It’s just like communism in that it entirely ignores the needs and capacity of an individual and makes them slaves to the idealism of the state.
They’re no better than a homeless encampment because you can’t give people a house and then expect them to act like a homeowner overnight. It was the wrong problem to solve, and I think people rush to solve it out of self conscious guilt and a desire to quickly make the apparent parts of the problem disappear from common view.
It’s a cruel and ridiculous strategy.
HN has had enough of those damn moochers, too:
I have found that many people who receive housing benefits are very poor stewards of their personal resources.
The first thing someone does when they get housed is to invite all their homeless friends over, to shower, to eat, to crash, to do drugs, to play games, whatever.
So your typical Section 8 housing recipient is not just a single person/family benefiting from housing, they’re dragging in their entire circle of loser friends who don’t have those benefits, and so now you’ve got a cluster of mooches who aren’t invested nor responsible for disruption or damage in that community.
It’s really an unfortunate thing, and I just saw it over and over again. So many people lose their benefits very quickly because they can’t resist helping other folks out, but that’s not what you do with welfare and entitlements.
They weren’t when I posted them.
No I’m not.
No, I’m linking the posts with the actual content in the OP.
Federating was a mistake.
yeah, I think our guests might be better off spending more time on the orange site with the race scientists, bigots, and other “biases and problems” they seem fond of minimizing, instead of posting here
it’s fucking fascinating how many times I’ve seen the “it’s downvoted, what’s the problem” thing from orange site regulars, when the fash element on that site doesn’t particularly care about downvotes if they can still control the conversation. plus there’s the degree to which the orange site’s shit moderation structure covers up these issues — anything problematic just gets deleted way after it’s had its intended effect. then you watch orange site regulars defend mass flagging trans and antifascist folks off of the site, and you realize none of this is an accident or due to incompetence; these systems are working as intended to empower bigots. flagging on HN isn’t an anti-spam measure, it’s a way to invisibly give control to the worst people on the site.
Exactly! Quoting myself from the conversation I linked above:
hacker news really is the cryptocurrency of tech sites: incredibly poorly implemented (dang begs folks to log out when threads get popular), controlled by technofascists, enabled by an extremely mediocre but remarkably fanatical fanbase, and everybody’s abusing
amphetaminesnootropics. but any day now, they’ll come up with something that solves all of its problems! it’s only been 16 years!why in fuck is tech like this
And thus by observing we changed teh outcome. inhales this is just like quantum mechanics.
I’m reminded of this conversation from last autumn, where HN moderators deleted posts only after they were used as receipts. It is a maddening sort of gaslighting to be told that HN isn’t that bad while the moderators only take action in order to make HN look good.
fucking exactly, that thread has prime examples of both dang and friends burning receipts, and of the gaslighting orange site regulars do whenever the site gets called out for covering for fascists. there’s also this interesting part where some asshole tried to signal jam the thread with nonsense — they’d reply to every critical post with an extremely long, unasked-for series of infodumps about the orange site’s moderation policies, in an attempt to overwhelm and control the conversation like they do on HN. weird how when you piss them off enough to drop the pretense, orange site posters just start doing fash shit