Comment by keeda
5 days ago
Of course, it's not possible to strictly represent a large population with a single characteristic. But then it is also absolutely accurate to call the USA a capitalistic country even though there is a very diverse slate of political and economic beliefs represented in the population.
Now, you could say the capitalism is a function of the policies enacted by the country, which aren't a thing for online forums. But these policies are a reflection of the majority votes of the population, and votes are a thing on forums. Even a casual observation, starting from the earliest Slashdot days to modern social media, shows that the most highly upvoted and least contested opinions align with the "information wants to be free" philosophy.
To get a bit meta, you can think of this rhetoric along the lines of the following pattern which is common on social media:
Hacker News: "All software is glorified CRUD boilerplate! You are not a special snowflake! Stop cosplaying Google!"
Also Hacker News: "AI is only good for mindless boilerplate! It's absolutely useless for any novel software! AI boosters are only out to scam you!"
The sentiment is obviously not uniform and is shifting over time, even in this very thread... but it does ring true!
It rings true but as with many things that seem intuitive it's an illusion.
Hacker News doesn't have opinions. Individuals on Hacker News have opinions. Different sets of individuals comment and vote on different threads. There's zero reason to suppose that it's the same people expressing both ideas or even that it's the same people voting on those ideas. To the contrary, I've spent enough time on this forum (way too much time) to know that there are whole sub-communities on HN that overlap very imperfectly. We self-select based on titles, topics, and even on time of day.
The only thing this kind of logic is good for is producing fallacious arguments dismissing someone's opinion because someone else holds a contradicting opinion.
Totally agreed that any large community must contain multiple diverse opinions. But when making a point it's impossible to address all relevant combinations, and so it's fine to generalize. Using the US as an example again, many Americans opposed the Iraq war but it is perfectly accurate to say that "the US invaded Iraq."
Now, generalizations can be faulty, but whether they ring true is a good proxy for their usefulness. And this point in TFA rings very true. Beyond just Hacker News or other social media, look at the blogosphere, industry "thought leaders", VCs, organizations like the EFF, startups, tech companies and their executives (and if you look closely, their lobbyists) on any matter involving intellectual property rights. The average reality that emerges is pretty stark and can be summarized as "what's mine is mine, what's yours is everybody's." Sure, many of us would disagree with that, but that is what the ultimate outcome is.
As such, I read that point not as singling out a specific set of people, but as an indictment of the tech community, and indeed, the industry as a whole.