Which is an attempt to actively legislate morality--not that I necessarily disagree with you. I mean more to point out that there is a certain despair in choosing (what I see as) an impossible solution as the 'only way', even if it is a straightforward attempt to clarify the lines of responsibility and execution.
I appreciate especially the description of the Valley as a postmodern corporate organization.
Merry Christmas. I follow your writing, and if ever you are fully hell-banned I hope that's the day I stop coming here altogether. For now, though, I'm still a tech worker, and this is still the water cooler.
Why should he? You clearly haven't repented of your impudence, and the authoritarian culture here only responds to criticism of a proper (read: flattering) tone.
I suppose it's kind of you to give dang the benefit of the doubt, but would he really be here if he weren't selected to follow in the path of those predecessors?
> That conversation didn't require abusiveness to be created.
How can you say that with any certainty? The only real example you have of this kind of conversation happened right here; which is to say, you have pretty strong evidence that the conversation did require abusiveness to be created.
You as a moderator are making value judgments on what should be discussed; you're not clearly specifying rules of engagement in general, and in this topic you've proven you couldn't enforce them even if you had them written down.
You know what referring to the conversation about who's the fuckwad does? It validates me, because I was one that made a point of being part of that conversation. It tells me that that conversation was, in fact, worthwhile: because it got your attention.
And now I'm posting with (what's essentially) my HN main, a shadowbanned account, because I'm pretty sure that you'll still see it. With the topic dying, with your post only a few hours old, I'm basically given a free private message to you. (You can also definitely track down who I really am now, but that doesn't really frighten me.)
So I can say: we're not really on a different page on the "already precarious balance" here. Despite my hatred for this community, I still care about it. (That's practically what hatred means!)
What I'm sure we disagree about is perhaps what's encapsulated by this topic. The two conversations you see are actually intimately connected, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they inform each other.
I think the Valley has a serious problem with positivity. You can't be negative in the networking world, and what that leads to is a culture where legitimate negative criticism is shut down. And that's where I fought today, and where you fought; the balance is that the negative criticism won the day. Which is why I say that your moderation is ultimately powerless.
I'm still here, writing to you. Even if for some programmatic reason you never read this, even if you've made an effort to not hear specific voices, I still exist.
And even outside my participation, the point was abusively made, because those forces make their point regardless of this chatter, and it might just be true that damage is the only real way of understanding and coming to terms with change.
If talking about who is a fuckwad isn't worthwhile, why does so much of your moderation involve finding fuckwads and terminating their participation?
This is a good conversation, solely because it happened. Because I can drag you into it no matter how elitist you're acting. (And I don't really think you're nearly as elitist as pg was; you've gone good clarifying work on title renaming, but you inherited a stupidly tough position.)
In fact, I suspect I'm writing this just to tell you how screwed you are.
>If you see the Valley as another Wall Street-- with a similar corporate ladder (engineer -> VP/Eng -> CTO -> founder -> investor)-- it will piss you off less.
As someone heavily inclined to agree with the headline, I think I agree; acquisitions aren't exactly the problem.
That doesn't mean I'm not pissed off, though. The idealistic mythos of the Valley is so self-indulgent it makes the crap of the "crappier Wall Street" so much more filthy.
But then where does the idealism have to go? Technology can be truly 'innovative'--or, instead of an empty buzzword, Technology can create quality of life improvements and encourage disruptive (:P) egalitarian progress.
Google's doing amazing things. The corruption (Google+) follows too closely behind to be excited about it anymore.
Value cannot be adequately quantified. At its best, money is an inadequate substitute for such a quantification that is often useful; at its worst, the failure to be mindful of that inadequacy exacerbates its inaccuracy.
At what point has my absolute contempt for "loving money and wanting more of it" been unclear to you? Because you really should have clued in around when I said "Yes?".
>Looks like you have some personal issues, you're taking this way too personal.
This is banter while I fold my laundry.
>some people love making money and there's nothing wrong with that.
See, you just keep on repeating your disagreement with me as if it's going to change anything. Moral imperatives are, well, imperative, you know? I'm just going to reiterate: there is something wrong with that.
I'll rephrase you: some people hate the love of money and there's nothing wrong with that, or at the very least, you can't do anything about it.
You're wasting your own time and giving me more opportunity to bash greed, which is, as I said, making the folding of my laundry more enjoyable.
But I guess it might bother you that someone might think your moral compass is off center because of your position on money.
>And yes, when you call something "vulgar and utterly clueless", you're definitely making moral judgments.
I know! My point is merely that I wasn't lecturing.
>You have enough consideration to feel like posting a comment about how much you feel about it.
I suppose I enjoy throwing the moral imperative into sharp relief; making it clear just how much I disdain your vulgar acceptance of the love of wanting money.
That moral imperative alone is enough to carry weight in this thread. It has wandered in as mere sentiment without ever presenting an argument.
...Now, of course, I have strayed into lecturing you about the mechanics of this whole thing--but note I still have not lectured you with the moral judgment itself. I don't care about convincing you that money is vulgar. Sanctimony is enough for me.
You are quite right, though; I have spent enough time here.
This seems to me to be an excellent example of the kind of poor thinking money promotes; do prove me wrong.
>If a lot of smart people thought WhatsApp was worth 14B
Why are they smart? Because they have billions of dollars? Because Whatsapp is valuable? Because Whatsapp was less useful before the smart people bought it?
Are you incapable of viewing the transaction of 16 billion as a possible utter mistake? As financial hand-waving assigning a liquid value to shares whose value might well be inflated?
Money is a poor measure of value. Plain and simple. Are you drawn to the volume of the transaction because you think it signifies true success?
> it's probably worth taking a second look at what WhatsApp did to get to this point.
Something I never contested and agreed with explicitly.
If you want evidence that HN has a fetish for money, it's that the technical details of Whatsapp's success are only closely inspected now that gratuitous cash has been thrown around.
You may view this comment as too cynical for this particular topic, but the ridiculous surge in Whatsapp stories doesn't lie. And of course we should inspect the action of successful companies.
I am merely pointing at the crude vulgarity of the Valley's barometer for success.
I appreciate especially the description of the Valley as a postmodern corporate organization.
Merry Christmas. I follow your writing, and if ever you are fully hell-banned I hope that's the day I stop coming here altogether. For now, though, I'm still a tech worker, and this is still the water cooler.