Ask HN: Why do comment threads suddenly seem overwhelmingly bad faith? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do comment threads suddenly seem overwhelmingly bad faith?

5 pointsscoofy7 comments

It's an honest question. I know HN has always been a pretty feisty place, and people here tend to be contrarian, but within the last six months or so, I find myself overwhelmed with a level of cynicism that I find incomprehensible.

Discussions about politics regularly seem grounded in conspiracy theories. Discussions about tech company decisions seem to overwhelmingly focus an anti-consumer monopolistic goals, when entirely sensible parallel explanations seem obvious. I'm writing this because the discussion of Android side-loading seems to mostly involve people who think scamware is somehow irrelevant, when it seems to be an ever evolving threat.

This has caused my to engage a lot more recently, but I think it'll ultimately cause me to engage less. I don't think I can handle debating basic economic and political questions, when I'm actually trying to talk about some neat product.

Has HN just grown a lot in the last year or something? Is there a way that we could signal whether commenters have anything worthwhile to say? I'm fine with the way the site is, and I'll keep posting when I have something interesting to share, but it has been weighing on me recently.

> the discussion of Android side-loading seems to mostly involve people who think scamware is somehow irrelevant

Is that bad faith? You are arguing over a system of tradeoffs, and by the sound of it most people disagree that your tradeoff is worthwhile. The onus is on you to demonstrate that the threat of sideloading scamware is greater than the threat of losing sideloading.

We saw the same thing happen when Apple proposed Client Side Scanning. Both sides accused the other of being bad-faith when they failed to justify their stance versus the tradeoff.

My point isn't that it's about tradeoffs. I'm all for that. My point is that many-if-no-most interlocutors reject the notion that scamware could even be a problem. This is why I'm concerned about good-faith discussion here.

I definitely don't want to complain about people just disagreeing with me. My point is that it feels like many of the threads that end up in /active feel like they are in a kind of reality distortion field.

I guess a good parallel to real life is when I get into housing market discussions in SF and people start saying that "we have plenty of housing, it's just that investors are buying up all the units and then not renting them" (not some investors, most investors) which is trivially, demonstrably false, beyond the fact that it makes no sense. That's the kind of "wait what?" feeling I'm getting a lot.

Please email reports of bad faith to the mods. That’s against the guidelines and until we as users have flag reasons it’s the only way to highlight the shift in tone and help halt its popularity. Subject line “Bad faith participation by username” and a link to comment(s) along with your opinion would help them tremendously.

hn@ycombinator.com

Big tech companies have spent this decade being dragged through antitrust and regulatory actions that have put all their dirty laundry on display so of course that is going to influence conversations about things they now do that stack things more in their favour!

It was only a few months ago that Google being forcibly separated from Android was on the table in the DOJ antitrust case in which they were convicted of search and advertising monopoly abuse, and only a few months ago they were convicted of abusing their Android monopoly separately to that in the Epic antitrust case.

I think it is entirely natural their plans to make it harder to use software from outside their app store - at obvious benefit to themselves - is going to be steeped in controversy and skepticism.

Separately to Google, many questionable things about Meta have been revealed too, and Apple's regulatory battles have heated up all over the world, of course these will influence discussions about what else they are doing. Microsoft have also earned a lot of disdain. They choose these courses of action, and conversation about them and their intentions and their motives is rightfully coloured by it.

I expect it has a lot to do with "AI". HN readers are early adopters, so they're probably getting Claude or Claw or some damn LLM to generate their comments in hopes of getting more karma.

I also think that Trump winning in 2024, and subsequently revealing himself as nothing but a grifter with authoritarian impulses has something to do with it.

Anyone with conservative leanings has either been disgusted by Trump and his admin (they've violated almost all previous "movement conservative" doctrines), or got on the metaphorical Trump Train, and are now utterly confused by why The Storm hasn't come, prices aren't lowered, and there's been nobody sent to Gitmo for a tribunal. None of the conservative people can argue that anything is going well, and are also suffering through an epistemological crisis.

The SV tech leaders have turned Libertarianism into a weird combination of an incipient aristocracy and a cult. Obvious legal, personal liberty and freedom violations are ignored in favor of cheering on cryptocurrency and Trump.

Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.

I definitely don't want to underscore this point. I agree with you that the sense that "nothing matter, everything is fake" definitely feels more real today than it did a decade ago, or even four years ago.

I'm honestly just surprised that it feels like it's showing up on HN right. I suspect that the proliferation of machine learning into artificial intelligence probably brings a lot more laypersons onto HN that would otherwise not have been here.

You young'uns don't remember how post-Nixon the US was in a funk. Happening again now, only worse

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