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Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

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Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#51

Post by gameswithgo »

door3 wrote: post #45
jstewartmobile wrote: post #2

I hate to have sympathy for the devil here, but I see their point. Hackernews is living proof. Pre-election, you could voice a contrary opinion here and have a discussion. Post-election, even the faintest wrongthink shibboleth gets silently downvoted into oblivion.

I was shadowbanned for getting downvoted too much for saying James Damore had terrible sexist opinions and should have been fired. Hackernews is predominantly right wing & conservative.

You probably just weren't civil enough? I've been shadowbanned but it is because I lost my shit and became rude. I mean it is understandable to lose one's shit here sometimes but also understandable to not allow it.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#52

Post by huffpopo »

nodesocket wrote: post #15

I recently moved (fled) from downtown San Francisco to Nashville TN and couldn't be happier. I lived in SF for over 5 years, and there is absolutely a mass exodus of people and engineers leaving the bay area because of extreme ideology, hypocrisy, constant outrage, and the echo chamber that engulfs everything. Downtown San Francisco is a great place to visit for a few days but no place to start and raise a family.

I left SF before the election, I could tell early on that Trump was going to win and figured free speech clampdowns in SV would follow and I knew my work was going to be affected. I worked in search and I remember the scandal within the industry when Yahoo accepted money from the Chinese government to censor pages on the 2008 tainted milk scandal. They charged $10K per link. At the time Google was seen as a beacon of free speech and 'do no evil' which was a nice contrast to Yahoo which is apparently OK with killing babies for a small buck.

Now Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. are all finding excuses to allow various meddling of the search results. There is too much money in it, it is inevitable.

Free speech is important to me because without it we quite literally end up killing babies for very small amounts of money.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#53

Post by almost_usual »

Then leave, you can drop a pin on pretty much 95% of America and end up in a conservative place where people will share your values.

Don’t like being conservative in the Bay Area because you feel ostracized and judged? Cool, now you know what it feels like to be gay in 95% of America.

Get over it.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#54

Post by wz1000 »

superquest wrote: post #11
makewavesnotwar wrote: post #9

Likening people to Thiel is ridiculous. He is personally facing the backlash from openly supporting Trump and being a speaker at his rallies. Nobody else in the valley did anything as absurd or unnecessary. And if he thinks he'll fair better in LA, I think he's sorely mistaken once people start recognizing him en masse. But to my point, this article seems to be generalizing an outlier to make its point. Everyone is b…

"openly supporting" the winning presidential candidate isn't "absurd".

Supporting any US President of the last century or so is morally dubious(if you consider mass murder and toppling democratic regimes morally dubious). Like Chomsky likes to say, if US Presidents were held to the standards of the Nuremberg principles, they would all be executed. In that regard, Trump has so far done less harm than most recent Presidents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BXtgq0Nhsc

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#55

Post by gameswithgo »

sho wrote: post #46

What is crazy about the the situation in SF is that even 5 or so years ago if you asked me what the "echo chamber" there was echoing I would have said libertarianism and some kind of techno-utopianism. The takeover by the proscriptive far-left has been astonishingly rapid, and it is absolutely real. I also know people who have left, and many more who absolutely keep their political and even philosophical views to the…

I have no idea what SF is like, so in these discussions I never can tell if there really is an influx of insane, insufferable far left crazies, or if people who insist on remaining racist and keeping gays in the closet are mad that nobody is having that anymore. The latter is what I see in my own circle of humans but I live in Texas.

I can say though that I've moved further to the left as I've gotten older, from a libertarian tech-stereotype when I was younger, and in large part it has been from seeing the conservative half of american slide slowly further into insanity and horribleness, seemingly driven by fox news, at least among family.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#56

Post by dang »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #2

I hate to have sympathy for the devil here, but I see their point. Hackernews is living proof. Pre-election, you could voice a contrary opinion here and have a discussion. Post-election, even the faintest wrongthink shibboleth gets silently downvoted into oblivion.

Only a small minority of HN users are in Silicon Valley, so your argument wouldn't apply here even if it were true.

When I see complaints like this I always look at the history. Usually the account in question has a pattern of posting flamebait and/or snark. In that case you needn't reach for political bias or 'wrongthink' to explain why the community downvotes such comments. They get downvoted simply because they break the site rules.

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

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#57

Post by dominotw »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #10

What is it that Peter Thiel said previously about women voting? What did he do to Gawker?

> What is it that Peter Thiel said previously about women voting?

Respect for capitalism declined rapidly in the US after women gained the vote.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#58

Post by shaftoe »

sigmar wrote: post #43
superquest wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"openly supporting" the winning presidential candidate isn't "absurd".

While I'm not sure I'd use the word "absurd," arguing that "he won, so it couldn't be absurd to support him" doesn't make sense. Lots of demagogues win elections. Winning an election doesn't automatically make you ethical or competent.

No, but it certainly makes you mainstream.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#59

Post by scarmig »

sho wrote: post #46

What is crazy about the the situation in SF is that even 5 or so years ago if you asked me what the "echo chamber" there was echoing I would have said libertarianism and some kind of techno-utopianism. The takeover by the proscriptive far-left has been astonishingly rapid, and it is absolutely real. I also know people who have left, and many more who absolutely keep their political and even philosophical views to the…

I remember always getting annoyed at colleagues and Hacker News generally for being technolibertarian fanboys. And now I'm constantly annoyed at the sanctimony and self-indulgence of the "Left," even though I hate granting them that label.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

Re: Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley ‘Echo Chamber’

#60

Post by chillwaves »

nodesocket wrote: post #50
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, and I left NYC for Nashville in 2015, and I’m moving back to NYC next week. Nashville itself is pretty purple, but the ideology of the south is just as homogeneous as SF, and I find it much, much more offensive (Roy Moore). There is not a (net) mass exodus from the Bay Area, hence the ridiculous prices. I moved to SF in 2006 and there were always people claiming it was on the verge of collapse because everyone w…

Nashville as you know is actually pretty liberal, but the biggest difference is that people here live their lives, are friendly to others, and that southern charm is a real thing. People in San Francisco are always so outraged and angry (mainly since Trump took office) and the media constantly feeds them things to be outraged about that they are perpetually angry. People in Nashville for the most part don't let polit…

The media "feeds" us stuff to be outraged about?

You mean factually reporting the news? There is real and severe damage that is happening to our country and our standing in the world. The regressive politics will have consequences.

Even if you are a fan of Trump's policies, the White House is chaos, we essentially do not have a president. Imagine a real crisis hitting, and what this White House would do.

It's incredible how insulting portions are at the population that they think the very real harm (this is not normal) is just some kind of media sensation. I think you are confusing the real current administration with a season of the apprentice that Trump hosted.

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