alt Hacker NewsI don't think HN needs the top comment to be a vague attack on someone in response to a blog post that the comment doesn't even interact with.
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But seriously, I think the level of discourse has gone down considerably on HN in the last few years. I know people always say this in their forum but I think it's true.
For instance, you'll see a post about GPT. Top comments are often "I use Claude", completely irrelevant. And then when [political thing happens] you get these passive-aggressive submissions with a lot of upvotes "how to switch to Claude". It's all just so exhausting. Constantly this moral grand-standing. Here is an example:
> I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure they would allow AGI to be used for truly evil purposes, and the events of this week have only convinced me further.
Sir, this is a Wendy's
I think it’s time to accept that Internet comments are the bloodsport of our day.
Not everyone knows who geohot is and even if they do they may not see the url handle. They may (like me) think why is a glorified shower thought tweet on top of HN.
They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example. This could really make them decide not to even spend too much time thinking about the passage which in theory is profound for 10 seconds but no further.
As much as ad hominem attacks are not great approaches, the one scenario I feel it's justified is in cases like this.