The one where instead of saying "here's a good book", you side-eye your friends and say "OMG Becky can you believe it, they are reading Twilight! THEY think it's a GOOD BOOK! a-haw-HAW-haw-HAW!", where the purpose is not to enjoy whatever book you are reading, or to share good books with other people and why you think they are good, not to improve the quality of books in general or to observe and people-watch with curiosity, but to re-inforce that people who read Twilight are inferior and therefore your group is superior.
From a PG essay[1] "When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people [...] will try to emphasize [their status] by maltreating those they think rank below. But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy."
The status grab is "I must be superior to those people, because I'm here, and they are there so I'm not part of them, and they are inferior".
> "The only thing that's going to happen here is that I get aggressively downvoted and the problems I'm complaining about will continue unabated, because mentioning them makes for "tedious reading."
That will continue regardless; a big part of your rant was that Dunning-Kruger dross about how people who write a comment on the internet without adding a pile of IMHO to it must be cock-sure idiots who don't know how dumb and wrong they are. If that's correct and they don't know how wrong they are, how are they going to identify as the target of your rant and change? If they are "soooo confident", why would they know to change their belief?
The only thing that's going to change it is people pointing out incorrectness in a way that helps (i.e. without closing off avenues to change with insults), or downvoting it to hide it so it doesn't spread. In the "be the change you want to see in the world" sense.
>The one where instead of saying "here's a good book", you side-eye your friends and say "OMG Becky can you believe it, they are reading Twilight! THEY think it's a GOOD BOOK! a-haw-HAW-haw-HAW!", where the purpose is not to enjoy whatever book you are reading, or to share good books with other people and why you think they are good, not to improve the quality of books in general or to observe and people-watch with curiosity, but to re-inforce that people who read Twilight are inferior and therefore your group is superior.
Except the entire point of my comment (fairly, rant) was to tell the people who refuse to read Twilight that they should actually try reading Twilight instead of asking their circle of friends who probably haven't read Twilight but insist that it's garbage because all modern literature is infantile commercial pap whether it's worth reading.
>If that's correct and they don't know how wrong they are, how are they going to identify as the target of your rant and change?
They won't. They'll do what you're doing, attack me personally and lecture me and, ironically, attempt the exact same "status grab" you're accusing me of. Except something tells me you'll wind up with far more invisible kudo points at the end of the day than I will, because defending Hacker News and refusing to admit its flaws is always a better social strategy than criticizing it. Who's pushing whom under the water here?
I'm attacking one specific comment (yours), linking to the HN guidelines to say why.
You're ranting about "armchair expositors of bullshit ranting about dark matter being a hoax perpetrated by cultural Marxists" [any examples of this happening?], claiming that posting a comment on the internet means the author "believes they are a subject matter expert", presumably reasoning that "posting on the internet" is something only people who believe they are experts do? Claiming that people "wear their ignorance as a badge of elitism", because "not clicking a link" is somehow a claim of eliteness? You're accusing people of "thinking themselves superior", because "not clicking a link" is the same as saying "people who read the link are plebian"? (This isn't encouraging people to read articles, this is "everyone else is so dumb, eyeroll").
In your terms, you're pushing everyone under the water. I'm pushing you and people who post similar "everyone except me is dumb" rants, under the water.
The one where instead of saying "here's a good book", you side-eye your friends and say "OMG Becky can you believe it, they are reading Twilight! THEY think it's a GOOD BOOK! a-haw-HAW-haw-HAW!", where the purpose is not to enjoy whatever book you are reading, or to share good books with other people and why you think they are good, not to improve the quality of books in general or to observe and people-watch with curiosity, but to re-inforce that people who read Twilight are inferior and therefore your group is superior.
From a PG essay[1] "When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people [...] will try to emphasize [their status] by maltreating those they think rank below. But I think the main reason other kids persecute nerds is that it's part of the mechanism of popularity. Popularity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy."
The status grab is "I must be superior to those people, because I'm here, and they are there so I'm not part of them, and they are inferior".
> "The only thing that's going to happen here is that I get aggressively downvoted and the problems I'm complaining about will continue unabated, because mentioning them makes for "tedious reading."
That will continue regardless; a big part of your rant was that Dunning-Kruger dross about how people who write a comment on the internet without adding a pile of IMHO to it must be cock-sure idiots who don't know how dumb and wrong they are. If that's correct and they don't know how wrong they are, how are they going to identify as the target of your rant and change? If they are "soooo confident", why would they know to change their belief?
The only thing that's going to change it is people pointing out incorrectness in a way that helps (i.e. without closing off avenues to change with insults), or downvoting it to hide it so it doesn't spread. In the "be the change you want to see in the world" sense.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html