Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Clearly the implication is that rushing to join a professional discussion just to yell about some or another controversial proposal you read about on HN is not going to work to sway the stakeholders. If you want influence, you need to cultivate it over time by building trust in the community you want to influence. That's hardly controversial.

In particular, taking a fairly dry proposal like WEI, which is intended as a anti-bot/anti-cheat framework for web content, and spinning it with a shitpost title like "Google vs. the Open Web" is really not going to ingratiate you with the people who think hard about very difficult problems every day.

Is it a good proposal? Honestly I don't know. But the problems it's trying to address are real, so I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the people trying to solve them in good faith over the shitposters.

View on HN

Your definition of shitposting is... odd.

Characterizing a fairly reasonable position like "we should have a way prevent bots at the client level" as an attack on "The Open Web" is pretty much the definition of a shitpost, no? It's a terrible strawman and it pollutes the discourse.

Do you really not agree that people might want the former and not the latter? You genuinely think that the standards folks are being driven by a conspiracy and not what they say they want?

There are ways to argue against WEI that don't involve the existence of enemies you have to fight. Maybe you could try them?

1. (noun) any content on the internet whose humor derives from its surreal nature and/or its lack of clear context. Differs from a meme: whereas a meme's humor comes from its repeatability, a shitpost is funny simply because it isn't a predictable repetition of an existing form. Shitposts can become memes, but memes cannot become shitposts. 2. (verb) to create such a post

No idea where you're citing. Oxford gives me "a deliberately provocative or off-topic comment posted on social media, typically in order to upset others or distract from the main conversation", which fits my usage perfectly. You'd agree this framing is "deliberately provcative", no?

Wikipedia explains it similarly: In Internet culture, shitposting or trashposting is the act of using an online forum or social media page to post content that is satirical and of "aggressively, ironically, and trollishly poor quality"; it may be considered an online analog of trash talk.

Even Urban Dictionary is on board: A post of little to no sincere insightful substance. Especially a "shit"(low)-effort/quality-post with the sole purpose to confuse, provoke, entertain or otherwise evoke an unproductive reaction.

Frankly I have to assume you went out of your way (like, off the front page of a Google search even) to find a definition that you could cite just to prolong an online argument. I wonder if there's a word for that.

None of those definitions fit the original blog post. It's not satirical or ironic, it's not aggressive, it's not trolling, it's not off-topic, it's not even a "comment". It's not poor quality (imo). It's an opinion piece.

My definition was from urban dictionary btw, the first entry, maybe it sorts differently for different people.

"Google is Attacking The Open Web!" is 100% aggressive. Whether it's trolling or not depends on how people react to it and not its content per se. And here we are in this ridiculous subthread. So, yeah, it was trolling too.

Come on. I repeat: it's a complicated subject and a real problem, and a sincere but potentially flawed proposed solution. It deserves serious discussion and not a bunch of yahoo's throwing bombs about the evil corporate overlord of the week.

Seems almost like you just read the headline

Reply on news.ycombinator.com