I find the internet full of panic and fear and negativity these days and it overstates how pervasive a thing is.
Example: I travel to Disney World sometimes. There's a recent hubub about transportation and the blame is all on "OMG THE INFLUENCERS ARE EVERYWHERE".
In those situations it's interesting how many people will spread those stories about influencers saturating the park / causing problems and yet ... most every user who replies "I've never seen one at the park".
Everyone's experience is valid IMO. Everyone gets to express their lived experience.
There used to be a lot of "abusive start up demands massive hours" talk on HN. I actually think people expressing how it isn't that way everywhere / doesn't have to be that way is VERY helpful. Folks in those situations now know that maybe they have options.
Think someone says i'm thirsty all the time because there's little clean water available, what's available is expensive but it could be better if we did so-and-so.
and someone replies I'm not thirsty.
The idea that if we're discussing a problem that only people with that problem may share their experience is absurd at face value.
"I'm insured!"
"Open-source software projects are being spammed with LLM generated PRs. Contributions are becoming more restricted".
"I have a repo that isn't being spammed!"
Sometimes sharing a somewhat related experience is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, and also completely uninteresting. It does not matter that somehow their "experience is valid".
If people's opinions or thoughts don't fit a narrative you want, a forum likely isn't the place to find it.
Everyone gets to share, there's no rules here about not sharing / having a different experience than others.
I have no idea why you're making a comparison to a TV show; nothing that was described was anything akin to that. I just made examples out of insufferable and clueless forum comments, that very clearly detract from discussion more than they contribute to it.
I don't think you should assume that describing meaningless and unrelated anecdotes as "uninteresting" is equivalent to users calling for a forum ban, which is seemingly what you're doing when you point to forum rules when encountering a critique.
>Maybe I just have abnormal leverage
while the other opens with
>I'm curious
The top two top-level comments are responding to this trend, so I assume it is or was present, but I'm not seeing it. I do wish people would reply to the comments they find objectionable instead of doing these meta comments subtweeting them because I find I run into this issue often lately here (pot-kettle objection noted and accurate).
It's telling if someone can't actually find a comment to reply to in order to address whatever meta issue they're concerned about.
...than it does for you, which means there's an opportunity for someone to expend resources verifying and characterizing the claimed difference.
IMO, the only reasonable argument one could take, is that roughly believes hackers should be curious, and that if you want to treat humans with the respect they deserve as individuals, you should default to trying to believe what they say, listening when they try to communicate, and avoid ignoring what they're trying to communicate just so you can interject something unrelated about yourself.
I not only agree, but I'm glad someone took a moment to encourage treating others with respect.
Explaining how to update your understanding feels like something that shouldn't need explaining, so I have no idea how well it'll turn out, but I'll give it a shot.
In the case of the original objection, the problem was instead of being willing to believe the other person commenting is being honest, and that they do actually have a manager so detached from reality, and what reasonable and fair behavior would be, that their manager expects them to respond to messages 24/7. Remember, we're assuming this person actually exists in real life. Either you believe this person exists, or you don't, or you actively refuse to believe that this person exists. For the above case, the argument was never you should pretend your boss behaves like that. The recommendation is that you assume the person you're talking to is not lying to you, until you have specific concrete evidence otherwise. If you don't have concrete evidence they are lying, you should believe them, and you should believe that [this person] thinks their boss expects them to be available 24/7.
This is an update to your world view. If you thought no boss could ever behave like this, your world view should now include there are plenty of people who believe their boss behaves like that. You don't have to discard your entire world view to say
shit, some people really do have a bully on a power trip instead of a manager who wants to help them be successful.
hell, you don't even have to believe that, you could just as easily update your worldview to include, wow, there are a lot more people who are afraid to say no than I thought there were. The point isn't to replace whatever idea you had, the point was always, listen to people and try to understand their point of reference, and try to use the things they have learned about life to help yourself, and if you're not incompetent, hopefully help them too. But seriously if you're still so stuck on how you just can not listen to them without completely discarding what you know today, pretend they aren't lying, but they're just engaging in some role play. In this magical make believe world, there is this evil bossman, how can we defeat him?!
If this idea, of picking up new information in the shape of an opinions from another person with eyes and the ability to form coherent sentences and complaints, is really so foreign to you... perhaps you do need to completely discard your current model for understanding, and replace it with a diff model for understanding that can be modified and updated in place without needing to start over.
You don't need to accept their reality as true, to believe them and want to help. Saying "that's not how my boss acts" is an attempt at a refutation, and a denial of their expression. You can doubt that their boss is really that bad, but still be willing to see if you are able to help, instead of rejecting them with, sorry I already believe something different and to even consider if you're describing something that actually happens, I'm going to assert my experience is exactly what it's like for everyone.
Becoming harder and harder by the day as the internet and society change, with the bots and the growing inequality and all.
I'm not sure about that, but to your higher point, HN hasn't taken pride in it's nominative determinism nature, nor does it appear to be a desired trait from the majority. But the continued enshittifcation aside, "it doesn't happen to me" is still a useful observation. That shouldn't be read as a refutation, because I already agree with your point. The intent of most of the comments your objecting to, likely does come from a narcissistic compulsion, to turn the topic to something about them.
But I could easily say "it doesn't happen to me" while (poorly) trying to convey a message of encouragement towards self-confidence, and self-worth. Rather, it doesn't happen to me, because I haven't been gaslit into the shared and common delusion that: if you get fired, it'll because of something you did, and not because your manager felt like it. "Employee didn't answer the call/message at 10pm" is the reason they'll invent to fire you after they've decided to fire you. It won't be the root cause. You can just turn your messages off, and nothing bad will happen because you didn't respond.
Are there dysfunctional companies where something like that will get you fired? Absolutely! I would have hoped that existing wrongful termination laws would have already prevented this kinda thing, (if they don't that's a much larger problem) but I have no objections to making this an explicit law to compel the behavior of the sub-human group that would rather mistreat their coworkers. But given that within places that behave like this, this law would only fix a small subset of the pervasive human rights abuses inflicted during non-working hours. I feel like something more expansive should be done to protect those people from clearly abusive behavior.
I still expect that the vast majority of the people that would benefit from this, could simply just turn their phone off, and no one would notice... because while it's a problem, that does happen to some people, one that needs to be fixed! It doesn't happen to me, and probably doesn't really happen to you (most people) either.