I’m in my 40s and have been working in tech for a long time. I remember a time when it genuinely felt like the industry was a force for good in the world, opening doors for people to do things they never used to be able to do. And the companies were so open, e.g. I remember Facebook’s OpenGraph opening up a world of new social apps that were exciting to develop and to use. For sure there was a level of youthful naïveté at work there but it was still an exciting and interesting time to be in the industry.
That positivity still happens today but to a far less degree. Nowadays it feels like every major tech player is all about lockin, about dark patterns that draw users into their services whether they’re happy about it or not.
We used to point and laugh at the cynical, out of touch companies like Oracle. Now it seems everyone aspires to be them. So yeah, I’m often negative on HN.
Apple, Google, or Meta?
Apple obviously. They protect their users and still have a generally positive social vibe.
Meta and Google are largely only spoken of in negative light socially, and constantly castigated for their "user hostile" behavior.
But what is the ultimate irony here?
Apple only exists for people with money. It's a pay-to-play enterprise, and only a small sliver of the global population can afford to be part of it.
Google and Meta welcome everyone, and give everyone access to the same services and features (by and large).
I think there are a lot of people, who if they truly stepped back and understood this whole picture, would be left in a tornado of a soul search. How could the free companies with no bias towards wealth possibly end up as the bad guys?
Is that a serious question? They are ad companies. They don't do charity.
And one company had as a slogan "don't be evil" - they got rid of. And the other one was started with the words about their users
"they trust me. Dumb fucks"
They literally are the bad guys. Google started different, but now I don't see any value they care for except making more money by more web dominance. And with that dominance, spy, sell the data or use it to hijack peoples attention and manipulate it.
As a side note, the "openness" at the times you discussed were still very limited in demography and geography.
Your perspective is common and I see it a lot, but primarily in older and jaded developers.
When I switch cohorts and work with younger people in the real world (not chronically online) it’s a complete 180: Back to being excited about tech and the future, not really dwelling on the things that HNers complain about because they’re too busy looking forward than back at the tech world.
How does this younger cohort feel about locked down devices, App Store distribution and the like? In my experience younger people don’t think about it at all, because they aren’t aware of what the alternative could even be.
Lots of people are using locked down devices, but the higher friction alternatives just lost a lot of their friction.
Combine that with Windows getting noticeably worse and more aggressively annoying, and it might finally be The Year Of The Linux Desktop.
On a side note, so are the bugs.
These excessive daily updates I get on my linux are exhausting. For example, libre office started lagging on a large document I frequent daily and I had to rollback.
I am 110% sure, because the young people I socialize with are operating in a tech environment that is more free and open than what I had as a kid.
The amount of open software and platforms we have right now would be mind blowing to younger me. The fact that I can run high quality LLMs on my laptop and even use them to open up old, closed games I had as a kid is incredible.
> How does this younger cohort feel about locked down devices, App Store distribution and the like?
Honestly? They DGAF. Their phones are communication devices and convenience things in their pocket. They have so many actual computers, SBCs, and microcontrollers to play with and they just want their phones to be phones.
Those who do care about open platforms vote with their wallet and buy one. They’re pragmatic. They don’t buy an iPhone and then whine about it being locked down because they know that the iPhone is not what you buy if that’s your goal.
You also have to remember that they grew up in the age of janky jailbroken phone mods. Jailbreaking your phone wasn’t equivalent to freedom, it was what people did when they wanted crazy fonts and colors and widgets on their phone until it bugged out and broke so bad they had to wipe it and start over. They got their fill of jailbreaking and moved on.
> In my experience younger people don’t think about it at all, because they aren’t aware of what the alternative could even be.
I think this mindset is unfairly smug and dismissive. Like only the old people are capable of understanding technology and the world. In my experience the young people know more about the current open alternatives and their options than I do if for no other reason than they’re more online, have more free time, and have probably watched 80 YouTube videos talking about it this year.
Would you be open to accepting the idea that maybe they do know what’s out there, and they just have different priorities than you?
What tech environments are you using that are more open now than in the past? It certainly seems you're conflating LLMs and their ability to 'create anything (regardless of quality or level of skill of the creator) on demand' rather than the software & services currently provided by Microsoft/Meta/Google/Amazon et al. that have slowly monopolized essentially everything and pushed the smaller players out. I'm referring to the majority of software and services available to the general tech using public.
But then you're talking about highly privileged people being optimistic.
It's easy to be positive when you grow up with the kind of wealth that gives you access to expensive hardware, as indicated by your statements "LLMs on my laptop" and "They have so many actual computers, SBCs, and microcontrollers to play with".
There's a few ways to go here. 1) (vast majority of people) don't even notice what's going on and generally fine with things. 2) notice, and sink into negativity and helplessness. 3) notice, and actively weed out the garbage.
Usually it is the titles and posts underneath rather than users who make me less happy
HN is full of people who want to take other people's money. It should be in the forefront of your mind anytime someone wants to push something here. Nerdy tech discussions are a side effect, and has nothing to do with the motivations of this platform.
I think the difference I'm seeing, again from the outside, is that (a) people who don't eat, sleep, and breathe tech are entering the field because it pays well, and (b) the people who do finally took notice that their passion is a trap (a well paying trap, but a trap nonetheless).
But isn’t it just shift of the tech in general?
From quirky, optimistic, positive, “don’t be evil”, inclusive ~20 years ago.
To corporate, creepy, fascist, ultra greedy since ~10 years[1] ago and onwards to this day.
I could feel gradual change of comments more into right political spectrum, since 7-8 years.
[1] Personally - Cambridge Analytica and Facebook scandal is that point for me.
The slice of software development that is purely "finding technical solutions" is shrinking.
You increasingly need to identify with the purpose of the software you are developing.
Spaces of detached "purely technical" software development are shrinking.
So you either say your job is to turn specs into software, then you need to aim at technically demanding tasks. Or you aim at being good at doing this at scale without being particularly involved with the purpose.
The pure "developing an efficient implementation of this clearly defined requirement" part of software engineering is retreating to spaces with really thanklessly complex or tight requirements, and even then, you need to be extraordinaly good.
The gray area between "software where the tiniest bug is a legal liability" and "software that seems cool, fix bugs later" is shrinking.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Twitter/X has been growing as a place for quality discussion for me. That claim will be unbelievable to many here, because the average quality of posts on that site is extremely low. The killer feature is being able to cultivate your follow list and your block list together. If you can stay away from the ragebait, block the anger engagement farmers who worm their way into every discussion (Theo and similar accounts) and follow people when you see high quality posts of theirs shared, you start moving toward a feed with good signal.
Some people can’t help but get pulled into the vortex of ragebait and clickbait on sites like that. Those people should stay away, of course. If you can’t help but click on today’s drama or you get distracted or outraged easily, the Twitter firehose is not a good place to be.
I think you would be hard pressed to find much positive sentiment about a company like Facebook here; eg a post 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215
There are certain threads that always invite a lot of negativity just because of the subject matter. It’s relatively easy to avoid those once you spot the pattern …
Every comment thread got dragged into talking about the same few dozen things (or people) no matter where it started and the same shallow reddit level comments seemed to be all over the place.
Whereas before even on contentious topics there would be viewpoints like X s negative in these ways but if we also consider Y, W and Z these could be confounding factors, people were open to alternative takes and wanted to learn. Even on subjects I disagreed with I came out of it feeling like I better understood things, and other viewpoints. Nowadays though it feels like if the headline read "SpaceX space craft contacted by extra-terrestrials" it'd take 30 minutes to turn into a discussion of Musk.
Problem is I need to stay in the loop on the tech news scene that isn't shallow stories written by "tech journalists" who have a PHB understanding of the issue they're covering, or thinly vieled marketing brochures.
If anyone has any pointers to where I could find that I'd appreciate it. Moreover if anyone knows of some semi-private communities that would take in a poor internet refuge seeking a new tech land to call home I'd appreciate an introduction.
It is semi-private as it is invite-based but still big. Compared to here it has less "industry news" and more "hacker content"
You're fooling yourself if you think your opinions, particularly on matters outside of your direct experience, can exist independent of well funded influence campaigns.
There’s a reason it spawned so many cults historically.
Edit: I wish HN showed some kind of indicator next to usernames, like a small flag for the poster’s country. I’d love to see how reactions to an article vary depending on where people live.