[martythemaniak]

I too am sick and tired of this zeitgeist and I hope it passes soon, because otherwise I think people will just tune out until every only community is nothing but a hateful cesspool.

Musk and Tesla attract more than the average share of hate, but this sentiment feeds on itself and grows like cancer. Yesterday's thread on Eric Schmidt leaving Google was dozens of people competing to see who could trash him better.

Apart from the bad effects of negativity itself, it is also supremely boring. HN's comments are slowly going from being able to find tons of interesting ideas/reactions/perspectives to finding only different ways of trashing the same person/company/idea.

[Klathmon]

There's a growing list of topics I just entirely avoid online now, and it's a damn shame because I enjoy most of them.

Cryptocurrencies, "smart" things or IoT, anything Google related, anything even slightly related to or made by Facebook (the other day Facebook released info on their rewrite of Facebook.com and zero comments were about the tech on HN, it was just a bunch of people arguing over how awful Facebook really is), and many things that deal with JavaScript (at least on HN).

Sadly I'm going to be adding Tesla to that list now, something I should have done years ago, at least on this website.

Every topic related to those things quickly devolves into a bunch of people just yelling at each other over semantics, and it's very hard to have any real nuanced discussion.

[grecy]

I completely agree with you and the parent comment.

It's like people now come online to just loudly scream their opinion about something, then leave.

Whether a tech person likes or loaths Facebook is not really of interest or any gain to us as a community. Like you said, it would be massively interesting to learn exactly what tech and how facebook are re-writing their app, but those conversations don't even happen on HN anymore.

It's amazing to think what the state of automobiles and driving will be in 5 and then 10 years (which is really not far away at all), and yet every single discussion thread just argues about the demise of Tesla instead of discussing, planning for and building the future that is inevitable, with or without Tesla.

> Every topic related to those things quickly devolves into a bunch of people just yelling at each other over semantics, and it's very hard to have any real nuanced discussion.

As much as I hate censorship, I think the moderation team at HN would be wise to shadow ban (or just outright ban) accounts that post negative rubbish, or simply expose their opinion on a topic.

Maybe there should be a rule that a person's opinion is off-limits in HN discussions. Discuss the topic at hand, but don't just cram opinions down throats. (yes, I get the irony, I'm expressing my opinion here)

[c0vfefe]

Perhaps people are beginning to look at the downsides of innovation at all costs. Tesla's and Google's technical contributions can't be divorced from their failings. I'd think this would be a refreshing shift in startup culture.