1000 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 25 Aug 2023 \ on: What are the top reasons someone SHOULD NOT use Stacker News? meta
As some have pointed out, it's a massive echo chamber right now that attracts only a very particular slice of people who are, or could be, interested in btc. Ideological diversity seems low, and membership shows the usual pathologies: relatively little truth-seeking (e.g., trying to question your beliefs and figure out what's true) and more circle-jerking and self-soothing (posts about how the btc religious doctrine is Right and True, and how stupid and corrupt and villainous The Enemy is, and how our triumph is certain and we will all soon be rich.)
This is not unusual for a sub-community in its relatively early days, but it's worth asking how early we really are, e.g., comparing with the early days of btc on bitcointalk, where the participants were even more "extreme" in the sense of devoting themselves to btc when it had far less going for it, and yet the conversation was often nuanced and hugely informed by wide learning and thought, not just vomiting up talking points of the Murray Rothbard book you looked at once. You had some confidence that the people writing manifestos on socialism had actually, like, read Marx.
In key ways, things are worse now. The ability to make participation a real economic activity with real prices is innovative, but it's not clear what the current SN incentive system will accomplish when bootstrapped out of this community.