I think this comment is a good example of a type of cynicism that we're discussing, probably the type that most instinctively jumps out as "cynical."
Like pessimism and optimism, cynicism often boils down to a bias.
The key word is "just" (virtue signalling). Blogging, commenting, and communicating generally are various things as once. We're pursuing intellectual curiosity, showing off, participating in a culture, signalling virtue, signalling other things... to ourselves and to others.
Our bias and/or perspective lens dictates our focus. A lot of cynicism, certainly within my generational cohort, is also about signalling. Signaling that we're not naive, that we're cool, grunge, etc. If you hate grunge, hippies, Diogenes or whatnot, you're more likely to adopt a perspective whereby they're "just" bunch of virtue signaling posers.
You can always plausibly adopt this perspective. Grunge, hippies, Diogenes & whatnot are attention seekers. They are cultural figures, which is kind of virtue signalling by definition. They're also other things though. Reducing these to "just" virtue signalling is cynicism regarding these things.
You can also have a general cynical viewpoint, but it's pretty hard to do without also adopting arseholery. As a general cynic, you pretty much assume that base motivation for everything. OP is just virtue-signalling optimism. Drewcoo is just edgelord cool-signalling. Netcan is just cool-signaling.
I think what is true from reading reddit, HN & the internet broadly is that cynicism is very "in" right now, to the point where it's annoying. Hence, I suppose, why such posts do well.
It's signaling something, but not virtue: criticism implies expertise. People observe the respect experts get and start imitating the behavior. Since they don't have anything actually insightful to add, they fall back on generic opposition to everything, also called cynicism.
It's cargo-culting for non-(non-?)academia. HN, the world's #1 source of smartitude, may just be its purest crystallization.
I think this comment is a good example of a type of cynicism that we're discussing, probably the type that most instinctively jumps out as "cynical."
Like pessimism and optimism, cynicism often boils down to a bias.
The key word is "just" (virtue signalling). Blogging, commenting, and communicating generally are various things as once. We're pursuing intellectual curiosity, showing off, participating in a culture, signalling virtue, signalling other things... to ourselves and to others.
Our bias and/or perspective lens dictates our focus. A lot of cynicism, certainly within my generational cohort, is also about signalling. Signaling that we're not naive, that we're cool, grunge, etc. If you hate grunge, hippies, Diogenes or whatnot, you're more likely to adopt a perspective whereby they're "just" bunch of virtue signaling posers.
You can always plausibly adopt this perspective. Grunge, hippies, Diogenes & whatnot are attention seekers. They are cultural figures, which is kind of virtue signalling by definition. They're also other things though. Reducing these to "just" virtue signalling is cynicism regarding these things.
You can also have a general cynical viewpoint, but it's pretty hard to do without also adopting arseholery. As a general cynic, you pretty much assume that base motivation for everything. OP is just virtue-signalling optimism. Drewcoo is just edgelord cool-signalling. Netcan is just cool-signaling.
I think what is true from reading reddit, HN & the internet broadly is that cynicism is very "in" right now, to the point where it's annoying. Hence, I suppose, why such posts do well.