_r0fz's comments

The cruelty I'm talking about is not individual posters hurting each other. It's how we talk about people who are not here, who can't be here. How we judge the poor and dispossessed, uneducated, addicted and marginalized. People pushed aside and hurt by inequality that WE build in our work and then come here to virtuously discuss.

Can you honestly go look through the comments of any post touching any of those issues and call them kind? It's one thing to say it's out of scope for moderation because they keep it civil and calm. But to say the cruelty isn't there is to choose not to see it.

Yes exactly! This is a much better description than I was able to come up with.

Look I just really disagree sorry. The flavor is different but the beneath it's the same stuff.

You can pretty much be as cruel as you want on HN as long as you don't swear or call people names too much.

You can find joy on here sure but it's despite the culture here not because of it.

I don't think there's much to be learned from SA in this context. It existed during a different time of the internet, when cultural capital and honestly just raw power were allocated differently.

It existed into the "modern" era of rage engagement, influencers, clickbait etc, but I would consider its "flourishing" to have ended well before that.

It's also very very funny to me the general tone of self-congratulatory nonparticipation all over this comment section about how superior we all are for not using social media or twitter or whatever.

HN is social media too! I've heard the arguments why it's not but they aren't compelling to me; it is one. The main difference between here and twitter is the tone.

On here there is a cultural expectation that you will perform dispassionate erudition but if you read beyond that at all very few comments are any more intellectually stimulating than an average tweet. Less, honestly, at least people on twitter still seem to value joy and humor and whimsy.

No not really. If you put them in a list of features and compare them it seems pretty close, they have most of the same stuff. But if you actually learn and use both the android one is much worse.

I didn't catch if she said she was completely blind or not. She may be able to make out some shape or color distinctions and is using that as a navigational aid.

I have a friend who is blind but keeps their phone on max brightness for this reason. Very little comes through but they still find it helpful.

If I mention a sea lion do you understand what I'm talking about?

People are sometimes kind of down on that approach in software, considering it sloppy. Especially in comparison to other engineering disciplines it just looks kinda bad sure.

But really I'm pretty sure if for example civil engineers could build a bridge in an hour and load it up consequence-free they'd do it too.

The fact that we do it isn't bad at all, but yeah it's easy to not realize when you've exited the realm of consequence-free testing.

No dude they are not the same. PUA stuff came out of a deeply misogynist internet subculture with close ties and many overlaps with far right activists, "red pill" violence, and ethnonationalism.

Plus it's just inherently manipulative and gross. I know no one on HN likes to hear a value judgement but seriously go take a look. And I'm sure someone will jump in with like "but it's not manipulation just acknowledging reality/it's empowering for shy nerds/whatever" and ok sure sure sure but no.

Well the first two at least. I'm describing my beliefs. They are also shared by a lot of people; y'all wouldn't have to yell about free speech so much if this view was unpopular.

I admit that I also enjoy riling up first amendment fundamentalists but it isn't my main goal and these are my sincerely held beliefs so I don't think really qualifies as trolling.

Correct!

No the second embeds two important differences from the first: that this is new (it's as old as writing at least) and that it's bad (a value judgement you can fall on either side of).

This apparent contradiction is just a moderately clever way of using an ambiguity in the word.

If "deplatforming" is taken to mean "depriving people of an easy means to find and communicate to an audience" it can be an effective technique depending on context, alternative communication channels, etc.

If "deplatforming" is taken to mean "a novel social ill based on depriving people of their right to communicate" then yeah it's a myth.

Why not? Can you explain what "the issue itself" is in a way completely divorced from the people who have devoted themselves to _making_ it the issue?

Even if you can I don't see the value honestly.

No, you're embedding a bunch of viewpoints in this comment as facts when there is absolutely room for disagreement.

For example I think "rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought" is massive government infrastructure projects that don't factor in profitability. Note that I am not trying to _have_ this discussion here, just pointing out that it's a valid disagreement.

And the author of that tweet it seems considers this a loss of an ancient and fundamental shared planetary resource. I think anger is an understandable, even appropriate reaction to that perception!

The point is to get people to talk about it and maybe also not just accept the neoliberal consensus about the role of technology and infrastructure and their externalities. Seems to have succeeded by that measure.

There is plenty of substance here but you're using the author's anger and profanity as an excuse to not engage with it.

> The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government.

I don't think this is true really. There's been a really big shift in the last 50-ish years and at least in the US there seems to be a general consensus that projects of this nature are no longer the domain of the government.

I mean the telecom thing is a factor sure but I don't think you'd see that level of investment in infrastructure for anything else at this point either.

No it doesn't you can fully engage with the complexity and ALSO blame him for it. I do for example.

We expect "better" from democracies largely because they have more sophisticated and effective ways to defang troubling journalists.

You don't really need to murder or imprison them when you can just make it so no one trusts them or they can't find an audience.

That said I do think Belarus fucked up here evaluating by their own best interests. Having an open dictatorship in Europe has always made a lot of people uncomfortable but was tolerated as long as they didn't draw too much attention to it or do any scary shit to outsiders.

Here they kinda did both. Would not surprise me if this ends up being a huge problem for them long-term.

I mean spread awareness but that's pretty much every job. I've done a lot of kinds of work in my life but this is pretty much the easiest. At least we're paid well and respected. All the other kinds of work were just as hard under as much or more pressure and also for poverty wages. I'll stick with this one lol.