because people are idiots and get off on raging on social media has nothing to do with the tech. "But the algorithms!" Nonsense. People were raging on message boards well before the algorithms, we're just seeing what happens when the internet is expanded to the general public and it's not just nerds arguing over tabs vs spaces or which semiconductor company makes the best processors.
UX has continued to improve year after year, just because your favorite app went to shit says nothing about the industry at large. I can't think of a single example of software that was better in the past vs now.
But go ahead, disconnect from tech, and see what the world was like before it.
Stop using the technological wonder that is Google Maps. Stop using Netflix with its stupendous ability to stream great quality video and audio on a connection that has no business handling it. Don't take advantage of Amazon's same day delivery on an obscure item that you would never find locally. Don't consume the billions of hours of educational videos on YouTube covering any topic you can think of. Give up the ability to connect and stay in touch with any person anywhere via the multitude of social media apps. Give up the ability to know what's happening on the other side of the world, as it's happening. Give up the ability to search for anything you can think of, and find multiple sources of information.
I mean, the improvements in every single industry have been massive due to tech. Anything from ordering food to launching rockets into space has been greatly improved by tech.
Tech has introduced new problems that we must address, but to complain that it hasn't brought forward some utopia you have in your mind, is just unfair.
The quality of the service for every one of the positive examples you mention has degraded since the largest firms involved have become effective monopolies that could get away with exploiting either their customers or their labor, or both, while also engaging in anti-competitive practices to destroy real and even potential competitors, destructively capturing large swaths of the free market in the process. The centrality and engagement-driving nature of social platforms, including youtube, have eroded the social fabric and aided the spread of conspiracy theories and political extremism, driven advances in mass-surveillance, or both. All user-generated content platforms have centralized and then adopted abusable automated moderation systems that exacerbate these problems.
Big tech has created some undeniable conveniences, and it provides an endless stream of content that entertains you as it distracts you, as you describe, but if you think that's worth the major problems the consolidation of its power has caused, you're a fool. If you haven't encountered any of the myriad ways in which this, like any consolidation of unaccountable power, is harming people, then you live in a very lucky and ever-shrinking bubble. But perhaps you have, and simply decided that this was the tradeoff for the shiny toys listed.
Maybe humanity will always live in a cycle of worshiping new unaccountable power bases for the scraps they feed them, until the dystopia they create becomes too horrible to bear, and some awful upheaval has to happen to upset it. Maybe this time the combination of surveillance technology and near-total capture of both retail and information sources, is too powerful and this can't be reversed. Maybe the planet will be uninhabitable by the time it can happen.
Zeitgeist is caused by the pandemic x social media outrage x hardships due to lost jobs. Everyone is glued to the internet and we've started to form factions.
It's hard to conjecture this, let alone prove it, but a strawman take I feel like is adversarial foreign powers have influenced the social media outrage narratives to destroy the western spirit from inside out. HN is reflecting larger trends. Western spirit was about putting behind differences and doubling down on cooperation. Looking back, from post-WWII to now, I get goosebumps and feel sad that this is what we've become.
Nothing has changed in terms of good vs. evil of technology. Fundamentals are still the same. Not even space exploration has escaped HN's cynicism. It's time for me to move onto some other place.
> It's hard to conjecture this, let alone prove it, but a strawman take I feel like is adversarial foreign powers have influenced the social media outrage narratives to destroy the western spirit from inside out.
Bingo, and I wish more people would realize this. “soviet demoralization” or “ Yuri Bezmenov” for more info.
> However, modern HN just feels so deeply cynical, angry, and negative with much less of the entrepreneurial tech optimism of the older posts
Isn't that a direct reflection of the current state of the tech world? Since the 00's, it has morphed from a rather hacker-friendly, digital far-west into a locked-down plutocracy dominated by a handful of gigantic corporations, whose end-goal are quite often to squeeze every single last bit of personal information or other valuable commodity they can out of, typically, misinformed users.
E.g., despite all the folklore, I feel much better toward 00's ‶Linux is cancer″ MS and their Windows 2000 than toward 2020's ‶We <3 Linux″ MS that just spy on me through Windows 10 and put ads in my start menu.
Similarly, I prefer the 90's ‶we're making expensive and original computers″ Apple to the 2020's ‶we will scan all the photos on your device″ Apple.
And it's not to single these two out, they're just the first examples I'm thinking of. All in all, I just believe the whole digital world is much more hostile now than it used to be, which would, at least partially, account for the growing apathy, cynicism and defiance in the community – it's hard to feel any different when every other week brings a new personal data leak, spyware scandal or privacy-infringement affair, be it corporate- or state-sponsored.
I haven't been browsing this site for more than like a year, but have found it one of the places on the internet where political discourse seems to be relatively tame and good-faith for the most part. I've also learned a lot from the blog posts you mentioned and really knowledgeable comments on them.
Is it really worse now?
As someone who was here since day two of the public launch, I'm not sure how true this is. It's true the conversation has changed, but less cynical? More optimistic?
The cynicism and optimism seems to have stayed more or less constant. The quality of conversation is the problem.
Luckily, quality tends to bubble to the top, barring manual intervention that occasionally makes a few (few) mistakes. So far.
The extremes are true: I've increasingly felt that people here are disconnected from reality in a way not seen in previous years. I'm not quite sure how to put it into words, and it deserves a substantive eloquence beyond my capabilities at the moment.
Head over to lobste.rs, not much activity but it fits your description.
HN's political discourse has been quite unpleasant since last couple of years. Used to be quite a gamut of perspectives, now it is completely lopsided.
Worth noting you have to be invited to join Lobste.rs (by a current member). I'm not one, but the discussions there are often interesting - IME about half the stories I've seen here first and on those stories in general the Lobsters threads are a bit more technical and a bit more focused.
I quite like the 'what are you doing this weekend threads' it feels very small-community-like. [But that might just be that I've often felt a lack of tech community - as an example, I've used Linux for >20 years and don't have anyone in my life I could have a conversation about it with like you might chat to a neighbour/friend about pruning a tree or fixing your car.]
> I've increasingly felt that people here are disconnected from reality in a way not seen in previous years.
Well, I don’t think that is surprising given the rise of popularity of HN. The early days had people interested in startups, and hence their virtues, and later came a large crowd that had some interest in tech but had random alignments.
I feel that human beliefs form a distribution where almost anything will believed by someone, and if you gather a large enough crowd you can find a large cohort that will earnestly believe various nonsense things.
I've been part of this community, and slashdot before it, for more than 20 years. The shifts in attitude are huge.
To start with a tech-focused example: there used to be at least a sizeable minority in favour of GPL licensing, vs. MIT, and people on both sides of the issue had at least some familiarity with it. Today, I see comments where people seem unable to even grasp the idea that anyone would consider the GPL.
Since it's difficult to believe someone would actually forget so much on an issue of importance to them, I believe it's changing audiences rather than the initial audience getting older. Or, alternatively, the tech sector simply expanding by several orders of magnitude, and any people who have been in it being drowned out.
This is somewhat noticeable on issues of social justice: all the major tech companies still have policies to promote participation by groups that were traditionally marginalised. But you wouldn't expect that from the comments here, Gamergate would still be filed in the ethics-in-journalism-dept', if that joke had survived.
It's tame in that people will opine that women are too stupid for IT, but they will do so very politely.
HN moderators are very proud of being accused at roughly equal rates from both of the US political tribes. That's the sort of triangulation leading to false balance even local journalists have managed to pick up over the last decade, where they still exist.
I'd really prefer if they flipped a coin and grew a spine. Is George Soros eating babies or not? Answering that question with a shrug isn't neutrality. For anyone in a position of even minor power over the discourse, it's dereliction of duty.
Practically, it means that any even barely political question on HN is discussed on a level where I could write both sides of the discourse in my sleep. If it's SF housing it's going to be "you don't want homeless people around where you life if you have children" vs. "you do know not all homeless people are violent, right?".
In the process, everyone retreats to their corners. The "virus lab leak" idea, in its first incarnation, was not something I'd be willing to explore, because allowing any possibility of it would immediately be weaponised by people pushing the idea that it was an intentional release of a biological weapon, an idea with completely different ramifications that was, nonetheless, superficially similar and closely linked.
Any tread on COVID is 90% fighting over "it's just the flu" (very beginning), then hydroxywhatever, and lately ivermectinopleasedont. In that regard, I truly doubt the comments are representative of even the readership of HN, let alone the US public, and even less the world's public.
Opinion on "mainstream media" is probably the most out-of-wack compared to opinions generally voiced in polite company. It's enough for a story to be published by the NYT to get a dozen comments often not even arguing that, but assuming everyone agrees with, the idea that everything they write is a lie. This may be an outcrop of the single uniting characteristic of commenters: they love to be contrarian. So much so, on this issue they all agree. "Actually", they tell each other with the mannerisms of a big truth being revealed, "I am much too smart to believe what everyone is believing". And if that means water isn't wet, so be it.
The reduction in optimism may be related to the increased experience with the topics discussed? For example the internet boom of 2000 was caused by hyper-optimism, then people learned to be more moderate and Internet really took off. By comparison, the generation of 2003-2005 was less optimistic, but not in a bad way.
I don't think it was learning to be more moderate, I think niche communities were pervaded with new users, which in turn caused a shift in culture and therefore later developed into new moderation policy. It's also been heavily corporatized as well, there are far less distal independent entities being a "big deal" and more centralization. But I haven't studied the patterns extensively and this is just collective anecdotal assessments of the shifts experienced from 2004 to present.
Not everyone is the same as you. I enjoy immensely reading HN posts and comments related to politics, FAANG, social media, economics (where the comments are actually just about politics), drugs, or open-source drama.
I also like interesting content links (great blog posts, writings, knowledge, new projects, and so on). I don’t get this mix elsewhere and it’s why I come here. Are you in the right community?
My account is now older than a decade so I guess I'm an OG here. (crazy) There's definitely been a big shift over the years. But, I feel like this is just the general state of the world right now.
The entire industry back then was so much more optimistic.
Politics should be interesting to a programmer if one can write a program or use data to do something useful. (or talk about doing that) You have to force the conversation in that direction. Like for a chemist everything is about chemistry. They know its not but pretending sure makes things a lot more interesting.
Or we're just getting older. Software tech has become less of a disruptive novelty. Younger generations are entering the scene with different ideals. They desire meaningful capitalism (in a political sense). This also brings new opportunities.
This is my favorite online place to waste time, after all. And yes, I've given up any dreams of starting my own thing. You pretty much just described me, except not FAAMG (but I am happy where I'm at).
I don't mind this description at all (there's a freedom in giving up even just the dream of the hustle).
When the people who had been laughing at Microsoft for years as being a washed up has-been came to the realization that it currently has a valuation of over $2 trillion and is still growing.
It makes some sense - if you replace Netflix with MS, the list will be the 5 largest tech companies. Netflix is only there because of how the term was coined in the first place - FANG (originally without Apple) was a list of stocks that Jim Cramer liked around 2013 and the acronym caught on and evolved from there.
Only wannabe? Aside from the niche and premium Apple products, you can't walk into a brick and mortar store and walk out with a PC that doesn't run Microsoft Windows. You also can't run almost any industrial software without Windows. Good luck with any slightly unusual hardware either. Gaming is still mainly Windows based.
They still have a tight stranglehold on desktop computing.
Most open-source projects exist on Github. VSCode is the best and the most-used IDE. A good amount of code in the future will likely be written using Copilot. Microsoft is a software development productivity behemoth.
Give Microsoft some credit - they're the second largest company in the world with over $2 trillion market cap. Sure we're not in the 90s anymore and their image, position in the markets and in the zeitgest is a bit different but "not at its peak" is a bit harsh.
As far as acronyms, I like FAAAM (replace Google with Alphabet).
But their #1 stranglehold position in tech went bye bye when they dropped the ball in the OS area by whiffing fantastically several times as mobile rose to dominance.
In cloud they are significant, just not dominant either.
You assume that their current market position is because they dropped the ball rather than a deliberate choice to step back from being the prominent leader. They're making more money than ever, they've essentially fixed their reputation from the Ballmer years, they can attract top talent, and they can work on projects without massive public strutiny and commentary now. I think it was Microsoft are exactly where they want to be.
> You assume that their current market position is because they dropped the ball rather than a deliberate choice to step back from being the prominent leader.
A business willingly choosing to make less money and get out competed by competitors? Why did they then attempt to create a windows phone then pull it after failure?
Microsoft wrote down billions of dollars on many attempts at being king of mobile.
These were colossal failures. The fact that they were such a cash generating machine doesn’t imply that they didn’t lose out on being a much bigger business.
They didn’t step back from mobile prominence, they stepped back from repeated mobile failures, licked their wounds, and refocused on other areas because they had lost their chance.
And they knew it.
Of course, every day is a new opportunity. Microsoft seems to be far better managed now.
What does them having “more money than ever” have to do with it? Your claim was that the step back from mobile was planned and purposeful no? Why would any company choose to step back from anything?
