Hacker News Reader

Comment by meibo | Hacker News Reader

Associating with this site and YC is an actual image problem nowadays, so maybe they changed their mind.

What group holds a negative opinion of Hacker News?

Whenever I hear others mention this site, the sentiment is generally positive with some lamenting a moderate decline in discussion quality because of more mainstream participation, but still putting it above other discussion forums.

Asahi Linux https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110503331622393719

I was curious about this one. Seems like Asahi linux has some beef with HN. They initially included a banner on the top of the page. Then that changed to a redirect to google. Looks like some other site did something similar but redirected to something less innocent. In response dang had those on a list that added norefferer, which that mutated into adding it to all links.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230649 which includes a reply from dang.

Some people have strong opinions about HN. There was a blog post which reached the front page on HN <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34446704>, and the blog post author immediately added a large box on top of the blog post:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230120013024/https://cohost.or...>

They have now deleted the blog post entirely, citing being on HN as the reason:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230403204702/https://cohost.or...>

Jamie Zawinski is another; whose WWW site, if redirected from Hacker News, returned an obscene image at one point.

Mostly white sf techbros lol. Pretty ironic

You can find a few of the negative comments by searching for "the orange site" which is the term the detractors of HackerNews use for the website. They are not completely wrong in my opinion. I've seen comment threads get so derailed here and end up defending truly awful things. For example, a couple of years ago there was a thread about a new custom genetic therapy for children with a certain genetic condition that causes their bodies to eventually shut down (forgot the name, but it's a condition that disproportionally affects a certain group of Jewish people). It didn't take long for a significant part of the thread to become people advocating for eugenics.

Just to clarify: I still participate here because I believe this website and the discussions within it are valuable, but I do recognise that it can be quite problematic sometimes and moderation is not always sufficient (you can make the case for this being the case for all public discourse platforms).

there are a lot of groups, and individuals, that attempt to cause chaos and disenchantment with sites that differ from thier worldview, even going as far as stalking individual users with malignant actions.

Curious, so giving in to the bait: why is this exactly?

Going to assume some YC affiliated person has been declared 'problematic'/'cancelled' on Twitter, and parent commenter thinks it's a bigger deal than it is in reality.

Gary Tan has been getting into politics lately. https://sfstandard.com/2023/09/27/garry-tan-y-combinator-dec...

Indeed, according to some leftists Garry Tan is now a white supremacist (???)

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