aschrijver community-team
I am very curious what you got out of the article. Note that your comments will be published both to the forum thread and the related blog post.
I am very curious what you got out of the article. Note that your comments will be published both to the forum thread and the related blog post.
Hacker News is fine, but it has its own biases and social effects that are not entirely “healthy”, shall we say – as all social networks suffer. Hence I personally avoid the rabbit hole of Hacker News conversation pits. At least for me, it’s a healthier choice for me and makes better use of my life time on this planet. 
I’ve followed Venkatesh Rao directly for other reasons. His topics become really heady (like his Unflattened Hobbesian analysis a couple years ago). Perhaps unnecessarily so sometimes. I feel his common trap is that mastery of a topic is reflected in being able to describe a topic simply, and he often struggles with that latter part. Awesome ideas, but I often feel he isn’t the most effective storyteller for those ideas.
For the most part, it’s a really good article. I agree with the lack of identity analysis. But I am not ready to leap to the conclusion that this is the prime engine for cultural flame wars. I think we need to ask a few more of the five “whys” to get at the core of it, and his analysis sits somewhere in the middle of the stack.
For example, taking the step beyond identity into belonging would be a better exploration. There’s also a great lack of attention to the pain and damages many humans naturally carry with them, but they often lack a reconstructive, redeeming outlet.
As such, I DON’T see this as a direct impact on “Humane Technology”. The problem isn’t primarily the technology … that’s mostly a catalyst and a symptom. These aren’t questions of ethics.
You might even make the argument that the toxicity of the Internet of Beefs is actually a form of therapy. I see parallels in the country I live in, where some of the most warm and humble people in the world turn into psychotic monsters when they get behind the wheel of a car. It’s completely incongruous, but I think I feel a form of an outlet and personal therapy.
By similar measure, if I were to suggest there was a “Vehicular Traffic of Beefs” or to suggest there was an ethical problem that needs to be addressed by car and road design, few would take me very seriously.
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I agree with Greg, tired of hacker news ads and fwiw I was severely chastised for pasting walls of text from articles by board staff. This type hypocrisy and soapbox politics will drive users away from here.