Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

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It seems like being supportive is something everyone agrees is a great thing, but few people actually do. Being supportive is just so much work, after all. Much easier to think of ten ways to tear something down.

For evidence of how supportive tech communities are, take a look at what happens when someone tries to show off their early projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747053

Comments include "They're probably lying," "This is like a parent posting their kindergartener's first crayon house-and-trees-and-sun drawings out into blogs," etc. And most of those comments were heavily endorsed by this community, judging by their overall position relative to sibling comments. So if HN is a thermometer for how friendly tech is, apparently nice people are rare.

Hopefully the culture will change, but that will take a lot of time.

(Now that I've posted this comment, I realize that it's not very supportive, which is a little ironic. Maybe a post-it note on my monitor that says "Be supportive!" would be a good reminder.)

The internet phenomenon of simultaneously granting voice with anonymity has definitely given rise to much more critical, negative discussion, which is ultimately fruitless and detracts from community value.

Like you said, it takes work to be supportive, and if your voice isn't tied to your reputation, many will forgo even attempting it.

That's not to say the workplace is the same though. Some people have figured out that support begets support, and put forth the effort. Online though, it's almost the tragedy of the commons, where users will take only what they want out of a community without even thinking about contributing to it's value or future.

True enough, but it may be one reason there are comparatively few women in tech. People choose a career for themselves when they're years of work away from being in any workplace. Hacker News is the closest thing that people will get to knowing what it's like to work in tech.

Which is unfortunate, since HN is nothing like working in tech. Remember the brogrammer phenomenon? At the time, it almost seemed like that was the direction the industry might be headed. Luckily not.

>Which is unfortunate, since HN is nothing like working in tech.

Working with SV firms full of men in the 20s is exactly like this. My colleagues are pretty much brogrammers, or overseas contractors (who are similarly young, callous, arrogant, and emotionally...young).

And looking at other sectors of tech, things look pretty similar. What area of tech do you work in that is nothing like HN in terms of this attitude?

(disclaimer: I actually really appreciate HN as a source of information, and there's an impressive amount of expertise here, but as a social network, it's depressing).

I don't think this is new, just more visible. Exactly this same culture is documented in Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine", and if you read biographies of Oppenheimer, Feynmann etc the same was going on back in the 40s. Academic math is filled with stories of famous crotchedy 'X' launching a withering attack during seminars.

I agree with your latter points; I think social media is making it possible to change this behavior. I.e. I view recent developments positively, not negatively.

    Comments include "They're probably lying," "This is
    like a parent posting their kindergartener's first
    crayon house-and-trees-and-sun drawings out into
    blogs," etc. And most of those comments were heavily
    endorsed by this community

Hmm; I remember that thread as much more positive. Let's look back over top level comments and look at ratios?

     [1] supportive: I did this kind of thing too!
     [2] dismissive: this sound suspicious
     [3] supportive: nostalgic
     [4] supportive: modern stuff shouldn't be harder to use
     [5] supportive: I did something similar
     [6] supportive: astonishing story
     [7] dismissive: nitpicking remembered memory sizes
     [8] supportive: fascinating story
     [9] supportive: we should be talking about the op, not ourselves
    [10] supportive: I did similar stuff too
    [11] dismissive: win2x > win98
    [12] supportive: similar experience; would love to talk
    [13] dismissive: not an os, it's a shell
    ...

Seems largely positive? And I'm not seeing either of the two quotes you reference.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747260 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747255 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747247 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747523 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747278 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747624 [7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747248 [8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747244 [9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8748571 [10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8751978 [11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747364 [12] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747228 [13] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8747712

The dismissive criticism was not only present, but in a large proportion of messages; and those criticisms were supported by upvotes. These facts make a very clear statement about HN. I'm not sure what you are trying to prove with your ratios, do you think that the only issue is whether the ratio is better or worse than 1:1?

The second toplevel comment ("this sounds suspicious") and its replies were mostly what I was referring to. The original author had to show up and defend himself, something that would rightly terrify many newbies. Comments near the top are exponentially more representative, both because of upvotes and because of the number of replies they engender.

Although it's interesting that a toplevel-only view results in a much more positive outlook. I wonder if I could write an extension to hide all replies by default to see what various threads would look like.

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