Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpweb | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me most and even on HN, where you usaully get intelligent discourse, the alarmist pessimism. Everything is falling apart! Just another form of self-indulgence. There must be something compelling about pretending the apocolypse is tomorrow.

Yes, there are problems in our social, political, ecomonic systems. They need to be recognized and addressed. Democracy makes that process slow and difficult. But the pessimism to me is one of the biggest dangers.

View on HN

Almost every thread on HN is filled with such weird pessimism. Or such obviously false observations. The famous dropbox criticism is only scratching the surface. Its so predictable you know what the top complaints will be before you even open the page.

There could be a post about some crazy new performance optimization coming to firefox and the top comment will be a link to a 15 year old bug where the right click menu padding for the flags page isn't consistent when viewed on BSD. Concluding the browser is abandonware due to this.

Well, the doom-scrolling is a feature not a bug of social media. If you think the world is ending tomorrow, don't you want to be there to watch it all end?

The general (Anglo?) public has adopted this eschatological aesthetic. The mood here doesn’t seem that different that in other forums. Whether the pessimism is warranted, I can’t say

Consider also that reality today may have unique intractable problems: plastic pollution, acidic oceans, mercury contamination, temperatures nearing unsurvivable in places, etc.

I don't discount the effects of pollution and consider climate change to be a very important problem to recognize that said, more humans are thriving (as in not starving to death or dying at young age) today than in any time in history.

More humans existing today isn't a sign of stability or sustainability though. Would horses have thought the same in the early 1900s, just before their population rapidly declined?

Yes, you're talking about despair. We get constantly feed a steady stream of doom and gloom from old media and have been for decades. I assume social media is just more of the same. I try to catch myself and try to be optimistic, but if I consume a lot of it, it's overwhelming.

I definitely have been limiting my intake of news over the past several years. Election cycles are the worst for doom and gloom, but they all sell it, all the time.

optimistic posts can do well here too. it depends on what catches peoples attention and gets voted to the front page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com