It's because there is a vast concerted effort by the political left to destroy Musk now that he is no longer regarded as being strictly on their side. It's at Trumpian scale these days, in terms of the venom being directed at him.
Reddit is overflowing with non-stop Musk hatred. They spout lie after lie about him in every single thread where he's a topic. The most popular lie being that his business efforts - ie his success - were funded by an emerald mine that his father owned (neither thing is true).
I say this as an emotionally independent, objective observer of the craziness, I have no stake in it, and don't feel one way or another about it. The seeming mental illness the topic of Musk seems to draw out of people is astounding however, the herd promptly acts like deranged lunatics when he comes up as a topic.
Until Trump I had never seen anything like it before, in person or online. There must be a name for such a massive scale of crowd insanity, to describe the frothing-at-the-mouth irrationality.
my deranged lunatic hivemind venomous mentally ill frothing-at-the-mouth leftist brain can’t handle how rational this fucking asshole’s take on musk and trump is
there’s also this at the top of the thread:
I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion.
This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.
Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding.
turning one of the most popular sites on the internet into a cesspit of transphobia and nazis: ambivalent
musk fails to appreciate the Twitter brand: angry and disappointed
remember, hacker news is a bastion of high-quality discussion. fucking shitheads
the incredible power of paul graham’s Lisp mastery
in general, how do you feel like lobste.rs and the orange site compare? the one time I gave lobsters a fair shake it felt like HN but more so, but that might have just been a bad day for the site. looking at your top score list (great work by the way), it looks like lobsters might attract a slightly more technical crowd? but the orange site is largely marketing folks and middle managers masquerading as engineers, so the bar isn’t too high
We can actively chase cryptofascists off of Lobsters, which is nice. We can also mock and fisk them, and usually the moderators allow it. In that sense, it isn't a literal Nazi bar like HN. Otherwise, yeah, the topics and attitudes are mostly the same.
I did some looking around lobsters.
From a front page post:
top comment:
Same poster goes on regular multiparagraph culture war rants to the point that the other users refer to them by name.
It seems like more of the same BS. Angry nerds waxing poetically about shit that doesn't matter.
HN and Lobste.rs differ only in degree. It's basically the same audience, but the mods on lobste.rs have a different focus.
As soon as I saw that submission I knew someone would recpmmend 4chan, and it wasn't surprisnig it was that user. After a while you learn who the idiots are and either avoid interacting with them or ignore them. Overt racism, misogyny and homophobia usually get forceful pushback.
Is it really a missing stair if the guy is consistently highly upvoted. The 4chan recommendation is top comment as of right now.
How many upvotes are for "4chan is good actually" (pushed back against in the comments) and how much is it for spleen against mainstream social media, which face it, is upvote bait in the fediverse too?
I don't know, but I suspect it's a mix, with a majority a pining for the good old days of Real Forums and Usenet.
that's what that's called? that's an incredibly useful term to keep in mind
I don't accept this characterization. When I say "ignore", I mean I don't reply to their comments, or upvote their submissions. (lobste.rs does not have downvotes, but it has flags. I use those when appropriate).
The important thing for me is that lobste.rs is not a welcoming place for people who promote racism, sexism, homophobia, cryptocurrency, or the worst parts of the California ideology. Do these people exist on the site? Yes, and I know who they are, and I keep an eye on them. Do their comments about these things get massively upvoted? No. Are they banned if they persist? Yes.
If this changes in a meaningful way, I'm out.
That actually sounds pretty good, how do people get invited these days?
They get an invite from someone who has been a member for more than 70 days 😉
The invite tree is public and many people (me among them) require a minimum of vetting (code forge account, social media presence) before extending one. PM me with details!
Thanks for the courtesy, but I don't think I'd want to join it with my internet arguments/drama/sneering handle!
@kuna @gerikson The point of the missing stair analogy is that everyone routing around the missing stair is leaving a dangerous structural fault, and the only solution is to fix it (stop or eject the bad behavior). The linked Wikipedia page says the exact same thing, actually.
I don't accept that a few users advocating for using 4chan are actually dangerous, at the level of the community member that inspired the coinage. That's all.
If y'all find participating in such a community distasteful, that's fine. I find it acceptable, but I'm in no way proselyting for it.
Thanks for expanding! I should probably stop replying to this thread.
I've gotten a lot to think about.
Interestingly, the user in question was called out 2 years ago for being a missing stair: https://lobste.rs/s/qcenv8/rms_addresses_free_software_community#c_fvbmgv
Lobste.rs is where I spend most of my time online...
The focus is much more on the technical side. Submissions have to be tagged by a pre-approved set of tags (pre-censorship!) and users can flag a submission as spam or off-topic. https://lobste.rs/tags
Membership is invite-only, which does tend to enforce echo chambers, but at least prevents drive-by spamming, and does keep track of who invites who: https://lobste.rs/u#gerikson
Moderation is transparent: https://lobste.rs/moderations
It's a much smaller community, and I believe the mods are quite active "behind the scenes" in putting out fires. FWIW I've read that dang works fulltime moderating HN but it's a thankless job.
If you enjoy discussing programming and IT, lobste.rs is great. It's also quite welcoming towards LGBT+ folks, although there's a vocal contingent who are opposed to "SJWs". Here's a representative example thread, with an on topic submission from a user who happens to be an outspoken furry: https://lobste.rs/s/mn1am1. The usernames with strike-throughs are no longer active, generally they have been banned (the ban reason can be seen by clicking on the username).
Edit to add
cryptocurrencieswas renamed tomerkle-trees.