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Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0 | Hacker News Reader

It is an interesting read. Part of me always wondered to what extent various online personalities ( lately, various game streamers ) sell out ( and to whom ). Unfortunately, and the article does make this point, it is the logical extension of what we as a society have been accepting so far and somehow manages to skirt the rules on 'I am being paid to say that' ( edit: apparently enforcement of discloure is self-disclosure by a given influencer ).

Anecdotally, HN is the last social media I am hanging onto at this point since I did notice a spike in clear propaganda from individuals on Nextdoor and Linkedin.

View on HN

I would argue the HN monoculture very much has its own brand of propaganda and influencers (see: pg), you just happen to agree with it.

This is actually a very interesting point. Does monoculture somehow prevent propaganda from propagating, because existing 'culture' is already defined to an extent,which prevents opposing views? Or does it simply mean an influencer needs to check various internal checkboxes?

edit: FWIW, I regularly see people disclose their association if it seems relevant ( "shameless plug" is perfectly acceptable for example ).

edit2: I thought a little more about what you wrote and I disagreed with Linkedin/Nextdoor posts before, but the last thing that kinda turned me off is a clearly political message that you could tell was written in the most divisive way possible to drive 'engagement'. And short online trek later, it turns out, the same person posted the same thing on their other social accounts. Since it is genuinely harder to tell what is a genuine conversation, I just opted to stop it altogether. HN has its issues, but at least I can typically expect someone to make me hesitate based on their arguments.

The only thing which prevents propaganda from propagating is closing the channel through this propaganda propagates. :)

So all of internet:P?

I'm not sure everyone here is a fan of pg. Personally I don't really know who he is beyond some guy who made money with computers and founded YC and HN. Beyond that, if he ceased existing I'd not notice.

I think he talks about Lisp too or something

You should read his essays, they're good.

I’ve read a few and there were some bangers for sure. His style seems to be to put forward these grand theories, which has its appeal, but I’m more interested in the empirical style these days

When I search for a current political topic on twitter, I find a lot of posts from popular and usually verified accounts from both sides of the spectrum, using this rhetoric which shares this identical... cadence? Style? I'm not sure the word for it. But some recent trends with these accounts are starting tweets with "to be clear...", making liberal (lol) use of line breaks, and ending on some short "mic drop" sentence. Like this:

"To be clear, if you're opposed to student debt forgiveness, you're not advocating for 'fiscal responsibility'.

You're just an asshole."

I'm assuming that this trend is just influencers noticing what gets a lot of engagement lately, but they're all copying it so well that it almost feels like they're being coordinated. It's uncanny.

To be clear, that's just the cadence of modern communication: Grandiloquence is out, qualifying language and mic drops are in.

You're just out of touch.

>Grandiloquence I like this word! Thanks, I am one of today's lucky 10,000.

I think I am going to start using it in the grandiloquent tone and cadence of Matt Berry.

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