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Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#91

Post by red-iron-pine »

cassianoleal wrote: post #61
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the latest Culture Wars, malice, scams, cancellations, filter bubbles, misinformation madness etc would not be possible without the Internet. The latest , sure, by definition. But nah, people were plenty good at getting worked up much earlier than the internet.

Yes but not at this speed and scale.

Nor with the level of responsiveness and testing.

You can see, in real-time, how well a comment went over, how quickly it spreads, and rapidly correlate it with specific demographics.

The upvotes on each comment here are a simple version of that, but it functions just as easily with Likes, reddit updoots, re-tweets, etc.

It's almost a skinner-box at this point

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#92

Post by moomoo11 »

I know rose tinted goggles and all that. But honestly the older I get the worse the quality of products has become (for me - important).

Everything has shifted towards planned obsolescence and I barely spend money today when I make way more than I used to when I first started working.

I got a Tesla and it was built crappy and interior kept breaking. A purchase should make me happy but I felt like my dollar didn’t go far enough for how much I paid.

I balled out on a $900 iPhone and it cracked on the first drop. Since then I’ve only purchased used iPhones for Almost every single video game I have tried in the past few years crashes or has bugs. The last game I played was Cyberpunk and I even put a new computer together to play it. What a nightmare lol.

Everything is subscription based now. There’s no support unless you pay even more. And if you use it for a while and then want to use something else good luck because most of they make it hard to migrate.

Maybe I’m just getting older but there ya go.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#93

Post by red-iron-pine »

sph wrote: post #84
satvikpendem wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean by 3, tech is just, well, technology; it can be used for good or bad, just like nuclear bombs. I see a lot of upcoming innovations that will be a net good for humans in the future.

I have been wrestling with a terrifying idea lately: The Internet, in its current form, is not a force for good. And the way it is going, it will be a net negative for humanity as a whole. The Internet itself is just bits pushed between computers, but the things we have built on it are dystopian, are a huge cause of the current loneliness epidemic (epidemics have an end date, this is a trend), and it's a way to contr…

> The Internet, in its current form, is not a force for good. And the way it is going, it will be a net negative for humanity as a whole.

i'm convinced the dead internet theory is an inevitability for the reasons you outline.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#94

Post by dukeyukey »

api wrote: post #55
bell-cot wrote: post #31

The older you get, the more you realize that all the shiny new stuff, and exciting news, and ways the world is changing...they are really not all that new. Pretty-similar stuff happened decades, centuries, and millennia ago. And getting worked up about all the "new and exciting!" is an outlook best suited to being a simple consumer of entertainment. Vs. if you're no longer a kid, in a world that has some rather dire…

Nothing like generative AI has ever happened. This is new, which is part of why it’s so exciting. No I don’t think these things are going to become sentient (in their present form at least) but no technology has ever been able to do what these models do.

I agree that generative AI doesn't have any direct parallels, but

> but no technology has ever been able to do what these models do.

That's not new. Steam power, the first computers, _especially_ electricity did things no previous technology could.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#95

Post by red-iron-pine »

JohnFen wrote: post #82
satvikpendem wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean by 3, tech is just, well, technology; it can be used for good or bad, just like nuclear bombs. I see a lot of upcoming innovations that will be a net good for humans in the future.

I can't speak for the author, but that comment rings true to me. The tech world did shift at some point from intending to produce things that improve people's lives to intending to produce things that mine people's attention, data, and wallets. The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I…

> The modern tech industry feels much more mercenary and cruel than the tech industry of the past. Whether or not it actually is, or if this is an illusion, could be debated (I personally think that it actually is).

capitalism took over, and does what capitalism does.

I dont know why you think it wouldn't be as ruthless and brutal as other industries, the signs of how vicious it could be were pretty clear even in the late 90s / early 2000s.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#96

Post by red-iron-pine »

nologic01 wrote: post #47
tormeh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is quite money-oriented and economically liberal, although nothing beats Blind in this regard. Many FOSS developers don't like this. I think it has less to do with age.

I find various economic views are represented, but the economic discussions are quite a bit less sophisticated than the technical ones. That's a general pattern of techie discourse: see also, e.g., the absurd simplifications around human intelligence and AI.

HN is a message board on a startup incubator -- no one gets into startups for fun, they do it to get rich. this comes with plenty of other biases.

that said, technical or no, the overall level of discourse is still better than mainstream reddit, and light years better than things like the local facebook page. I may disagree with a lot posted here, but I'm willing to consider the posters here to be on the "peer-level" far more than other sites.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#98

Post by whinvik »

While I think having an ageing audience has something to do with it, I think there's also another influence here.

YC and the general startup culture has been to do quick MVP's to validate product. This is great for making companies, but these companies have been more about reducing friction than to create something inspiring.

And maybe people have become jaded by new startups becoming successful with boring products. Dropbox is a great company but it's not really an inspiring product. Nor is AirBnB. Or Replit.

On the other hand this has lead to people also being skeptical about actual inspiring companies. I don't have the link here but the amount of negativity about Boom was disappointing.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#99

Post by ryandrake »

sph wrote: post #84
satvikpendem wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean by 3, tech is just, well, technology; it can be used for good or bad, just like nuclear bombs. I see a lot of upcoming innovations that will be a net good for humans in the future.

I have been wrestling with a terrifying idea lately: The Internet, in its current form, is not a force for good. And the way it is going, it will be a net negative for humanity as a whole. The Internet itself is just bits pushed between computers, but the things we have built on it are dystopian, are a huge cause of the current loneliness epidemic (epidemics have an end date, this is a trend), and it's a way to contr…

I think OP is distinguishing between the Internet, which is a neutral technology, "a series of tubes" vs. the horrible web sites being built on top of it. There is plenty of good in these tubes and plenty of bad. Let's focus blame on the actual bad sites that push the average down to negative. The Internet is not just Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Re: Ask HN: Why are we more and more talking about the past here on HN?

#100

Post by local_crmdgeon »

sfpotter wrote: post #42

Culture is dead. Nothing is new anymore, everything is now just a variation or an amalgam of recent culture. Software and hardware history have an element of the new about them if you didn’t experience them yourself, hence their enduring popularity as topics and objects of fetishization. ( Why culture is dead is another topic…)

https://samkriss.substack.com/p/all-the-nerds-are-dead

This covers that nicely

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