I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s. Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing their "dumb" questions was all the rage amongst a group of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully.
I think this "first opportunity to be the bully" thing is spot on. Everybody learns from being bullied. Some of us learn not to do it when we have power; others just learn how.
Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional.
Quite frankly you have missed the point of my comment.
The late 2010s moderator drama I was talking about was beyond the strict question curation. When StackOverflow expanded into StackExchange and started trying to be another Quora the moderation grew beyond curating technical questions. For years there was needless moderator drama and arguments over how the moderator team should run that were spilling over into social media everywhere.
That's true. But a similar case could be made for many other world leaders, they just don't happen to be sitting on top of a lot of oil and/or are able to credibly defend themselves. This was never about Maduro or democracy.
Please, educate yourself on Maduro and the people of Venezuela. It would be hard to find a less popular leader. A quarter of Venezuelans have fled the country under his regime. 82% of Venezuelans are living in poverty and he has presided over hyperinflation. Exit polls showed him losing the last election in a landslide and he stole the country anyway.
This man did not say he was going to bomb anything until after he was voted in, so the American people were - once again - completely duped by their own hubris.
A third of the American people voted for him, based on a campaign which promised a completely different economy than he has delivered (remember when people were pretending Biden had an egg-price level in the Oval Office?) and no foreign wars. It is unreasonable to look at that election and say a plurality voted for this.
Now this I would like to see, but I have serious doubts it will ever happen. I don’t think the American people have the courage to do something about their heinous, out of control government, personally. Happy to be proven wrong, because it would be a legitimate step to world peace on behalf of the American people, but I seriously doubt they are, as a population, capable of it.
I largely agree with you. Democratic leadership responded to an attempted coup by slow rolling prosecution with the hope that Trump would simply recede from public life and they'd never have to do the hard thing of trying and convicting a former president.
The Democrats have just as much blood on their hands as their Republican counterparts, and that is the problem - the only force capable of dealing with this conundrum is the American people, and they are too busy playing sides to actually confront the reality of their nations heinous war crimes record.
The entire media apparatus is owned by oligarchs: from Fox News to Twitter to Meta, now CNN... All are relaying non-stop right-wing propaganda. There can be no real democracy while information is this captive.
> For every one like the author of the blog post, it's likely to be another one in the opposite direction. But they will be unlikely to write a post about that.
There's literally an entire website dedicated to people with this point of view, it's called Reddit.
> Other people (at least in this country) are generally emotionally messy, unwilling to tolerate people with radically different views/values, and either intellectually lacking or overly predictable in their interests.
Does every person need to be unpredicatable and intellectually stimulating in order to spend time with them? If a friend who lives in Rotorua is interested in mountain biking (how predictable, how shallow) does that make spending time on a bike in the forest with them somehow lesser?
It's always fun seeing other Kiwis on HN, but this is the first time I've seen my hometown mentioned!
I do agree with your point too: perhaps emotional stimulation is also important? That can be a lot less sharp, less well-defined, but just as enriching.
It sounds like GP has very high standards for their friends, which is not the point IMO. I think we should have friends to broaden our horizons and expose us to new things. Intelligence is only one part of that.
I am not a Kiwi but was in Rotorua once, just wanted to say it is a lovely town (there was a sign claiming it was the nicest town in NZ!) and I loved the geyser and boiling mud! Must be funny to live with the sulphur smell and not even noticing except when you leave and come back after a while.
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