7 ms·

Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousn

Just want to say, this comment section on this website would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s wild: all the engineers have developed class consciousness. I wonder how that happened? Anyway, it’s fun to watch, but remember to stay sane guys, be aware of the pendulum dynamics.

raincole 1mo ago
> I wonder how that happened Layoff.
- throwaway_7274 1mo ago
  Rhetorically wondering :)
  - jacquesm 1mo ago
    Unfortunately it is not just the engineers that get laid off. Try finding a job as a translator, a copy writer or some other entry or mid level service economy kind of job.
    - throwaway_7274 1mo ago
      It’s unfortunate no matter who!
      - jacquesm 1mo ago
        Yes, but those other people can not be said to be causing this for themselves.
nozzlegear 1mo ago
> be aware of the pendulum dynamics. What do you mean?
- throwaway_7274 1mo ago
  People overcorrect, even when making directionally necessary corrections.
gibspaulding 1mo ago
Wild indeed. It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.
- reducesuffering 1mo ago
  I mean one look at both commentary and it's clear HN has devolved considerably. Just look at the atrocious difference in intelligent reasoning in this thread's comments compared to a LessWrong post right now: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9RL9MuGZjzm4q3gKG/what-just-happened-a-retrospective-of-ai-alignment https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9RL9MuGZjzm4q3gKG/what-just-...
  - Karrot_Kream 1mo ago
    LW stayed selective as a forum, HN became the home of refugees from Reddit. HN reads more like yet-another-subreddit these days than an independent forum. FWIW I think this is an artifact of site design more than anything else. A commentary site like HN in 2026 encourages hot takes and karma farming. All the "social media" with higher quality commentary like Substack and LessWrong center a large text blob of thought at the top and encourage reading more than writing. This puts up just enough of a barrier to write a hot take that you need to read the whole article and puts enough UI friction from leaving a throwaway angry comment that those folks will scroll away. HN on the other hand all but encourages shallow posting. The article isn't posted, commentary is more prominent than the article itself. Leaving a comment takes 2-3 clicks and the comment editing flow excludes every other comment on the site, encouraging a write-first mentality. Ranking commentary based on upvotes offers a sweet dopamine hit over collecting karma. In 2026 these all encourage low quality engagement. HN's UI has stayed relatively the same over the years while the Internet around it hasn't and I think its UI now acts as a low quality commentary attractor. LW changed its site design to stem the tide of low quality comments that show up here. LW comments certainly have their problems, but then, we humans all have problems :) On balance the community is much sharper and much more capable of having intellectually heavyweight, sober discussions on controversial topics. Of course nothing seems to trump my own friend network.
seydor 1mo ago
it's not fun - this forum started with infinite optimism in entrepreneurship, the PG stuff. Then about five years in it turned to "join a BigTech or you ll never be rich", then after AI everyone realized they are on borrowed time and most of them are already outside of the game, if there is a game at all.
maxnevermind 1mo ago
> I wonder how that happened? My explanation is - the technology is amazing and engineers admired it, but CEOs kept talking about an exponential curve while engineers on the ground started to notice signs of Gartner hype cycle curve.
- hapticmonkey 1mo ago
  My take is that engineers were hypnotised by the technology (which is incredible) and they ignored the downstream social/political/economic factors until it became too obvious. Like moths to a flame. We saw this play out with the social media era. Incredible technology but it’s now ossified into deteriorating closed platforms mostly filled with algorithmic, ragebait slop surrounded by ads. Fool me once.
advisedwang 1mo ago
I think the hyper business oriented, technology first view that is what HN typically has been is actually the exception. Open Source, hacker culture, scorn of "the suits", the love of sci-fi and it's attendant politics -- the bulk of actual technical people have a long history of being very politically aware and deliberately eschewing money for their values. It was rarely Marxist Class-Conciousness type stuff, but it certainly was aware of the political environment we were in.
- Karrot_Kream 1mo ago
  Right, so why did this site revert to the mean then? Just because every noodle place is mediocre doesn't mean I want my noodle place to become mediocre.
  - advisedwang 1mo ago
    My guess is growth alone explains the change. It went from being a niche site that had views representing that niche to a broad site with broad set of views represented in proportion to their prevelance.
GPerson 1mo ago
The early hacker culture in the 1970s inherited the political leanings of 1960s counterculture, so there’s nothing about being into tech that’s in opposition to class consciousness.
- simoncion 1mo ago
  > ...there’s nothing about being into tech that’s in opposition to class consciousness. I agree about the ethos and ethics of early hackers. But, I note that -by volume- most of the folks who do programming and nearly all of the people who are software-industry managers [0] are not hackers. [0] I'm including managers at all levels, including the executive levels.
  - jacquesm 1mo ago
    And in spite of the name, most the people on HackerNews.
    - simoncion 1mo ago
      Yep. Though, given that this was originally a message board and hangout for folks deeply involved with YCombinator, and that prior to LLM Mania, the most commonly posted stuff was either "Techie 'lifestyle' blogging" or "Vapid thinkpieces", it's not surprising.
      - GPerson 1mo ago
        There was also a really terrible era of JavaScript frameworks coming out constantly. That all feels so quint now.
mekael 1mo ago
Some of us have always had a class consciousness, we just tend not to be boisterous about it. Mine is based on two things: 1. The fact that i grew up in poverty and never want anyone else to suffer that fate. 2. I was raised in a religious tradition that can be accurately described as socialist.
nater5000 1mo ago
I've really only ever interacted with two kinds of engineers with respect to their take on AI: 1) Those with cautious, but enthusiastic, optimism for the technology and an understanding that things never work ideally in tech and any advancement that moves the needle even slightly is worth embracing. 2) Those who are so dogmatically opposed to AI that they leave logical conversation at the door in favor of just repeating whatever negative gotcha they heard last when the topic of AI comes up. I'll say that the ratio of these engineers seems to be about 10:1 in real life versus 1:10 online, at least in my experience, roughly speaking. I don't think I've actually ever interacted with actual "AI/Tech Bros" who are obnoxiously pro-AI the same way that many of the people who are "anti-AI" come off. The data I'm working with is biased (I've been working in high tech for a while now), but I'm left to conclude that the people who love to hate on AI online are those who love to hate online while most other people aren't particularly interested in defending a technology online that they feel is inevitable and doesn't really need defending.
nitwit005 1mo ago
I'd caution that you just have independent groups in some of these comment sections. You sometimes see people on reddit amazed that "reddit's opinion seems to have changed". Nothing changed, just a different subgroup. You'll see the other opinion again if you wait for another similar article. For example, the "did bother reading the article" crowd is attracted to certain headlines, and this probably isn't one of those.

raincole 1mo ago

> I wonder how that happened Layoff.

throwaway_7274 1mo ago
Rhetorically wondering :)
- jacquesm 1mo ago
  Unfortunately it is not just the engineers that get laid off. Try finding a job as a translator, a copy writer or some other entry or mid level service economy kind of job.
  - throwaway_7274 1mo ago
    It’s unfortunate no matter who!
    - jacquesm 1mo ago
      Yes, but those other people can not be said to be causing this for themselves.

nozzlegear 1mo ago

> be aware of the pendulum dynamics. What do you mean?

throwaway_7274 1mo ago
People overcorrect, even when making directionally necessary corrections.

gibspaulding 1mo ago

Wild indeed. It seems like a couple of years ago the HN and LW commentariat had a lot in common, but they’ve drifted so far in opposite directions that they look more like opposing political parties today.

reducesuffering 1mo ago
I mean one look at both commentary and it's clear HN has devolved considerably. Just look at the atrocious difference in intelligent reasoning in this thread's comments compared to a LessWrong post right now: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9RL9MuGZjzm4q3gKG/what-just-happened-a-retrospective-of-ai-alignment https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9RL9MuGZjzm4q3gKG/what-just-...
- Karrot_Kream 1mo ago
  LW stayed selective as a forum, HN became the home of refugees from Reddit. HN reads more like yet-another-subreddit these days than an independent forum. FWIW I think this is an artifact of site design more than anything else. A commentary site like HN in 2026 encourages hot takes and karma farming. All the "social media" with higher quality commentary like Substack and LessWrong center a large text blob of thought at the top and encourage reading more than writing. This puts up just enough of a barrier to write a hot take that you need to read the whole article and puts enough UI friction from leaving a throwaway angry comment that those folks will scroll away. HN on the other hand all but encourages shallow posting. The article isn't posted, commentary is more prominent than the article itself. Leaving a comment takes 2-3 clicks and the comment editing flow excludes every other comment on the site, encouraging a write-first mentality. Ranking commentary based on upvotes offers a sweet dopamine hit over collecting karma. In 2026 these all encourage low quality engagement. HN's UI has stayed relatively the same over the years while the Internet around it hasn't and I think its UI now acts as a low quality commentary attractor. LW changed its site design to stem the tide of low quality comments that show up here. LW comments certainly have their problems, but then, we humans all have problems :) On balance the community is much sharper and much more capable of having intellectually heavyweight, sober discussions on controversial topics. Of course nothing seems to trump my own friend network.

seydor 1mo ago

it's not fun - this forum started with infinite optimism in entrepreneurship, the PG stuff. Then about five years in it turned to "join a BigTech or you ll never be rich", then after AI everyone realized they are on borrowed time and most of them are already outside of the game, if there is a game at all.

maxnevermind 1mo ago

> I wonder how that happened? My explanation is - the technology is amazing and engineers admired it, but CEOs kept talking about an exponential curve while engineers on the ground started to notice signs of Gartner hype cycle curve.

hapticmonkey 1mo ago
My take is that engineers were hypnotised by the technology (which is incredible) and they ignored the downstream social/political/economic factors until it became too obvious. Like moths to a flame. We saw this play out with the social media era. Incredible technology but it’s now ossified into deteriorating closed platforms mostly filled with algorithmic, ragebait slop surrounded by ads. Fool me once.

advisedwang 1mo ago

I think the hyper business oriented, technology first view that is what HN typically has been is actually the exception. Open Source, hacker culture, scorn of "the suits", the love of sci-fi and it's attendant politics -- the bulk of actual technical people have a long history of being very politically aware and deliberately eschewing money for their values. It was rarely Marxist Class-Conciousness type stuff, but it certainly was aware of the political environment we were in.

Karrot_Kream 1mo ago
Right, so why did this site revert to the mean then? Just because every noodle place is mediocre doesn't mean I want my noodle place to become mediocre.
- advisedwang 1mo ago
  My guess is growth alone explains the change. It went from being a niche site that had views representing that niche to a broad site with broad set of views represented in proportion to their prevelance.

GPerson 1mo ago

The early hacker culture in the 1970s inherited the political leanings of 1960s counterculture, so there’s nothing about being into tech that’s in opposition to class consciousness.

simoncion 1mo ago
> ...there’s nothing about being into tech that’s in opposition to class consciousness. I agree about the ethos and ethics of early hackers. But, I note that -by volume- most of the folks who do programming and nearly all of the people who are software-industry managers [0] are not hackers. [0] I'm including managers at all levels, including the executive levels.
- jacquesm 1mo ago
  And in spite of the name, most the people on HackerNews.
  - simoncion 1mo ago
    Yep. Though, given that this was originally a message board and hangout for folks deeply involved with YCombinator, and that prior to LLM Mania, the most commonly posted stuff was either "Techie 'lifestyle' blogging" or "Vapid thinkpieces", it's not surprising.
    - GPerson 1mo ago
      There was also a really terrible era of JavaScript frameworks coming out constantly. That all feels so quint now.

mekael 1mo ago

Some of us have always had a class consciousness, we just tend not to be boisterous about it. Mine is based on two things: 1. The fact that i grew up in poverty and never want anyone else to suffer that fate. 2. I was raised in a religious tradition that can be accurately described as socialist.

nater5000 1mo ago

I've really only ever interacted with two kinds of engineers with respect to their take on AI: 1) Those with cautious, but enthusiastic, optimism for the technology and an understanding that things never work ideally in tech and any advancement that moves the needle even slightly is worth embracing. 2) Those who are so dogmatically opposed to AI that they leave logical conversation at the door in favor of just repeating whatever negative gotcha they heard last when the topic of AI comes up. I'll say that the ratio of these engineers seems to be about 10:1 in real life versus 1:10 online, at least in my experience, roughly speaking. I don't think I've actually ever interacted with actual "AI/Tech Bros" who are obnoxiously pro-AI the same way that many of the people who are "anti-AI" come off. The data I'm working with is biased (I've been working in high tech for a while now), but I'm left to conclude that the people who love to hate on AI online are those who love to hate online while most other people aren't particularly interested in defending a technology online that they feel is inevitable and doesn't really need defending.

nitwit005 1mo ago

I'd caution that you just have independent groups in some of these comment sections. You sometimes see people on reddit amazed that "reddit's opinion seems to have changed". Nothing changed, just a different subgroup. You'll see the other opinion again if you wait for another similar article. For example, the "did bother reading the article" crowd is attracted to certain headlines, and this probably isn't one of those.