> “At this point it's difficult not to suspect their awful 0pSec is a choice, and that there are specific people ( ahem cough cough the Russians cough ) to whom they're leaking secrets, with incompetence being merely plausible deniability for their true, treasonous agenda,” one critic wrote on Mastodon. Good point.
>Good point. Is it a good point? How so? Without any proof or arguments, to me that Mastodon comment is just your average brain rot social media conspiracy slop, especially when you examine the profile of the user who wrote it. Is this what journalism has now become? Parroting othe people's unhinged takes off social media, then upvoting it on HN?
Well, you’ve burned a bit of time on HN with the karma you’ve accrued. The non-conspiratorial truth is that if you go back and read HN over a longer period of time, it amounts to people parroting other people’s unhinged takes. Least offensive is tech, which is merely juvenile. But the other topics, especially medical ones, are dangerous. Political ones, with zero verification are the worst from a board culture/health perspective.
HN has turned itself into slop in large part due to the voting and flagging mechanisms, because the community was never mentally equipped to use either tools responsibly. And pg/dang never set the tone. So now you see how far it has fallen.
My advice: don’t come here to read comments seriously. Yes, from time to time someone of good taste shows up to a topic they have first hand experience with and they have to educate the rest as to why their takes are completely wrong (and sometimes dangerous, see above).
Instead, come here to get the news, laugh at the shit flinging if you must, and move on.
I’ve been contemplating doing an HN-without-HN filter board; show just the tech stuff, have commentary without voting or flagging. Because while you’re just seeing how things are now, I am afraid to say they’ve always been so.