There is definitely a discussion to be had about property, smarter people than us have had it for at least 150 years (even more, if you include the discussion between Locke and Filmer), don't see anything that cynic about it. I'd go on to say that even Cynicism itself was a really interesting philosophical school [1]. I do agree that that there are some people on this website who still take the IQ thing seriously, but even there, I think that the majority regards it as bogus.
I'm actually a really disappointed in Josh's response. I thought that his open stance on what he'd been doing would mean he'd being open to people criticising what he'd done. He doesn't need to agree with that criticism, but dismissing the whole site as toxic based on that disagreement just feels flippant.
From what I've seen and participated in, the discussion mostly centered around whether this was a good deal for everyone involved and whether or not a greater proportion of a company's success should be attributed to it's employees. At least in my eyes very little of it focused on Josh personally.
His goal in publishing this information seems to be to foster a community of transparency. To that end, his actions appear entirely consistent.
Put another way, what additional information do you want him to convey? His goal is to accurately and openly convey information, and he's basically laid it all out on the table.
You're free to have an opinion on whether his actions were right or wrong, but don't expect him to engage with your criticism when that takes a lot of time and effort (and is not part of his goal).
I think his goal was to help people. The goal of many people in HN comments is to ‘be right’. It’s a cultural thing. What we prioritize, how the community started etc.
I think HN has ‘trying to be helpful’ forces in the long run. There are ideas, content, links to new information that are helpful. But it’s not the priority compared to what many people think is decent. If you look at other online communities that’ll be pretty self-evident.
But again I think the key to HN is it has no direct interest in being helpful. Only as secondary effects. There’s nothing wrong with that - just as there’s nothing wrong with an incubator with a certain philosophy or writing essays that you think are insightful. In the long run, they help. But they don’t prioritize human decency or kindness and there are a lot of false negatives (startups missed in YC, entitlement and biases in some essays, dismissal of what isn’t clearly the right comment, etc).
It’s a cruder world that way. Take for example the culture of ‘X, Y, and Z read drafts of this’ that everyone has emulated. I used to admire that. Team building and acknowledgments! But it’s also encourages a culture of not being open and trying out new ideas. Living in fear of new ideas that will be rejected etc.
And that is something Josh had the balls to reject. There’s no hiding behind his Harvard / MIT connections. There’s just honesty and transparency. HN and YC people could learn a lot from that bravery.
I don't expect him to engage at all. I do think he should be able to handle dissenting opinions without merely dismissing the whole site as toxic on twitter.
Apple wants to alert users to genuine / non-genuine batteries (to mention latest downvote blast). That is evidence of how evil apple is (not even considering how many folks were getting screwed by all the trash batteries going into iphones pretending to be real).
Zoom is so evil for X/Y/Z reason - except zoom is actually easy to use which is what most non HN folks care about - so their "evil" is just optimizing for different goals in some cases.
The negativity and the myopic focus on personal need / preferences really highlights sometimes how just out of touch with the rest of the broader world HN can be.
