The illogical adoption of React must not be questioned, even in the face of its poor performance and ugly syntax. One must never note that perhaps it is simply a cultish adoration, or faddish adherence to popular mass opinions, that leads to "popularity" mattering more than practicality.
So what if React is massively bloated, stupid syntax, can't use regular HTML, can't use regular CSS, can't use async/await, have to do everything a special way...literally, SO WHAT. It IS REACT! OMG behold it's glory. It came from FB, maybe if we use it we can scale like FB!
Omg the idiocy. But keep on slavishly following the next front-end dev trend. I can't tell whether front-end dev culture is a massive circle-jerk or cargo cult. And don't mention the irrational hate attempted to be heaped onto anyone who dares question the programmatic thinking of the official line of the React Appreciation Society.
Is there anything more in-bad-faith than assuming everyone who uses X is just an idiot, trend-follower, or beginner? Unlike you, the Enlightened One?
Why not just ask people why they use X? Plenty of veteran developers on HN could tell you why they like React despite a sea of alternatives, but it's easier to just cast aspersions instead of understanding.
It's a shame to see this on HN which is supposedly a community of craftspeople who build things. If you can only come up with insults for why another group of people do something, it's time for you to get up off your ass and ask someone in that group. And this extends beyond just engineering, it's how you understand other people in general.
I've been building websites in some form for at least 23 years, and professionally on-and-off for over 18.
React is the first framework that allows me quickly build rich web-apps that load fast, perform fast, and have a structure and order to them that keeps them enjoyable to work on as they get bigger.
I have no loyalty to Facebook and I've tried pretty much every major framework or library that's gained traction in the past 15 years.
Translation: "Let me dismiss and trivialize that which I'm too scared to admit might be true." Good luck keeping on pretending the opinions of a large chunk of the world don't exist, don't make sense or don't matter.
Or maybe it's you who needs to expand your mind, show a bit of empathy and try to understand the other side?
Sure, I guess it's easier to pretend the other side doesn't really exist, than to come to understand it. Keep arrogant and ignorant at your own peril. But I guess it's easier to close your mind and feel better by pretending it's wrong, than to try to know the rest of the world?
The other side exists. They have their opinion. I deny them the right to censor me, though.
> Or maybe it's you who needs to expand your mind, show a bit of empathy and try to understand the other side?
If the other side was doing the same, sure. The other side is actively denying my side the right to speak, though. I give zero empathy to their actions.
> Keep arrogant and ignorant at your own peril. But I guess it's easier to close your mind and feel better by pretending it's wrong, than to try to know the rest of the world?
You don't find it arrogant for China to try to prevent the rest of the world from saying that they support Hong Kong? You don't find it ignorant for China to try to keep information from the west out of China via the Great Firewall? You don't find that "closing your mind"?
China has no right to appeal for us to show those values, when China so clearly has no interest in them itself. (Yes, we should support the values that we claim. China has no right to demand that we do, though.)
I give empathy due to the coercion (active or passive), relatively forcing them to act in the way they do - but I don't stand idle.
There's not only ignorant behaviour coming from the tyrant-lead China, however the hypocrisy is blatantly obvious. Makes me think of the pro-China indoctrinated students in Canada (and elsewhere) who have the freedom to protest whatever they want, yet they're protesting to allow censorship and against freedom of peaceful assembly; it's clear indoctrination, likely with fear of consequences with falling out of line (for themselves, friends, family) - their own critical thinking perhaps not developed, and perhaps stunted from development - tied into whatever propaganda they're actively fed.
For the record I'm not complaining about "genuine" Chinese people expressing their opinions. As you said, it's important they have a voice, and we should listen.
What I'm pointing out is the increasing number of accounts that are very, very obviously paid or otherwise government controlled to influence opinions on HN (and obviously elsewhere on the internet)
Do you have some examples? It'd be good if we could keep a list and screenshots of this sort of thing, with some research into the usernames.
I hear people on Reddit talk about 'Russian bots' constantly and I've always wanted to see some examples on a site like HN/Reddit.
The above person lists his Github account and AFAIK he's not a paid shill, just a political contrarian or provocateur for political ends. Which IMO is an important difference if we're going to accuse everyone of being bots and "paid shills".
A green name with a single comment being downvoted immediately isn't influencing opinions here, they can't even downvote. But it'd be interesting to measure their frequency as well for a research project.
At the risk of being labeled one myself... there are no examples. I've seen dang respond to complaints like this many times and every time it was real people with real profiles being accused of shills, trolls etc.
Also, if you look it up it's almost all politics threads wrt China this year on HN with overwhelming anti-China sentiment, yet here we are, arguing about pro-China influence being too strong.
Then the question is no longer about how many shills are objectively out there that can be quantifiably measured, because this fact is obviously not what people have been basing their accusations on, but what results in the very question of shills being raised in the first place.
The only theory I can think of would be Chomsky's fifth filter, that is, a common external enemy that helps maintain consensus and divert ideological stress from internal antagonism, be it terrorists, Russian trolls, Chinese shills. This is compounded by the universalist belief that it is impossible to hold "genuine" political thoughts other than the End of History liberal democracy project, which is in itself beset on all sides already, making it all more intense.
The vast majority of users doing this will be real people who're simply indoctrinated - it's why China's tyrant leadership and censorship/control mechanisms is so effective, albeit powerful - however I don't like wrongly conflating the idea of what true power is with control.
You couldn't be more wrong, and the example shows how rooted these discussions are in imagination and skirt the margins of some truly ugly behaviors, which I'm certain you would never knowingly engage in.
I know who baybal2 is—we've exchanged perhaps a couple dozen emails over several years. I know his name and nationality. (Unless you want to argue that he's been emailing under a false identity? That's what spies do, after all.) He's someone with a technical background who's done extensive business in China. His views come from those experiences and no doubt from the rest of his background. This gives him a perspective that's very different from that of more mainstream HN demographics. Do we want a community member like that here? Or would we prefer to hound him out with suspicion and insinuation? Of course we want a community member like that here.
Why all the emails? Because for a while we were repeatedly banning and/or penalizing his account when it broke the site guidelines. When we think a user is persuadable, we'll often try to persuade them by email to use HN in the intended spirit. baybal2 may not have fully cleared that bar, but he's come a long way and that counts for a lot. And if you read his emails you'd see that he's a nice guy who means well and mostly has no idea when he's breaking the rules here; in other words, much like you and me.
In most cases, you can easily figure this out simply by taking the time to look at an account's public posting history. Unfortunately, what people seem to do instead is see a handful of data points—and when I say "handful" I'm being generous—that pattern-match a pre-image they have in their minds ("pro-Chinese agent" or whatever). From those few data points, they autocomplete the rest of the dots into a sinister picture—the picture they already had to begin with. Once they've done that several times, a feeling of pressure builds up that they call "overwhelming evidence" or something like that, which they can't help but vent into the threads. This is the real problem, not the posting history of someone like baybal2.
I feel ambivalent about writing this. On the one hand, it's important to look at specific examples that illuminate how this internet phenomenon of accusing others of astroturfing, etc., fundamentally comes from projection: reading into external situations the image that one carries in oneself. This community badly, deeply needs to take that insight in.
On the other hand, it feels sickening to pick apart individual histories in public. Because we have baybal2's email address, I can at least check in with him. But there have been other cases where that wasn't an option, including this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358, which had a mixed outcome. The user who made the accusation responded magnanimously. Unfortunately, though, the accused user really was hounded off HN and never came back. IIRC, they sent an eloquent email but refused our invitation to keep participating—or maybe that was someone else. There have been many such cases, including one that's sitting in the inbox right now, that I have yet to figure out how to reply to.
Thank you dang. I often think about how great of a job you're doing here and wondered if I could build a Reddit replacement built on your approach to community building. It's such a challenging problem to solve. I wonder if a strong creed and hiring approach could scale up to a larger site but I have my doubts.
It can't be easy doing your job and I hope you understand we very much value your work, even if everyone doesn't realize it's being done.
What would make you to reconsider? I don't really hide my identity on the Internet, and see no reason to do so for as long as I want to have a life.
Can you be one of those men who trolled me and my coworkers on email in July? If so, you need to work harder "to break my life." We were having good laugh reading that silly correspondence on lunch brakes. Very glad that I work in China now, and that people here don't give a f* about such drama, unlike in US.
What I want to see is the HN data - anonymized if necessary, so we can calculate averages - and know what accounts are behaving in what brigading behaviour; and so in essence the community of HN can crowdsource moderation - at minimum to help spot and highlight patterns, so each reader or user can independently analyze, interpret and decide for themselves what the data means.
All the critical comments on this. Why are all these critics so scared that there might be an easier way to do web dev?
Are they really just protecting their archane methods because they see that as protecting their income and any simplification a threat to that?
Or is it more tribal, cult like adherence to an overbloated way of creating web UIs?
Or is it people don't want to learn yet another tool and they're just resigned to the fact the these are the tools they have because really, they don't get to decide that anyway, their employer does?
Or is it people don't like being reminded that actually, they're "forced" to use these tools (which they perhaps wouldn't if it wasn't mandated), but because the workplace uses them, they use them, so the existence of other options while accurate is a painful reminder of their own limited autonomy to individually decide the tools they use for their work?
Is the same cultish zealotry seen in other languages and frameworks or is it just (what compiles to) ECMAscript and Web UI/state frameworks?
That's like saying because we can't fix everything, we should fix nothing.
There's no need to include everything. HN is selective. It's in English. The reason it can't have posts about the responsibility of SV towards the tech and social impact they make is because that would pierce the veil of fake narrative that supports SVs continued unexamined influence.
The reality is the mods are not the tip of the spear. There are others mods above them who intervene to set policy and crush off plan posts. A truth this place can never acknowledge.
It's not just the women's movement, any postmodern "leaderphobic" group of anti-heroes will operate under this adhocratic masking of power. It's still power, but it's the power-pill that palatable to their sensibilities, suitably masked. Marxist revolutions "of the peasants" pioneered this mass delusion of flattening.
But isn't this just gaslighting people? I mean "flat" is just disempowering existing power structures, to empower a secretive cabal, that pretends to rule "benevolently" by consensus by usurping the existing "oppressive evil" but ends up just becoming worse. Prove you can actually be better, then come back and tell me how to.
This article should have been called: "Afraid of Kings. How we tried and failed to get s*it done when we need to pander to everyone's leaderphobia."
Bottom line is, this is not new hat. It's old hat. What I'd say to the author is: It's an adhorcracy. Read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Then come back and tell me how to.
"Marxist revolutions 'of the peasants' pioneered this mass delusion of flattening."
Ironically the Bolshevik revolution didn't really start out this way. The Bolsheviks advocated for a strict disciplined party model - if you've ever read what Lenin wrote of the Left-communists and Anarchists, it was clear that he was very much not mindlessly "against" structure. Of course, this would all eventually be liquidated by Stalin and Mao.
"Flat" organizations rarely seek to deliberately create cabals and power cliques - they do inevitably occur, sure, but the call for flatness usually comes as a result of you not getting what you really want out of the system. Ulterior motives are not really at play; rather it is just a case of organic collapse.
On the topic of Lenin, one can read The state and revolution where he defends the need of a strong state in a communist regime, and this quote: "the people don't want freedom, they want power. Freedom ? What would they do with it ?!"
For what it's worth, most Marxists favor some form of democracy. The libertarian wing favors direct democracy while other tendencies favor different forms of representative democracy. Democracy is favored for exactly the reason that unclear power structures are a kind of oppression and that democracies broadly speaking offer decision making power to the people. A big difference between a Marxist and a liberal is in the analysis of the economic base of power which can either support or undermine democratic structures.
I really want to read the perspective of some great contemporary thinkers on this. Who were the thinkers writing about this in a compelling way and who it's likely that in 20 years or 50 years we'll be able to look back on and say their essays really understood the zeitgeist?
What shocks me is how companies and organizations have reacted to this. Every time a significant decision is deferred to mob rule I feel a little bit of power departs civil and ordered society and is transferred to the mob. Which seems to me to validate the notion that we ought to be afraid of mobs. That's a pretty scary society to live in and doesn't really mesh with the principle of rule of law.
The only reference point I have for this is historically the utilisation of and empowerment of angry mobs has coincided with times of great political turmoil such as a revolution. And that historically at least you could say that these mobs are created by breaking down the existing structures of authority. I think you can find a reference for that in Western society where the power of traditional moral authority or institutional symbols of authority have declined or been dismantled.
Probably the least controversial idea I have as to a cause of all this is that there must be a huge amount of potential emotional energy present in the population that is being directed towards are tapped by these expressions of outrage and mob outburst. I think it's reasonable to say that this potential emotional energy was not created by these topics it was created elsewhere by foundational issues such as economics but it's being directed towards these topics perhaps as cathartic outlet.
I think clearly author was using "like it's 1999" as a metaphor, not literally.
It's a fairly common phrase (originating from a Prince song I think) that you can take to mean "like a throwback to a more authentic and possibly prior era." In this case the era is prior the explosion of frameworks and div soup.
Which strangely in this case is not necessarily prior but in parallel, as you said. This is English, it doesn't have to be precise like programming. You can use it for effect.
Similarly, as I have skin in the game and didn't want to get blocked by DO, I was expecting a muddy response and ready to make a throwaway account and complain about "keeping processes opaque to give carte blanche to take whatever arbitrary action they like" in the normal complaint about deplatforming and tech censorship, but then I read their document and was surprised and encouraged by how transparent DO were. Congratulations DO!
The funny thing is when you consider applying this very cool stylesheet to a regular web site or app the result would be a complete mess mostly, because those places are often div soup, rather than neat semantic minimal HTML.
Most HN comments are gratuitously mean or incorrect, but it has good technical comments.
This is so true. Posting work I've done on Show HN is like going back to an abusive relationship with someone who just wants to crush, dismiss and ridicule every creative thing you ever did or wanted to do.
I've spent a lot of (necessary, but still feels wasted) time getting over the trauma of commenters on Show HN and their cruelty. I find their comments contribute to the self-doubt inner narrative I have and I hate that, particularly the idea that some random abusive person on the internet can influence your future choices by convincing you you are stupid, or your work is bad or whatever. But I consider I just have to find my own way to get stronger about this and to somehow be resilient to that. Because people are like that every where you go.
In processing this emotional/comment abuse trauma, I also have spent quite a lot of time thinking about what makes each person say something mean, when they could have pointed out something in a considerate way. I think the path to become an abusive HN commenter is different for each person who goes that way, but one thing I think must be behind it is people who feel crushed, or dismissed creatively themselves, and wanting to perpetrate that on other people as a substitute for making something themselves. It's common that the meanest commenters don't have any "submissions" or at least no personal "this is something I did" submissions.
Creative communities don't have to be like this. OpenProcessing, Glitch are some very supportive places I've seen for creative work. IndieHackers, Product Hunt, the same. Here it seems that the community "tolerates" this behavior and possibly views it as some sort of sport or entertainment, as unhealthy as that is. I'm not dissing entertainment like that, it has its place, I just wish/expect it were not here.
But that leads to a second theory I have about abusive commenters, that this is a "tech" or engineer thing, and not a creative person thing. Tech has an asshole problem, and maybe there's correlation between people who are technically good, but emotionally abusive or lacking in empathy.
I find often mean comments are disguised as not, to give the abuser an "out" or plausible deniability. So they get to perpetrate their cruelty under a cover of just being helpful, or whatever.
Anyone want to share some strategies they have for processing this trauma in an efficient way, or some strong responses they have for it?
One of my hobbies is music, I play in a live rock band and frequently meet other bands. A feature of fellow amateur musicians that stands out the most to me is how often they are dismissive and snobbish towards other musicians. I've been in bands and amateur musicians' circles in two very different countries, and people in both had this thing going on! It's bizarre.
And coming on to the next point...
>Tech has an asshole problem, and maybe there's correlation between people who are technically good, but emotionally abusive or lacking in empathy.
I've seen this behavior from people that are pretty proficient at their instruments more often than from newbies, too!
Well, you should be aware that a lot of people who spend a lot of time on HN are bitter, because their own ideas did not flourish and they are stuck in a mediocre job, so wandering on HN and alike to get inspirational spirit, but with jealousy, so not eager to love new things at first sight, but to smash them. But they are also able to applaud something if they love it.
So of course it is possible that your work is not the best, if random internet strangers can crush it easily.
I found HN to be a much nicer place than most other places on the internet, but still, you should not expect anonymous people to be nice. Not in this internet, not in this world with all its freaky, unhappy people. Happy people usually have other things to tend to, that makes them happy, than posting all the time. So don't take it too personal. View it as a challenge and don't try to please a internetmob.
> you should be aware that a lot of people who spend a lot of time on HN are bitter, because their own ideas did not flourish and they are stuck in a mediocre job, so wandering on HN and alike to get inspirational spirit, but with jealousy
Yes it is. And I know, I got no data to back it up, just experience and logic. And yes, there are some people who really like to post a lot here and enjoy it. But they are the exception.
Thank you very much. I found your comment helpful by giving some perspective about why people do it and how that helps to not take it seriously. It's reasonable.
You should not read the feedback in show HN seriously. HN is good for the exposure and traffic it generates, and it helps that the links are also picked up by a few blogs, aggregators, and even the media may pick it up and write an article about you. But don't rely on individual opinions and don't take them seriously, instead do your own a/b testing with your product. HN is no longer a community of hustlers the way indiehackers is so you 're not going to get any high fives or enouragement, unless you pander to the sensitivities of the crowd here, which are overwhelmingly corporate employees.
The best way to get over it is to see the reactions rationally, and understand where they come from. Don't read further into it than you should be. Instead pay more attention to the opinions of your users.
The main thing to consider here is that Hacker News probably isn't your audience. Unless your product or service is aimed at developers/software engineers first and foremost, the probability of it getting relevant feedback via Show HN is slim.
And to some degree, that's one of the big reasons why this community can be so harsh or mean. Because for the kind of person who uses this site, many of these Show HN projects feel like things they'd be able to build themselves, or which can be done better via some simple technical process. I mean, look at Dropbox. People here were real harsh towards that one, and didn't understand the market potential for it at all.
It's also subject to the same trends as other expert focused communities, in that experts in a field/creators in a field will usually be harsher towards others in said fields than the general public will be. They know how the work is done, and are looking for technical novelty in such rather than the content of the work.
So don't take it too seriously, remember that people here probably aren't your audience and that they're likely to be significantly harsher/more dismissive than the general public is.
Two thoughts - on cause and on dealing with it. For the affinity of assholes in technical fields, I see two things push people towards it. One is the work (engineering) pushes you to look for edge cases, flaws, etc, and fix them. The second, highly related imho, is that technical people frequently work for non-technical people who tell them what to do. Often in a way that leaves out lots of important details. I think that creates this inner frustration where people who may be good at leading projects architecturally instead constantly clean up bad plans. I don't think this is everyone or the cause of everything, just a supporting thread i see in a lot of people.
As for dealing with it (and negativity elsewhere) I've been trying to train myself to focus on the positive. Not in some head in the sand type way, but more in realizing where negativity and positivity goes. Negativity, dwelling on mistakes and flaws, etc -- they don't get you anywhere. They get you nothing. They make you feel worse. Moreover, _searching_ for the positive does more than just let you find opportunity. It affects how you see the world. And it gives you more chances to improve it. Because instead of dwelling, you use that energy to look for ways to change things. Or make things. Or network. Or find luck. Its not as simple as deciding one day to be happy. But becoming aware of the tendencies and making a concerted effort to search out the positives, it changes you over time.
I really appreciated your your explanation of cause about finding fixes and edge cases, and being incompetently managed, and found your notion of making the effort to search for the positive very helpful, thank you.
So what if React is massively bloated, stupid syntax, can't use regular HTML, can't use regular CSS, can't use async/await, have to do everything a special way...literally, SO WHAT. It IS REACT! OMG behold it's glory. It came from FB, maybe if we use it we can scale like FB!
Omg the idiocy. But keep on slavishly following the next front-end dev trend. I can't tell whether front-end dev culture is a massive circle-jerk or cargo cult. And don't mention the irrational hate attempted to be heaped onto anyone who dares question the programmatic thinking of the official line of the React Appreciation Society.