Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Haters

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 308 posts

Re: Haters

#121

Post by dang »

normalnorm wrote: post #96
AmericanChopper wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re massively misinterpreting what I said. > in spite of the opportunity to do so I am talking about people who have opportunities they don’t take, so the spiel about circumstances is pretty off topic. In my comment I also made no reference to outcomes. I was specifically describing an approach to life. Anybody, even the most low agency circumstances, can choose how they approach life.

> Anybody, even the most low agency circumstances, can choose how they approach life. That is a very common ideology around these parts (and also in the US), but it is simply not true. We are constrained by our mental health in how we can choose to approach life, and our mental health is partly due to genetic lottery and partly due to environmental circumstances outside of our control. This is not my opinion, scienti…

Please don't add nationalistic flamebait to HN. It leads to nationalistic flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Haters

#123

Post by darkerside »

> Could a hater be cured if they achieved something impressive? My guess is that it's a moot point, because they never will.

Couldn't disagree with this more. There are innumerable examples of toxic people turning things around in a different situation. PG is making the fundamental attribution error here.

Only the most cursory glance could imply that haters are never successful. If you followed individual haters, you'd likely find many of them grew up and stopped shitposting on Twitter.

Re: Haters

#124

Post by nsgi »

dataisfun wrote: post #38

I think there's a bit of cruelty in so casually reducing people to "losers." Taking what must be a complex set of personal histories and circumstances that lead people to that behavior and framing it as a matter of winner vs loser seems to border on smug, especially when the writer is clearly the former.

Not just cruel but potentially stupid. It's the kind of thing people pushing MLMs say: "you're just jealous of my success."

Re: Haters

#125

Post by phoe-krk »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #100
Zanni wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point. Graham is explicitly not using hater to disqualify genuine criticism but to identify people whose hate is irrational, who can't be reasoned with. Obviously it's a risk that someone can dismiss genuine criticism as hate (and people do this all the time), but that's not what Graham's advocating here.

Who decides what is "genuine criticism" and what is "hate"? To the person receiving criticism, everything is hate. Look at pg's twitter on Tesla: doesn't understand the hate. Has he read the criticism and refuted it? No, he dismisses it.

> To the person receiving criticism, everything is hate.

That's some immature criticism-receiver that you are describing here. You have just implied that it is impossible to receive criticism without thinking of it as hate, which I find to be false.

Re: Haters

#126

Post by bobbytran »

My opinion is that if you are spending all of your time posting hate towards another person, you are mentally Ill and should get help.

The problem is that many online communities foster this sort of thing and allow it to fester and grow..as if it's perfectly acceptable.

Reddit has subreddits that I've seen that are dedicated to this behavior and sites like Twitter and Facebook will only get rid of posts if it fits the current political narrative. I've seen republicans/conservatives get death threats against their kids with no bannings, but if you misgender someone, it's an instant ban.

Its these sorts of double standards that allows hate to flourish and sends a signal to the person doing it that it's acceptable behavior, so it not only continues, but gets worse...and the person sending the hateful messages will never stop there.

Re: Haters

#127

Post by rossdavidh »

darkerside wrote: post #123

> Could a hater be cured if they achieved something impressive? My guess is that it's a moot point, because they never will. Couldn't disagree with this more. There are innumerable examples of toxic people turning things around in a different situation. PG is making the fundamental attribution error here. Only the most cursory glance could imply that haters are never successful. If you followed individual haters, you…

At a later point, he did mention that teenage haters have a decent chance of growing out of it, but I concede your basic point.

Re: Haters

#128

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I never could learn to deal with this.

I set up a blog way back when blogs were first a thing, maybe 20 years ago. Started posting articles about internet, culture, tech, anything I found interesting.

Almost immediately, I had people dropping by and posting the most vile comments. Whatever I did, I did for bad reasons. I was a bad person and there just wasn't anything I could do or say to fix that.

I never learned how to mentally deal with this kind of blind anti-fandom, but I did learn an important lesson: never joke on the internet, or if you do, be very, very careful it's obvious it's a joke. Because whatever I think is funny because it's silly, obnoxious, or ludicrous? Somebody else will take seriously. And now you've got a new hater.

The net is drifting towards private communities. I think that's a good thing. This kind of environment really isn't healthy for folks.

Re: Haters

#129

Post by rossdavidh »

yaih wrote: post #110

I once read an article in Readers Digest with the title "Why we gossip". I started reading, prepared for something which was probably going to point out all the flaws in those people who gossip, and how they can be rectified etc. But the article took a very interesting turn. It said, (paraphrasing) without gossip, people in power will arrange everything in the general direction of usurping more power (e.g. dictators)…

I think you're fundamentally correct, but this is a mechanism which works better in small groups (say, a hunter/gatherer group on the African savannah, or a small medieval European peasant village). The same instincts which create haters now, would prevent somebody from getting too powerful in a small (Dunbar's number or less) group. Unfortunately now, we are interconnected in groups orders of magnitude larger than that.

Re: Haters

#130

Post by Aperocky »

bobbytran wrote: post #126

My opinion is that if you are spending all of your time posting hate towards another person, you are mentally Ill and should get help. The problem is that many online communities foster this sort of thing and allow it to fester and grow..as if it's perfectly acceptable. Reddit has subreddits that I've seen that are dedicated to this behavior and sites like Twitter and Facebook will only get rid of posts if it fits th…

It doesn't have to be so extreme, or even hate.

What I've found is that the overwhelming discourse in this society has been moving away from facts to emotion. If there were any news coming from anywhere, regarding a person or a group of people, the first criteria of examination, especially on places like reddit is usually: Does it fit my narrative and emotional need? Not fact, those are usually thrown out of the window.

This trend is accelerating and it has successfully taken over most social media. HN has been one of the few places left that unpopular opinion based on fact still gets upvoted. When facts and emotions collide, it fosters hate as hater cannot dismiss the argument factually, and resort to attacks on personal level.

Post reply on HN