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Comment by jsonne | Hacker News Reader

Cynicism is easy and for whatever reason in the cultural zeitgeist tearing down other people/ideas/things is seen as being an intellectual.

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"for whatever reason"

I think part of the reason is that business has co-opted optimism and positivity. To the point where being positive seems to not be genuine. Furthermore, I think if the 80s-00s have taught us anything, it's that technology and business aren't going to fix the core problems us in the first world are facing currently... trust, community, health, environment, stress, etc. especially considering these are mostly problems caused by technology and business.

I'm not narrowly talking about business or technology. It seems endemic that lazily poking holes in things while offering no viable counterpoint is the defacto mode of many pseudo-intellectuals. It's saddening.

This fake looking optimism and positivity is HN's own policy though. They are not moderating out shallow positivity and praise, like they do negativity, and even tried to actively push people to be positive at some point. This is might be the reason why negativity looks genuine, i.e. too much non-genuine positivity.

But are you still passionate?

I think the industry has matured and lost its fun and sense of adventure. Once upon a time captain crunch and blue box, war dialling, or office-wide unreal ctf at the end of the day; now we have sprints, OKRs, and codes of conduct. It's becoming accountancy.

Sometimes i feel like its a bit polarized. On one side you have people being cynical about everything but then you get the opposite people who are supportive of everything and upset at the slightest cyncism. The tech industry is full of silly ideas. If someone says they made an app for taking pictures of unpopped popcorn kernels, i think its fair to ask "why would anyone want this?"

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