HN does read like its full of jerks. Altman, Thiel, Curtis, YC connection tells a lot.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
167 points (91.5% liked)
Technology
88329 readers
3151 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Years ago, in the early 20-teens, I had posted on HN in protest to some new web property that aimed to tie yet another aspect of life to cell phones. I said something like "I work in software but I still don't have a cell phone, I don't like them, I don't want one, I don't want yet another aspect of modern life to encourage dependence on some subscription service like a phone." Which was all true.
This attracted rather more reaction than anything else I posted on there. The reactions fell into a few categories:
- I don't believe you, liar, why would you post this
- I have no sympathy for you, loser, go buy a phone
- Fuck you
Any illusion I had that the HN people were software-loving geeks like me kind of dissolved after that, and I stopped visiting. I suppose that's exactly what they wanted.
load more comments
(6 replies)
I think HN is one of the most rigged websites I encountered.
Some posts there look clearly botted regarding the score.
Not a single soul can tell me that it's normal that the 345th "new AI model"-post get's 1k upvotes within like 3 hours while articles like "I can steal Mastercard transactions" barely have 800 after an entire day.
In my experience, AI has ruined HN. There used to be a lot of articles that weren't technology related on the front page. Philosophy, art, history, geography, lots of cool things that were interesting to intellectuals. Now it's probably 80% AI stories. I'm struggling justify leaving it in my RSS reader.
Politics and society are bifurcating, and Hacker News is taking the fork on the right. “Apolitical” is an excuse to favor the status quo, a resistance to change, and therefore a re-enforcement of the existing biases and power structures of society.
Quote of the day right there.
Reminder that Drew DeVault is a pedophile.
He also wrote a smear piece about Stallman and then pretended it wasn't him.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41838124
He is the problem. Ignore him.
Drew has posted a response in defense of these allegations.
Having read it as well the "report" on him you linked, I personally find the report lacks credibility. I take much more stock in Drew's accounting of things, including his mature ownership of the bad decisions he's made in the past.
As for the Stallman Report: it's not a smear piece in my view. It's a whistleblow that outlines an argument why RMS is unfit to lead the FSF with accompanying evidence. You may disagree with some of it, but it's hardly malicious; I can sympathize with anyone who wishes to see better from the leaders of the major social movements of our day.
And as for why Drew initially denied his involvement, I found his response reasonable:
Myself and the other authors asserted our moral rights to publish anonymously, motivated by our wish to reduce our exposure to the exact sort of harassment I’ve been subjected to over the years.
I don't know Drew, I don't really give a shit about him at all. He may well be a terrible human being, worthy of all the scorn cast at him. I have no idea.
However, having all of this scorn thrown at him by what appears to be Kiwifarms (very well known for being a cesspool) after penning an article about what a sack of shit RMS is (the exact kind of scum Kiwi would deify) sure does cast a lot of doubt onto all the accusations made against him.
Kiwifarms is full of terrible people. The site still lists factual claims of his pedophilia.
Are they factual? Maybe. It's possible.
But, do I trust a group of people who make it their whole life to ruin other's to be honest and objective? Fuck no.
You're entitled to put your head in the sand.
If anyone else is actually curious, spend a few minutes reading Drew's response. Lots of words apologizing over a minor detail. Zero response to the facts of his pedophilia. Just read his words. Classic shitbag strategy.
He wrote that response so that people like you can defend his pedophilia in exactly the way you're doing now.
Or he opted not to validate asinine accusations made by bad faith actors. Neither of us knows.
We do know that kiwifarms is full of scum and filth that would likely make asinine accusations for the lawls.
Something something head in the sand.
Read it, instead of wasting time defending a pedophile.
You're literally doing the same thing MAGAts do.
Trump is opting not to validate accusations made by bad faith actors. Neither of us knows.
We do know that the liberal media is full of scum and filth that would likely make asinine accusations for the lawls
☝️You, literally right now
I don't know that he's a pedophile. I know that people I don't trust in any way, shape, or form say that he is. That's not enough for me to definitely call him anything. I'm defending not taking at face value the word of known trolls.
Honestly dude, "these people we can't trust said something and we need to believe them without reservation because it reinforces my core belief and if you don't agree you're literally this enemy" is pretty fucking GOP.
Have you looked at any of the claims yet?
His rebuttal curiously doesn't dispute the facts of his pedophilia. It's included in a blanket denial and then ignored.
Are you claiming those pedophilic accounts aren't his? Why?
And he did more than "deny" his involvement in the report
Speaking as someone who has done a lot of my own research on Stallman's bullshit, the depth of this report is astonishing.
That was his report. He can't be trusted and will openly make bald-faced lies. He's full of shit and best left in the dustbin of history.
Oh my God he looks at hentai! Oh, the humanity!
The list of subreddits he programmed his bot to run on includes one, "r/pomf" so pedophilic that it was banned by Reddit, along with many other pedophilic and racist subreddits
What a string of grasping at straws. I'm sure this (Attempted) character assassination has nothing to do with Drew DeVault publicly naming and shaming fascist developers, with receipts.
Both can be true
Those are probably terrible people too. Drew DeVault is still a pedophile that stirs up shit to benefit himself.
He links it at the end, life imitating art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817280
See here's the thing - to get the ability to downvote / flag articles, you have to say stuff in public enough times to get the 200 (400?) karma to unlock that. Well, how do you get that karma? You say the things that people on that site want to hear so they click upvote. Spot the curricular bias problem? It was intentionally designed this way.
But "want to hear" on HN is sometimes just intelligent or interesting comments, not necessarily bias confirming...
load more comments
(1 replies)
I used to read HN and find interesting stuff, but stopped when it became ever more flooded with startups and AI this.
In its place I have the RSS feed from lobsters, which surfaces plenty of interesting articles.
I read both, though lobsters seems to have more useful content lately. I would like to join so I ask comment/ask questions, but don't know anyone there to ask.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Lobsters manages an okay community (caveat: from what I've seen), but their lack of particularly strong rules or guidelines (just as with HN) don't give me a ton of confidence in their ability to handle value conflict. Following, they don't really state their community values anyway, which is something I find increasingly important.
Also with respect to the feedback cycles from hiding progressive comments that has been posed; I see a similar thing happening with these invite-only platforms. You are less likely to have diverse opinions and viewpoints from a userbase that largely grows only from the people in the same degree as existing users.
I've written about that last part before, and I'd like to stress that's as neutral an appraisal I can proffer; I think for some communities that is an ideal model, but for many others it would be stifling.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I've also noticed the HN community has been on an accelerating train of lower quality discussion since some time before COVID.
Some of the community has always had a bit of a silicon valley libertarian brain rot, but it used to be balanced out by the open source crowd and just normal professional engineers across the world. The latter demographics have mostly evaporated leaving some of the most braindead takes completely unchallenged, until they've become the only noise in the room.
It's a bit of a shame really, because it used to be a pretty good resource for keeping on top of the comings and goings of the software engineering industry. Combined with Reddit shitting the bed just after COVID, I've yet to actually find a decent replacement for what I got out of browsing it, really. Here does a fairly decent job, but as with many subjects, the breadth of content and opinions isn't quite the same.
Perhaps I need to give Mastodon another go despite not really enjoying microblog social media as a format in general (any recs for follows are greatly appreciated)
I really want to enjoy Mastodon, I truly do. But my experience has been that it is a living doom spiral by 95% of posting users on there. I learn a lot, but it also drags me towards a highly negative thought pattern and mini-existential crises. I still occasionally review it for the information, but it's like watching an episode of "This is Us" knowing that I'm going to cry multiple times by opening this pandora's box. Lemmy has been a lot more varied. Still deeply disturbing news, some weirdness from the .ml crowd, but overall I'm much happier here even if it's bc my feeds sandwich disturbing news with memes for the dumb caveman brain that's using this site.
That site has always been the feckless asshole version of Slashdot.
It always rubbed me like it was 4chan trying to be presentable, and I could never figure out why.
It's pack full of gouhls
It's funny and sad how many people that consider themselves apolitical and above the quarrels of the left and the right are completely oblivious to how they let the political devils pipeline bias straight into their brain.
And how people that consider themselves centrist seem to have a genuine hate against anything actually centrist. Centrism today is anything from market liberalism and rightwards straight into fascism it seems.
They use excuses like this:
The flagged comments given as examples are exactly the type I don't want to see here. Not because they are wrong (they are not), but because they are boring, low-calorie declarations of obvious that add very little value to the topic at hand.
They see rhemselves as people who should only have to read what they deem as intellectual conversations.
And that stems from the HN rules.
It’s all designed to shut down progressives.
It's quite common to reinforce the idea that they are just talking about objective truth while "the others" are being confused by emotions. While they are having a most agreeable circle jerk on right wing talking points wrapped in pandering to their ego.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Depends on when you read HN. Right now, I see a fierce debate about the evils of AI at the top. On the one hand there are folks defending AI and dreaming of the end of human labour, pointing at Wall-E as a utopia. On the other hand, there are others pointing out that the ultra-rich in the tech industry have openly expressed a desire to build a techno-feudalism with themselves living as kings, while the masses die in unemployed squalor.
Currently there is an interesting discussion of Georgism with 300+ comments. Not exactly a right wing subject...
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›