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I may belong to that silent majority. I have learnt a lot from the discussions here in HN and other sites, but I rarely participate on them. This post made me think about being a little more active because, sincerely, most of the times it is just laziness what prevents me from commenting anything. In fact, this is my first comment here in HN. Little by little.
Here have an upvote!
Mh I've never seen a developer who is not passionate about a few topics. Eventually he's not participating in online discussions, but I think the silent-mayority thinking assumption is plain wrong. Without a good bunch of enthusiasm you cannot do this job well. Moreover without some strong opinions that you are able to voice you just are a puppet of pull request comments and cannot profile yourself in your team.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is like what Reddit used to be. Heavy emphasis on news, technology. Usually some interesting debate in the comments when they were added. Found some screenshots from the early years: https://www.reddit.com/r/historyofreddit/comments/q1zks/redd...
That's what I expected. It used to be niche.
> The “silent majority” was used by President Richard Nixon during his presidency and his campaign against the Vietnam war. He spoke to the people who were not actively voicing their opinions and who were overshadowed by the vocal few who were supporting the war. This is a shocking misunderstanding of history. The “silent majority” Nixon spoke of were folks opposed to anti-war protests . Nixon intentionally prolonged…
Try criticizing capitalism or "free markets" sometime.
> There also seems to be an assumption on HN/Reddit that vocal activity on the internet, in any form — be that videos, blogging, podcasts, etc. — is proportional to activity behind the screen. Personally, I dislike this attitude. I think the internet is a good signal for what will be in the streets in 2-4 years time unabated. The attitude OP reflects is one that was valid in the 90s and early 2000s, but not today.
Moreover "the internet", whatever the meaning, is not a faithful representation of the "real world". Go tell the millions of people without toilets or working the whole day the slacktivists spending their days on twitter represent their struggle...
> There also seems to be an assumption on HN/Reddit that vocal activity on the internet, in any form — be that videos, blogging, podcasts, etc. — is proportional to activity behind the screen. Personally, I dislike this attitude. I think the internet is a good signal for what will be in the streets in 2-4 years time unabated. The attitude OP reflects is one that was valid in the 90s and early 2000s, but not today.
No, I think that's very wrong, now more than ever. What you read "on the internet" is almost always fabricated and published with manipulative intent and asymetric capabilities to promote a product, lang/skill, or whatever. It's the negative comments you should care about.
Try criticizing capitalism or "free markets" sometime.
I think most HN users are quite receptive to debate around capitalism. It’s just that the majority of this debate is copy pasting slogans and making easily disproven statements.
This is one of those things that "everyone knows". It may have been true at some point, but it definitely isn't true anymore. The reality is that most discussons here treat PHP fairly, giving it credit where it deserves it and also pointing out its weaknesses.
Examples:
- (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32325055 : top comment praising PHP
- (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219984 : the top comment is a fairly positive comment overall, without falling into zealotry.
- (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655 : the top comment is someone praising Laravel and the "modern" approach to php. The general feeling is that PHP got some things right (shared-nothing), doesn't offer anything particularly unique but is surprisingly effective in reality.
> There also seems to be an assumption on HN/Reddit that vocal activity on the internet, in any form — be that videos, blogging, podcasts, etc. — is proportional to activity behind the screen. Personally, I dislike this attitude. I think the internet is a good signal for what will be in the streets in 2-4 years time unabated. The attitude OP reflects is one that was valid in the 90s and early 2000s, but not today.
No, I think that's very wrong, now more than ever. What you read "on the internet" is almost always fabricated and published with manipulative intent and asymetric capabilities to promote a product, lang/skill, or whatever. It's the negative comments you should care about.
Not being skeptic in 2022 of comments or news online is being very naive.