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October 15, 2013

Filed under: culture»internet»excession

Hacker No

A few years ago, I started blacklisting web sites that I didn't think were healthy: gadget sites, some of the more strident political sites, game blogs that just churned crappy content all day long. If it didn't leave me better informed, or I felt like my traffic there was supporting bad content, or if the only reason I visited was for the rush of outrage, I tried to cut it out (or at least cut it down). All in all, I think it was a good decision. I felt better about myself, at least.

This week, I added Hacker News to the list of sites I don't visit. HN is the current hotspot for tech community news--kind of a modern-day Slashdot. Unfortunately (possibly by virtue of being run by venture capital firm Y Combinator), it's also equally targeted at A) terrible startup company brogrammers and B) libertarian bitcoin enthusiasts. Browsing the links submitted by the community there is kind of like eating at dive restaurants in a new city: you'll find some winners, but the price is a fair amount of food poisoning.

For a while, I've been running a Greasemonkey script that tries to filter out the worst of the listings (sample search terms: lisp, techcrunch, hustle). This is not as easy as it sounds, because HN is written using the cutting-edge technologies of 1995: a bunch of nested tables with inline styles, served via Lisp variant that causes constant timeouts on anything other than the front page. But even though I had a workable filter from a technical perspective, at some point, it's time to hang up the scripts and admit that the HN community is toxic. There's only so long you can not read the comments, especially on any thread involving sexism, racism, and other real problems that Silicon Valley would like to pretend don't exist.

For example, here's some of the things I've been trying to ignore:

  • Women don't want to be in tech, just like they didn't want to be doctors or lawyers just don't want to be in tech, any more than they wanted to be doctors, lawyers, or astronauts.
  • Literally blaming women for being sexually assaulted at tech conferences
  • It's great to be homeless, and by "homeless" we mean rich.
  • My favorite: Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, admits that he won't fund people with an accent. Here's the fun part: Graham is one of the "major contributors" to FWD.us, Mark Zuckerberg's self-serving immigration reform lobby group. In other words, foreign labor is welcomed, unless they want to start a company.

The tech bubble isn't just financial: these are signs of a community that's isolated from difference — of gender, of opinion, and of class. The venture capital system even protects them from consequences: how much money will Twitter lose this year? The fog of arrested development that hangs over Hacker News is its own argument for increased diversity in the tech industry. And it affects more than just a few comment threads, unless you also think the best use of smart people's time is the development of a $130 smoke detector that talks to your iPad.

Leaving a well-known watering hole like this is a little scary — HN is how I've stayed current on a lot of new developments in the field. It's frustrating, feeling like good information is being held hostage by a bunch of creeps. But given a choice between reading an article a couple of days after everyone else or feeling like I constantly need a shower, I'm happy to work on my patience.

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