> The internet (well, just worldwide connectivity IMO) has turned cynicism into a social signaling mechanism, it's not just HN.
We're cutting to the punch here, but: a lot of the thing you are about to list sound less like "the internet" & more like general society waking up & understanding what's less than optimal.
> make a "hot take" against US democrats,
They're pretty useless absolutely but the opposition has been stalwartly effective. Bernie wasn't that far off from being president & even though he's far outside the current party, the core consitutents desire far far more from this party. A lot of democrats-the-people loath the uselessnessness. Hot takes are deserved against any party that has gotten so little done. But also, most democrats are pretty sympathetic to how impossible the situation has been, how constitutionally rigged everything has been against them getting any chance to do anything. It's been decade after decade of democrats having zero actual chance to pass anything meaningful, other than, say, Romneycare. the demorat's are slammable but we all know there's not in many's lifetime been a single chance to determine whether they're actually useful or not.
> CRT, cryptocurrencies, management, VCs, capitalism,
Mostly deserved & out of touch higher echelon's detached from ground truth. The one exception IMO: I don't see any dunking against Critical Race Theory (CRT)s that doesn't come off as maligning & poisonous. There's no popular way to be anti-woke, yay.
> pastafarianism
Again a weird conflation of that which is slammed versus that which slams & is woke. No one makes "hot takes" against pastafarianism. We all know they are already warm saucy goodness. Pastafarians don't make hot takes against anyone else. Like CRT, like US democrats, they're just trying to do good; they only want progress, there's no possession with tearing down the bad or other.
To return to our seeming core disagreement, you said:
> Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications to your in-group:
This feels like turning a hunt for oppression into a reason to disregard people. Many groups deserved to be dunked on, BECAUSE THEY ARE CYNICAL. Because they are inaccessible, not open, not participating, not doing enough, doing bad, or outright acting in bad faith.
It's difficult to figure out exactly where any voice is positioned, but, critical review that says: "you are not being optimistic enough": that's (sometimes) not cynical. Just because review is negative does not make it cynical. One can have higher expectations & use those to stage critical reviews.
> it's not just HN. Cynical "dunks" burnish your qualifications... you'll get all your fellow in-group folks upvoting/retweeting/liking your "hot take". IMO this is the greatest threat of all
I've walked point by point through how I don't see your listed examples as bad or hazarous or cynical. There's due cynicism against bad, there's due well wishes for the good to be better. I'm not completely opposed- there's certainly a critical air about- but to me it's not the internet & a lot of those airs are resistive to oppressionaries, are optimistic in nature. It is a very critical time, absolutely, but I don't see much of the critiques as cynical or performative or harmful: I see them as part of a direly needed push out of the long rut society has been stuck in, & a drive towards better. And one that isn't trying to harm or damage, but to simply make aware, to share.
I don't mean to say that any of these in particular are or are not hostile, dangerous, or negative. They were examples of issues that people like to have "dunks" or "hot takes" on.
> Again a weird conflation of that which is slammed versus that which slams & is woke. No one makes "hot takes" against pastafarianism. We all know they are already warm saucy goodness. Pastafarians don't make hot takes against anyone else. Like CRT, like US democrats, they're just trying to do good; they only want progress, there's no possession with tearing down the bad or other.
I'm not trying to sort these into sides. That's my point.
> This feels like turning a hunt for oppression into a reason to disregard people. Many groups deserved to be dunked on, BECAUSE THEY ARE CYNICAL. Because they are inaccessible, not open, not participating, not doing enough, doing bad, or outright acting in bad faith.
> It's difficult to figure out exactly where any voice is positioned, but, critical review that says: "you are not being optimistic enough": that's (sometimes) not cynical. Just because review is negative does not make it cynical. One can have higher expectations & use those to stage critical reviews.
> There's due cynicism against bad, there's due well wishes for the good to be better. I'm not completely opposed- there's certainly a critical air about- but to me it's not the internet & a lot of those airs are resistive to oppressionaries, are optimistic in nature. It is a very critical time, absolutely, but I don't see much of the critiques as cynical or performative or harmful: I see them as part of a direly needed push out of the long rut society has been stuck in, & a drive towards better.
The long rut of what, on what time scale, when? When was it "better" and when did it become "worse"? It wasn't that long ago that McCarthyism was used to bully political sides, when the US and the Soviet Union propped up brutal puppet regimes to fight proxy wars, when Africa/India/China was divided into an arbitrary map of colonial powers, when queer folks were unacceptable in the general public while being ruthlessly bullied (and this continues to this day!) in private, when Muslims/Arabs/South Asians were regularly frisked in Western airports, when people of color had their lives ruined for the possession of token amounts of recreational drugs. It's always been this way.
My point has nothing to do with either "side". That some of these are negative things by some and positive things by other is also something that I understand and accept. My point is that, when you create group-identity, you begin to get dialogue like "because fuck capitalism" that gets many upvotes/shares/engagement, instead of nuanced arguments like "there's no recourse for labor to fall back onto when management manipulates them". What that does is it crowds out the voices of people interested in novel ideas ("what if I get dunked on for being socialist/capitalist/Georgist/whatever") and shifts the dialogue away from problems and solutions into in-group signaling ("yeah I'm gonna upvote all the anti-capitalist posts because f*** the 1%!"). It's a culture that makes people defensive and adversarial ("ugh I wanna see what IPFS is all about but they're associated with Filecoin which is crypto and all my friends hate crypto so I shouldn't") instead of supportive and uplifting. It also then incenitivizes people ("huh I get lots of upvotes when I hate on <X>, so I should keep doing it") to keep up the cycle of hot takes. When cynicism meets group-identity politics, you get IMO the worst case.
