Hacker News

Can we please not play this internet game here?

"This is [sarcastic reference] coming from [personal reference] who [cherry-picked outrage bit]" is a trope that doesn't lead anywhere interesting. It ratchets up indignation, fries curiosity, and removes any semblance of ontopicness.

Also, I assume that's a skewed pseudo-quotation since no one would actually say that. Please don't play that internet game here either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. You're a good commenter otherwise and I even put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26787519 in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights.

nsagent 3 days ago [ - ]

Agree that the snarky reply doesn't help, but the quotation isn't really skewed (though it is a paraphrase). It comes from an internal memo that leaked in 2018 that states:

  Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.

  And still we connect people.

  The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.

This comment [1] linked to an article [2] with the leaked memo.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45721016

[2]: https://techthelead.com/incendiary-leaked-memo-facebook/

dang 3 days ago [ - ]

Ok good point!

bre1010 3 days ago [ - ]

Thank you for this feedback. Definitely a failure on my part to follow my personal guideline of if I don't have anything thoughtful to post then it's better not to post at all, not to mention the actual posting guidelines that I violated.

Andrew Bosworth somehow short-circuits me though as he is responsible for so much bad in the world (I have multiple grandparents who have been totally captured by the Facebook infinite-scroll newsfeed -- his idea and for which he shows no shame). Like this sociopath can just get away with it all: multi-millionaire AND wannabe thought-leader? And I'm supposed to just scroll by and let his pontifications about moral philosophy get promoted on this site. That being said, I thought about posting something more significant in my OP but gave up because who am I convincing anyway. That should've been the trigger not to post at all.

Thanks for the call-out and for the compliment on my ant-post from back in the day.