I love you, Hacker News, but you’re toxic
One thing that I didn&#x27;t see discussed is the long-term effects of even passively exposing oneself to a community over a significant stretch of time. The term that first came into my mind when thinking of this was &quot;radicalization&quot;, but I don&#x27;t mean it in the usual sense of being taught misanthropic ways of looking at the world. I was a different person before I first came across Hacker News. To my younger self, I might even call them somewhat naive, if I was going for a reflexive first impression without much thought.<p>For example, my attitude towards adblockers shifted from when I first installed AdBlock Plus as a teenager. I used to be content with letting adblockers be my way to save me time and frustration on the Internet. They were nothing more than a cool, useful tool. Nowadays, I tend to see them as a weapon against a raging consumptive enterprise without enough meaningful limits on its ability to grow. My opinion of adblockers has become welded to a larger, more sinister feeling of <i>discontent</i> than I started with.<p>The thing is, the latter impression makes more sense to me. I feel like I&#x27;ve learned something new about the world in between. But when I remember it, I simply feel sad. And yet, without a source of information like HN, I might have remained gullible for much longer, unwittingly using an extension to block advertisements that was built by an advertising company.<p>Then there is a certain post format which tends to get a lot of traction on HN specifically. It feels like it&#x27;s been on an uptick recently. It&#x27;s where a news article or an HN poster without a corresponding link describes an injustice or user-hostile action that causes discontent. They tend to get upvoted heavily. People on HN <i>want</i> these stories to be heard. I&#x27;ve found that what goes on in the comments section of such posts no longer surprises me at this point - they almost always cause dozens of people to chime in and turn the discussion from the single injustice described in the post into a general &quot;company X&#x2F;product Y frustrates me&quot; thread. &quot;You can&#x27;t forget the time product Z fell on its head. This is just more of the same.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not that these comments are unjustified or even toxic at points. They don&#x27;t break any rules. But they simply start to wear on me after month upon month of seeing the same general sentiment unfold again and again. And perhaps the most problematic thing about them is that I <i>agree</i> with the most well-reasoned, critically sound ones. The more threads I read through, the more I&#x27;m reminded that this really is the current landscape of technology&#x2F;society&#x2F;humanity at large. But I sometimes think that with regards to those injustices, little has changed. I sometimes expect something to spark my curiosity in these threads. At times I have to look elsewhere.<p>It makes me feel that HN is not immune to the drama of the social media sites that usually attract reproval. It&#x27;s just that HN&#x27;s definition of &quot;drama&quot; is much different than that of social media sites like Twitter. I tend to think that I can go back to HN to avoid the &quot;drama&quot; of the other sites. What I was actually doing was avoiding poorly-researched, uncritical drama in favor of dense, cited, and at times intellectually stimulating drama. Somewhat ironically, from time to time a Twitter post about a user describing their gripes with company X&#x2F;service Y surfaces on the front page. I think it says to me that if you wall off the term &quot;outrage&quot; from its usage on non-HN social media sites, and bolster it with enough critical thinking, thoughtful analysis of the bigger implications and moderation, then you can still propagate outrage. You can end up partaking in some definition of outrage while holding the belief that &quot;those other sites&quot; do even worse, and that HN is somehow different from all the rest.<p>You can feel better about outrage or drama or discontent if you think you&#x27;ve done the work to understand <i>why</i> you feel that way. But the feeling still lingers. I think that my time on HN has made a permanent mark on the way that I view the world, for good and bad. And it sometimes dawns on me that little of that critical thinking or elaborate analysis ultimately had any tangible effect on the thing that causes the discontent and murky feelings. It feels like the worst injustices or the biggest product flops are out of my control. And additionally, many of them tend to have no real relevance to my life. I am probably invested in less than 10% of the products or services or technology stacks that appear on HN. So what if Stadia is a spectacular flop, for example? It wasn&#x27;t surprising to me. What did I learn from it? HN tends to make the inevitable grievances of technological life feel legitimate. But I&#x27;ve almost never stopped to think about just what commenting or reading through posts was meant to accomplish for me, and myself.<p>When I think of the word &quot;hacker&quot;, I think of the usual stereotype of some adolescent prodigies &quot;bringing down the mainframe&quot; of the malignant enterprises that ail them from the comfort of their urban residence. Now it feels like I&#x27;m just watching a bunch of billion-dollar monoliths throw their weight at each other from street level, while dozens of people plea between each other between the cracks and get all of their informational bases covered. I have to wonder what would happen in the cheesy hacker movies if instead all the whiz-kid adolescents with the lightning hairstyles had to adopt the 21 million lines of code that comprise Firefox and attempt to figure out if they were capable of convincing the common masses of humanity to switch their browsers over from Chrome, before the arms race of the attention economy is lost. It feels like that&#x27;s the usual day-to-day when it comes to parts of the technology sphere in the present. The stories lack the same wondrous edge. It feels like the answer is already written on the walls, and it&#x27;s an answer none of us would like to hear.<p>I don&#x27;t think the interesting question is about whether or not HN is a better community by virtue of being smaller or better moderated than its alternatives. Instead, I sometimes wonder if HN is the place that <i>I&#x27;m</i> supposed to be a part of in the current chapter in my life. For everything that&#x27;s said about the addictive power of modern technology platforms, I don&#x27;t think that browsing HN across weeks or months will send many signals that you have the <i>option</i> of leaving HN for a while to do things that are entirely irrelevant to HN or its users. That option is always there, but it is implicit, not explicit. It felt as if I was just entering a point where I was going to see another &quot;Tell HN&quot; post about a smart TV forcing an update on its users, or a 2,764 upvote post about how Reddit is becoming the most significant place for actual opinions on anything, and I was simply going along with the sea of tears because that was what I was used to.<p>All of this strife is completely understandable. I entered the comments and scrolled through like I usually do, like a reflex. If I had gave myself the option, I would have agreed with more of it than I had allowed myself to read through.<p>But recently I purchased a tub of LEGO bricks.