On the topic of technological tribalism
One of the things I absolutely loved about Hacker News was the technical, and generally high quality discussions about technology. That is something I also really appreciate about Tildes right now. But as the years progressed I went to HN less and less because I found just about any topic related to PHP, JS and Node were filled with toxic low effort comment/jokes about the language.
I don't feel it is constructive to replay the exact same tired jokes about the exact same warts everyone has known to exist and avoided/worked around for years now. It's okay to not like these languages or technologies, but can we try to be better and a little more inclusive and constructive in our community? I feel like it's going to be a losing battle as the site grows if we're already stooping to these levels.
The problem is that eventually, people have to answer to investors and shareholders. So in order to do that, they have to create the content that gets the most people to view the pages, not necessarily the best content. We should be wary of this, sure. But Tildes isn't planned to have that sort of accountability, so I'm not sure we'll have it at that rate. Already discussions are popping up about what types of low effort content we should ban/not post/disallow. I think this bodes well for the future.
It's also something that the open tag system seems prepared to handle pretty well, potentially, as much of a concern that could be with regard to bad behavior. I'm not the most up to date on the discussions since tagging disappeared, but filtering jokes to the bottom or solutions to the top could be a decent solution. I'm not sure how that would work in child conversations, but I don't want to get too off topic.
This bothered me on Reddit as well. The constant "LOL PHP/JS/(insert other interpreted language that isn't Python here)" jokes are just beating the proverbial dead horse.
If you don't like something, then fine, you're entitled to your own opinion and are perfectly welcome to bring it up if someone wants to discuss languages themselves, but don't sit there circlejerking and shitting on something that someone else works with and may even enjoy. There aren't too many things that feel worse than working with something and/or enjoying something and being told by pretty much everyone that you're wrong for doing so.
I definitely agree that some people take the circlejerk too far, or just bandwagon without understanding, but there are usually reasons this tribalism started. How do we differentiate between someone just hopping in the bandwagon vs a snarky comment actually criticizing the language/technology.
I’ll take the npm post from yesterday, where I made a quip about frequent vulnerabilities and exploits. Was it a low effort comment? Sure, but let’s not pretend that the node ecosystem isn’t a functional disaster right now. Especially on a post about a vulnerability in a massive npm package, criticism should be expected.
Please don't take this thread as singling you out there was also a comment I noticed earlier
I get if you want to have a discussion about the state of nodejs and security vulnerabilities but how about we talk about mitigation strategies instead of the counter productive dead ends that such comments lead to.
Said better than I would've thought to put it. Constructive vs. destructive discussion.
To me it just shows again that Programmers and Tech Folks are still people, and many of them still take comfort in being around those with like interests and preferences.
I disagree, this sort of talk is not about liking similar things, it's hating similar things.
It's really only natural. People run in the same circles at work, get entrenched in specific technologies, development stacks, etc. etc. and what I've noticed most is that off-hand jokes or comments start to cause tribes to form because people want to feel included in on the Big Joke . As long as we set up good ground rules, I think we could foster good conversation in the future. I like the idea of being able to filter comments by votes, and if there's a way to mark a comment as irrelevant, low-effort, or simply a joke, we could filter out those comments without much trouble :)