You don’t consider HN social media?
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I guess it's a gray area? It's more like a forum to me, of the pre-Facebook sort, more like Slashdot than reddit.
And there's extremely strong moderation here that does the opposite of Facebook: It optimizes against controversy and vitriol rather than encouraging it.
We end up with a bunch of nerds mostly talking shop and sometimes complaining about the job market, but that's still far less ragebaitey than most social media.
And it's not just human moderation (which would be biased based on the moderator) but things like the flamewar detector which actively demotes content that is getting a lot of quick responses. This is precisely what Facebook would promote, and HN might also if they were dependent on ad revenue to fund the service.
Much of what's bad about Facebook and other social media pretty much boils down to their need to show as many ads to as many eyeballs as possible.
> It optimizes against controversy and vitriol rather than encouraging it [...] a bunch of nerds mostly talking shop
Something doesn't add up here. Nerds talking shop and controversy and vitriol about the their technical preferences is the same thing.
Perhaps what you're saying is that controversy and vitriol is only apparent when you're an "innocent bystander" who doesn't have a passion for the subject? Which HN avoids by usually remaining focused on a fairly narrow set of subjects, to a user base generally passionate towards those subjects, so you don't notice?
That is an astute observation, if that is what you're trying to say. Indeed, if you showed your non-technical grandmother HN, she would no doubt see it the way Facebook was talked about earlier.
OK, but I think there's a pretty big difference between "Next.js is too bloated, you should use HTMX" and "so and so group of people are all _____ and they should all be ________, and oh, your mom sucks".
I don't think – I hope, at least – no one is going to start a shooting war over their framework of choice. You can't say the same about much of the content circulating around social media.
(Edit: You added more to your post after I replied. To your point of "Which HN avoids by usually remaining focused on a fairly narrow set of subjects", that's not just my observation, that's the actual guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We self-select into a narrow slice of nerdtalk or we end up getting downvoted or banned from the site. To me that is the big difference between an interest-based forum that generally stays a functional monoculture vs a general social media site that brings diverse strangers together into shouting wars about whatever the controversy du jour is.)
> there's a pretty big difference between "Next.js is too bloated, you should use HTMX" and "so and so group of people are all _____ and they should all be ________, and oh, your mom sucks".
Is there? Perhaps the trouble here is that your examples are too far apart to recognize how they compare?
What if Facebook, instead, said "Fat workers are too bloated, you should hire skinny workers"? Or if HN said "so and so projects are all ____ and they should all be ____, and oh, your vacuum doesn't suck".
I see no practical difference. It seems the only difference is that Facebook tends to talk about people, HN about tech. But that's not a significant distinction – aside from where your interests lie. Certainly tech-minded folks often find people to be uninteresting.
> Is there?
The difference is that talking about a framework with passion doesn't generally end up with severe real world consequences for other people.
The difference between tech and people is that people are... people. They have lives, feelings, all those fun human things. Passionately talking about how X group of people should die (or <insert rhetoric of your choice>) is quite different than passionately talking about how Y framework is the worst thing programmers have ever concocted. Generally the latter won't end up with someone getting stabbed. (Generally...)
> What if Facebook, instead, said "Fat workers are too bloated, you should hire skinny workers"? Or if HN said "so and so projects are all ____ and they should all be ____, and oh, your vacuum doesn't suck".
I think this is a terribly unfair switcharoo to make. Let's fill in the blanks for that second quote.
> "so and so group of people are all inhuman and they should all be killed, and oh, your mom sucks"
> "so and so projects are all terrible and they should all be deleted, and oh, your vacuum doesn't suck"
> Generally the latter won't end up with someone getting stabbed.
A technology may not be literally stabbed, but I think it is fair to say that it very well may get stabbed metaphorically. It may even lead to the complete demise of the technology.
Passionately calling for the death of Next.js isn't really any different than calling for the death of a person, other than you may perceive it as being different if you hold people more dear than technology. But, in that case, that's just your arbitrary opinion that means nothing to anything other than you. There are no doubt some who would be more concerned about the loss of Next.js (bad example; nobody would miss Next.js, but you get the idea) than the loss of a person, which is equally valid. The true arbiter of truth, the universe, certainly doesn't have greater feelings towards one than the other.
> Passionately calling for the death of Next.js isn't really any different than calling for the death of a person
I love these HN takes.
I think it's just the different degree of emotional attachment people to have to these topics. Yeah, people can get a bit worked up about how annoying JS development has become, but not quite to the same level as the major headlines of the day about the latest Middle East controversy/Soviet threat/identity politics thing.
Oh, and my vacuum does suck just fine, thank you very much.
> not quite to the same level as the major headlines of the day about the latest Middle East controversy/Soviet threat/identity politics thing.
Why do you say that? I share in the tech-minded proclivity towards not having much interest in people, so I admit to being largely out of the loop, but what is there to be worked up about where you wouldn't equally get worked up around some tech-based topic?
It just sounds boring an uninteresting to me. When I have encountered discussions about those topics, all I have is some laughter at how silly the people sound. Just like I'm sure how the "Next.js is awful" conversations sound to the metaphorical grandma.
You, yourself, might just be different/lucky then :) Or you could just be typical here. The average HN user is probably not representative of the average person in the overall population. It's a self-selecting crowd of nerds, many of whom aren't all that interested in more worldly topics. (Nothing wrong with that, mind you. It's part of the reason I'm here and not on mainstream social media.)
But out in the greater society, people get all worked up about those other topics, and will go protest in the streets, blockade representatives' houses, send death threats, rage endlessly online, attempt assassinations, go on shooting sprees, etc. Those things are usually triggered by some emotional attachment to some tribal identity and anger towards some out-group.
In a monoculture like this, we're mostly peers. Yeah, we might disagree about some particular things, but there's less of an "us vs them" mindset as you see politics, geopolitics, values-based communities, etc.
Discussions of technical merit, even when heated, thankfully don't reach those emotional heights quite as often. In my experience, at least...
> And there's extremely strong moderation here that does the opposite of Facebook: It optimizes against controversy and vitriol rather than encouraging it.
Oh god, now I feel old :P