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Comment by aydyn | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the good points about the platform. But the points about the userbase reek of pretentiousness.

The New Yorker called it Performative Erudition: frequently, people here are entirely focused on appearing to have insight, appearing smart and avoiding colloquial language to the point where having a straightforward normal conversation is sometimes impossible. To say that the userbase has a "mindset of humility" is almost too ironic for words.

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I completely agree. I actually avoided hackernews for years because the users are all so pretentious. Debating in this context is not generally an exercise in self-development.

Now I’m completely guilty of it myself. :)

So far away from my own experience! I think I have learn so much from reading comments here, and then following up on other sources... Perhaps those commenters are just used to write in those terms or it can even be a subjective perception. I think as human beings we should judge ourselves with a bit more compassion and, if possible, always leaving space for positivity.

If anything it has gotten watered down a bit. I see you’re a fellow sub-10k karma haver, so possibly you weren’t around when it was at its most toxic ~10 years ago.

The problem is that you can't combat pretentiousness by declaring others pretentious, because that is even more pretentious.

Okay but what if you call someone pretentious for declaring others pretentious. Uhoh, is that double more pretentious?

I think it's idempotent

I wonder if non-native English speakers that post a lot on HN might pick up the "pretentious tone" as part of their writing style, sort of by accident.

In the same way like "Reddit English" has its own idioms by now ("Thank you, kind stranger", etc)

I'm not a native English speaker myself, and I think I have some feeling for what sounds casual and what sounds pretentious, but I sometimes wonder if that intuition is really correct or off-base.

Jargon and special terminology aren't necessarily performative; they can also be 1) how people with a shared profession or interest talk to each other, and 2) preferred for precision or context.

Everything you just said is true.

And yet.

HNers are still often guilty of Performative Erudition. It's not _just_ the use of technical jargon.

Yeah but the lingo's pedigree matters. Some words are practical. The dialect you use in an academic paper or the SF set saying "orthogonal" "isomorphic" "non-zero" whatever is performative.

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