[quacked]

"A well-armed and informed populace governing itself" is a pipe dream by indigenous uncontacted people and certain very intelligent dissenters. The majority of "civilized" people in the world are very happy to live in an authoritarian information-sanitized nation so long as the people in power cater to their own in-group.

[barnabee]

I’d like to think this site of all places might be populated with very intermittent dissenters willing to be or at least support activists trying to change that, with the internet and technology as their tool.

It’s always jarring to discover the extent to which it’s not.

[colpabar]

I've realized this recently too, and I'm trying to just ignore/flag everything even remotely political that gets posted here. If you disagree with the idea that information control is something the government has no business of doing, you're in the minority here. The response to the twitter files was the slap in the face I needed to finally understand that.

After all, it's a blog for a VC fund. I'd say a lot of people here are building things that do much worse than what the twitter files exposed.

[lovich]

You don’t like that people aren’t as open minded as you’d like, so you flipped on your values and now try to flag anything you disagree with(i.e. political content)?

Am I misinterpreting your comment?

[colpabar]

I think dang kinda just looks the other way because he knows people want to talk politics, but it's literally the first thing in the "off topic" section of the guidelines.

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".

So yeah, you are misinterpreting my comment. I've just realized what HN is meant to be, or at least what dang wants it to be. I think he's an excellent mod, and I respect the guidelines. I want to come here and see cool nerd stuff like "can you play minecraft inside doom inside minecraft" and as soon as I see something political it puts me in a bad mood. And yes, if you scroll my comment history, you will see that I post mostly in political threads. But I have learned my lesson - this place isn't for that. There's no revolution to be started here, given the userbase is mostly financially well-off tech bros who benefit from the status quo. Just like me!

[lovich]

>> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

>The exception clause is "unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, but according to all the top comments on the twitter files threads, "this is nothing new".

You said you were flagging all of political content and then brought it back to Twitter files specifically to justify it not hitting the exception clause.

For me the Twitter files content themselves aren’t interesting, but the effect of the what seems like obviously non interesting content getting so many people up in arms just because a billionaire is claiming it’s bad is an interesting new phenomenon.

I understand this type of content might put you in a bad mood, but given that you weren’t flagging the content until you felt

> The response to the twitter files was the slap in the face I needed to finally understand that.

Kinda feels like you’re trying to engage in the same type of censorship that bothers you.

[colpabar]

> Kinda feels like you’re trying to engage in the same type of censorship that bothers you.

No, because that isn't censorship. I'm participating in community moderation to the extent that this website enables me. It wouldn't be censorship for the owner of a facebook page about cooking to remove posts not about cooking, and it isn't censorship for posts not about "hacker news" on a website called hacker news. One type of censorship that does bother me is shady government agencies that have done horrible things in the past working with massive social media platforms to influence public discourse. But that's pretty political, and this isn't the place for it.

[fallingknife]

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting

I would say that government agencies trying to stop me from seeing information that it doesn't like is something most good hackers would find interesting.

[colpabar]

I did too! But like I said, the majority of HN does not. We love our LEOs here.

[MarkPNeyer]

Bitcoin is people striving for financial self sovereignty.

“Crypto” is a bunch of people trying to get rich using some cool new technology they nobody understands.

See how much bigger the second is than the first.

[barnabee]

Meh. People will try to get rich off anything— crypto, the internet, SMS scams, every type of physical business, legit or otherwise.

As a hacker I want to find out what else we can do with it. What surprising things can we build?

What if we could use some kind of blockchain tech to incentivise people to do great things despite what you’ve seen so far? (Some people really are trying to do that.)

What if we can help activists all over the world with Tor and end to end encryption?

What if the internet can give a voice to people who never had one?

What if we can find a better way than copyright to compensate people for their creations with restricting sharing and reuse?

What if we can build and online encyclopaedia many orders of magnitude grander in scope than anything that’s gone before?

Let someone else worry about what the grifters are doing to screw us this time.

Let’s see the hackers hack.

[dale_glass]

That vision of bitcoin died somewhere around 2017, back when blocks filled, commerce ground to a halt and nobody in charge thought this was a problem.

Because the people that were in control already figured that what they wanted to use the system for is to buy low and sell high for huge profits, and so it didn't matter if the network didn't perform well for regular commerce. You don't need a lot of TPS if your ideal scenario is to ever make two.

[quacked]

The reason Bitcoin got so large so quickly is the same reason that "Crypto" got large so quickly. The majority of people who "invest" in Bitcoin aren't trying to figure out a way to trade goods and services in a way that undermines the Federal Reserve and the IRS, they're trying to increase their holdings in USD in order to better participate in the existing economy.

[chaosbolt]

The age of cypherpunks is dead, we live in the age of the "programmer who blindly believes the same thing everyone at his company believes and thinks he's right because he's intelligent because he's a programmer".

And the scary thing is, this came out of nowhere, one day everyone online is for freedom and freespeech, the next day everyone became against it, it's the same thing for Elon Musk, it's crazy how popular he was online and how everyone loved him, he didn't do anything bad between then and now (except insult a couple people here and there and other asshole things we have all done in the past) but went from "invented X" to "merely invested in X", and from "genius" to "idiot", etc.

The people who said they couldn't tame the internet were as wrong as those who said the same thing about crypto.

[helloworld11]

>And the scary thing is, this came out of nowhere, one day everyone online is for freedom and freespeech, the next day everyone became against it

I don't think it came from nowhere. Specifically, I'd say a lot of it started very specifically after Trump won the 2016 election and a whole obsessive craze struck the progressive media and wider communities that follow it (among them, many programmers, techies and other academically educated, otherwise supposedly intelligent people) who rapidly also started to follow the line of this same craze over supposed "misinformation" and other "harmful" information.

Rapidly, the notion of free speech became something that needed to be modulated, coordinated, controlled and carefully allowed because it might lead to another case in which something disliked by the media/academic/cultural ingroup happens.

The related Russian disinformation mania of that same timeframe also introduced a strong and strangely absurd nationalist streak of controlling foreign influence in how people see information to the debate, this further reinforced the wider argument of free expression and access to it being dangerous for people.

Totally outside one's personal politics, this idea is absurd and hypocritical, but it notably became the case after that specific point in time among many people who previously used to aggressively defend the notion of free speech and online freedom. Remember the whole previous-to-that debate about net neutrality? Much of it faded away because it tacitly goes against the grain of these superseding notions about how discourse should be controlled.

The "trust science and lockdown measures" narratives during the COVID pandemic only expanded the scope of the above, and for similar reasons of partisan politics.

[tastyfreeze]

If you know a site with reasonable discussions of governance, with voices from all points of view, don't hold back. I am often a dissenter here and take the down votes for it. But HN isn't really for such discussions even if dang let's it fly.

Thanks to dang I do find HN to be much more balanced on most viewpoints than the majority of sites. I can't recall a time here where I have been disgusted with someone's comment like I have on Arstechnica reading comments wishing death to Trump supporters or the unvaccinated.