[8vectors]

I only joined HN a couple years ago (I've been working in tech for 12 years). I also find HN to be a bit depressing and pessimistic.

It's like there is some sort of "I tried that and it didn't work, so no one should ever try it again and if you do I'll warn you and then ridicule you for wasting your time" attitude that permeates all of some people's contributions to the discussion. This attitude isn't just at the individual level but also at the team, company, societal levels.

This doesn't feel like a hacker mindset to me at all. It feels increasing defeatist.

While I can't point to HN glory days (I wasn't here), I imagine that HN is devolving from hacker news to defeatist expert news.

But maybe it's society as a whole? I don't know...

What I can say is that the real hackers (eg builders, not speculators) in the web3 communities seem to be more optimistic than the average interaction I see here.

[Shocka1]

Your comment about this place is spot on and has been for several years now. Even though it's been a tough year in crypto, one of my personal favorite HN threads and one your summary rings true for is Brian Armstrong's Hacker News post, before Coinbase blew it's top off.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664

Another one of my favorites is the multiple times 4Chan has made fun of HN. An example of that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9788317

[gofreddygo]

i observed quite late, that the views expressed on HN do not represent the real world views. Its not a proxy or a petri dish for new ideas.

My experience from discussions both with technical experts and non-technical layman views suggest a very low co-relation with views expressed on HN. Try it yourself, discuss some top HN posts with experts and non-experts and compare.

So i look at HN as a lopsided subset. This has 2 outcomes, on one hand, it is depressing to spend more than a few minutes a week here, and on the other hand, the real world has parts which are less so.