Hacker News Reader

Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Unbearable read. Overflowing with intellectual elitism. Completely out of touch with reality. If this is PR [0], Evan Williams should demand a refund. I don't know, maybe this crap appeals to yuppies living in the coastal big cities? Tools like Twitter and Facebook have done more to connect more people of all income and education levels than anything else. Medium is not going to reach these people, who don't read the New York Times, let alone frequent quaint used bookstores.

Long form anything is going to continue being dead until we find a way to fix society so that families don't have to spend every waking moment struggling to pay the bills. All indications are that this problem will only accelerate as automation wipes out more jobs, with self-driving cars and trucks at the vanguard of this revolution. Stay tuned.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

View on HN

If we had this attitude --- nothing of greatness or substance or length will be tolerated until everyone can have unfettered access to it --- we'd still be living in caves. The future is always unevenly distributed. The solution is not to demand everything stop until everyone is equal, but to make sure no one is left behind in the long run.

Rejecting intellectual elitism is a huge mistake.

I have no problem with Medium existing for the people who have the time and inclination to read it. I've enjoyed reading it myself. What raises my hackles is the suggestion that it'll replace Twitter.

Edit: Please don't conflate intelligence with intellectual elitism. One is a net good that is universally valued. The other is a form of patronizing and dismissive behaviour that leads to political polarization.

I've got no problem with intellectual elites. Too bad that most Medium writers aren't such people, despite whatever they may believe about themselves.

I don't think Twitter and facebook have allowed people to communicate across social/educational/economical boundaries. Yes you do get an odd an interaction here and there, but by and large both these platforms have become giant echo chambers where you only hear echoes of voices and opinions like your own.

Honest question, do you think an average internet user, interacts with and actually enagages in an intellectually honest way with people outside their own educational/social strata on any sort of regular basis?

You can lump YouTube in there with the echo chamber accusations. At the borders of these networks there is a huge amount of debate going on. It's moving forward. People do get bored of the echo chamber though. It just takes a really long time because people let their identity get caught up in it (identity politics).

To answer your question: yes. I think this goes on far more often than it ever did before the internet and these social networks came into being. A lot of it is invisible though, because online identities don't carry that info around.

Many interest type forums have off topic/political sections that are deeply polarized. At times this can bleed into other sections but for the most part everyone gets along on topics of the interest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com