Hype on Hacker News and Silicon Valley (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Hype on Hacker News and Silicon Valley (2016)

blog.codesolvent.com

63 pointsEdmond55 comments

Er... maybe I'm missing something but I need to see more evidence. I searched for these adverbs on several major newspapers' websites: sure, there might be one or two newly fashionable phrases, but this usage pattern isn't new. Unless I'm missing something, I think the author is pointing out a pretty normal thing that most people don't notice and attributing it to something that let's people feel smug. That's a great way to generate hype around your blog, though.

It should be compared with other comment sections, not newspapers. I agree though, this is a weird take.

> It should be compared with other comment sections, not newspapers.

Not sure why though. The author is using HN as a proxy for SV, generally-- not just talking about a trend on HN. (Which is a dubious conclusion by itself.) He's saying this usage makes the writing style a) peculiar, b) a new trend, c) intended to unnecessarily convey hype, d) specific to SV culture, and e) something 'no decent writer' would do. This style was used consistently in national, prestigious non-SV media for the past few decades so it's a) not peculiar, b) not SV-specific, c) not new, and d) not specific to bad writers. I doubt it's used solely to unnecessarily convey hype but I didn't dig that far into the newspaper examples.

This is nothing more than the kind of writing that people have complained about since Orwell and Hemingway, and probably long before.

HN and SV are not special offenders here. It's just good old-fashioned over-writing. You see it everwhere.

You really want to read the following comment!!! I have years of experience working in the start-up industry and can give you life-changing insights. If you follow my 3 simple tips, you will become a millionaire within a year!!!

Okay, I best stop here before I end up on the /HackerNewLunatics on Reddit. The problem is that we live in an age with a surplus of information. If you want people to read your article or blog rather than the million others on the same topic, you must somehow lure them in. "I am a boring person with a boring career, please read my article" doesn't quite tend to cut it anymore. This results in the word hyperinflation you observe. As a result, finding good-quality articles on certain topics has become more challenging, and I suspect it will only get worse with ChatGPT-4 around the corner.

I don't think this phenomenon is exclusive to Silicon Valley. If anything, Silicon Valley has calmed down somewhat. There seem to be fewer start-ups that provide a solution to a problem that doesn't exists (think Juicero)

We need to hear more of:

- "failed to deliver"

- "under performing the market"

- "declining product quality"

- "unacceptable performance"

- "financially unsustainable"

- "ongoing criminal enterprise"

- "distressingly low quality"

- "dangerously interdependent"

OP forgot the new classic "unreasonably effective"

By far one of the biggest offenders.

The adverb there is actually meaningful, unlike something like "massively" or "immensely".

It conveys the idea that something is effective to a degree that seems unjustifiable by reason.

There is an idea out there, in the context of improving writing, that adverbs are useless; but it's not the case that no adverb ever plays a useful role in a sentence.

I've only seen it being hyperbole

I do this, I think we are all just bad writers, who developed a style from reading and writing on internet message boards for years.

there's nothing "bad" about phrases like "impressively easy" or "significantly larger". OP just has a weird phobia of utterly reasonable adverbs.

“Utterly reasonable”

Nice.

I think we probably all have our own sets of words and phrases we don't like.

Mine are learnings, honestly, content creator / content consumer and verbed nouns of all sorts.

The weird one for me is honestly. According to Google NGram, it's been on the up upswing for the past 20 years or so.

It's a real struggle for me to take anyone seriously who uses "learnings" unironically.

It's not bad writing if it conveys the desired message to the target audience. Every big industry has a distinct prose & style of writing.

> Massively

The word massive, in the way tech people use it, is a real sore to the eyes. No matter how massive the word is meant to be, it is still a god damn weasel word.

I wanted to tell you an astonishingly successful pun, but my sense of humor is atrociously bad.

Lame take. Especially given the author's own use of adverbs. "My superiority complex is superior to your superiority complex" inter-nerd contrarianism.

Hype is what startups do. Because hype is valuation and the path to exit with $$$$.

Let's look at what Musk does with "self driving" Teslas, a very impressive (I have watched the videos) but fundamentally flawed technology. I mean, not as flawed as say, commercial fusion (see: hype on here), personal aircraft (Moller for decades, but maybe a wee bit more plausible), etc.

What amuses me is people dumping on Musk on here for using arguably LESS hype than I would say the average SV startup's CEO parrots. I get it, it's the classic fall guy "him not us" group psychology.

Don't get me wrong, Musk definitely is somewhere in the "owes a lot of money for lying/overhyping" for self driving at this point. But it still was something that had tangible demonstrations, ongoing improvements, and juuuuuust enough success that you could see it miiiiiiiggghhhhtttt work. Someday.

Let's look at Meta. Hahahahahahahaha the hype around their VR/whatever. Now THAT is some primo-grade bullshit hype, they couldn't even beat second life from 20 years ago.

"well, our startup didn't defraud people of $15000 for full self driving that wasn't". Yeah, your startup just sells personal information to companies (and therefore, to private security firms/information central nexuses, and thus to both democratic (if we can call ourselves that) and very very nondemocratic states. Um, which is worse?

So ... is the hype just a legitimate "vision" for the company/product? Or is it outright fraud and chatgpt wordsoup designed to target fat investment from the Saudis?

Let the market decide, I guess, to some degree.

> Hype is what startups do. Because hype is valuation and the path to exit with $$$$.

Hype is a short term drug and has a very rough landing.

> So ... is the hype just a legitimate "vision" for the company/product? Or is it outright fraud

This is the hard part of being a tech investor. It's also what motivates me as a founder. I don't want to sell or invest in hype. I want to make customers happy and my employees and investors wealthy because my customers are happy and paying. I might be naive, but growth to me is a symptom of doing it right, not just spending boxcars full of money on marketing and opinion shaping and then selling to some unfortunate private equity company before the whole thing falls apart.

I dunno, Uber hasn't crashed yet. At some point, from a founder's perspective, you get so big that it doesn't matter if it crashes. I mean, how much have Uber's founders actually made? You know, assuming Uber isn't sustainable, things have been quiet on the doom and gloom for that.

If your ride gets hitched to enough cash from influential people, your company gets cashed out (and you with it). They'll find a better sucker.

> your company gets cashed out (and you with it). They'll find a better sucker.

I don't want to be that kind of founder when I grow up.

The peculiar curiosity highlighted by the author has caused deep unsettling in my mind.

Q: How many Northern Californians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Hella!!!

Q: How many Southern Californians does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Totally!!!

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6492j904

http://people.duke.edu/~eec10/hellanorcal.pdf

Hella Nor Cal or Totally So Cal?: The Perceptual Dialectology of California

Mary Bucholtz, Nancy Bermudez, Victor Fung, Lisa Edwards and Rosalva Vargas. Journal of English Linguistics 2007; 35; 325. DOI: 10.1177/0075424207307780

>Abstract

>This study provides the first detailed account of perceptual dialectology within California (as well as one of the first accounts of perceptual dialectology within any single state). Quantitative analysis of a map-labeling task carried out in Southern California reveals that California’s most salient linguistic boundary is between the northern and southern regions of the state. Whereas studies of the perceptual dialectology of the United States as a whole have focused almost exclusively on regional dialect differences, respondents associated particular regions of California less with distinctive dialects than with differences in language (English versus Spanish), slang use, and social groups. The diverse socio linguistic situation of California is reflected in the emphasis both on highly salient social groups thought to be stereotypical of California by residents and nonresidents alike (e.g., surfers) and on groups that, though prominent in the cultural landscape of the state, remain largely unrecognized by outsiders (e.g., hicks).

Extra credit question:

Can you locate the isogloss designating the "101" / "The 101" line?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isogloss

The Californians:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIklKPzND20

This essay massively resonated with me, greatly

For exceptionally great things it is crucially important that the intensity of the resonations match that overall immensity.

I have astoundingly profound whiplash from reading your comment before reading the article, then coming back to your comment again.

Truly impressive what happens when someone shares a really fresh new perspective.

I intensely agree, one thousand percent.

Those phrases suffer heavily from intense adjectivism and raging adverbialitis.

Didn't agree with the article -at all-, but great linked song I didn't know (Hype-Nitis by Canibus), great.

Oh cool, so adverbs are banned now, are they?

Just the exceptionally unnecessary ones!

One of those is a well-known Douglas Adams quote that should not have been swept up in the adverbial filter.

Yeap, this one: "You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

I think he is a pretty decent writer, which may suggest that we need to take all those quotes within their context.

If you read any mainstream news sources or publications, you will see similar hyperbolic adverbs and adjectives. It's just modern writing. Lost all sense of subtle or the sublime and afraid of being "dry". It pleases the filthy masses, so it will continue.

Some of the phrasing OP lists are awkward but it sounds a lot like they just don't like adverbs. A few of the examples I found fine, many just sounded awful, but few I thought were sufficiently something I'd associate solely with "hacker news" types.

If you don't like adverbs, adjectives, superlatives, or emphasis, don't read any H. P. Lovecraft.

> The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies—men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case come from strangulation or laceration. The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had been set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean organisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that monstrous wind behind flimsy walls of insufficient height they must have stampeded—whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing odour emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say. Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a tent-cloth; yet the low antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to make the strangely sound and tough tissues of the things relax and expand. Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from over them, and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity.

- From The Mountains of Madness

I can't say I've noticed this outside of a "tone" that HN comments tend to have.

Unfortunately that tone is often something akin to "devil's advocate trying to write like Paul Graham and Steven Pinker".

Haha there's definitely an exaggeration culture. Sometimes it amuses me. Other times I read about something on HN that's "incredibly dangerous" and it's just stuff people do every day.

Perhaps the former president could recruit a press secretary from this crowd.

Oh no!!!! Not adverbs!!!!!!!

The Mac was Insanely Great™ in 1984. It’s nothing new.

Just goes to show how long it’s been going on. SJ was just one of the early “pioneers” of this.

[citation needed]

The hyperactive voice.

(2016)

(Updated 2023)

What a pity the 2016 version didn't include a list of things the author was certain had been overhyped and would fail.

Is that necessary for anyone who's on HN? The article assumes the reader is already familiar with the site.

Off the top of my head, things like voice search, Uber autonomous taxis, Tesla FSD, WeWork, NFTs, P2E crypto games, Web3.....these were hyped to the skies on HN. Even people that didn't believe the business model was viable, believed that they'd succeed anyway because of the influential people that put money into them.

Read

Oh, it would be interesting because the list wouldn't be the one you gave there with the benefits of hindsight.

> the desire to create emphasis when otherwise the point being made is prosaic has lead people in Silicon Valley to come up with this odd writing style where adverbs are deployed in ways that no decent writer would.

Perfectly discromulent hyperbole has infected online discourse far beyond Silicon Valley. As well as subjective opinions being passed off as obvious reality. Your opinion, dumb and bad. My opinion smart and good.

Call it techno dystopia Patrick Bateman type prose. ChatGPT bots can't come soon enough to wash it all away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com