Maybe because I love Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs, and Henry Thoreau, or maybe because between Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' legacies, I chose Richard Stallman's, but I've never felt any appeal from Silicon Valley.
Maybe visiting might change my view, but the realizations in the article seem obvious and late enough that I think I understand the appeal but don't share the values.
There was a reply to this, now deleted, that I thought had an excellent point. I suspect the poster did not enjoy the immediate downvotes that come from criticizing Silicon Valley orthodoxies, so I want to paraphrase it.
The poster, a European, said that one of the things they liked about HN was that when the discussion drifted too deep into an SV-centric view, people from other parts of the world would often provide a useful corrective that would then be upvoted.
I appreciate that too, although as the treatment of the poster's comment demonstrated, it's not perfect. I think too many SV orthodoxies are vigorously defended here. The poster gave a footnote with a short list of what they called "Silicon Valley mindcuffs", and I suspect that's what got the instant downvotes.
> The poster, a European, said that one of the things they liked about HN was that when the discussion drifted too deep into an SV-centric view, people from other parts of the world would often provide a useful corrective that would then be upvoted.
It's actually fascinating to observe how the "tone" of HN varies through the day. My impression (I haven't carefully analyzed) is that during the morning in Europe you tend to have more left leaning points of view politically and more advocacy of Stallman-esque Open Source.
Once the US gets online though the political spectrum of opinions shifts right and towards Libiterianism. You also have people working at places like Google and Facebook adding their 2 cents, which tends to lead to "moral outrage" (European) vs "here's the reality" (US).
If your point is not well argued you'll get a few down-votes. If you point is very well argued you'll get a lot of down-votes. Nothing makes people down-vote more than an opinion they don't like but can't easily refute or dismiss.
Common ones: everyone speaks English or pays in dollars. People are not familiar with Chinese internet, or even non-American-centric companies. People have access to some local service (typically delivery services or local chains) or are familiar with their idiosyncrasies, including Amazon (Amazon is only present in 11 countries https://services.amazon.com/global-selling/global-selling-gu...). Issues around food or water quality are very local; American conspiracy tropes.
Less common are understanding of legal issues, typically common law needs at least one case to clarify an issue as opposed to positive law countries; the right to bear arms is a big one, so is American-style freedom-of-speech.
More specific are things like: non-American universities provide a good education, non-American companies can innovate meaningfully, tipping is omnipresent in services, keyboard layouts, American references in literature, sport, movies, etc.
One of the latest obvious examples of such mindcuffs outside of HN is Apple’s announcement around battery replacement: it’s impossible to find conditions that are not meant for the US market. You can redirect the offer to local stores or find it there. That is actually quite typical of Apple, in spite of 60% of their sales being outside of the US.
I have made the mistake to point at similar mindcuffs on HN and I will not do it again.
They are to some extent but my point is that a doctor from NYC or Austin TX is more likely to think like someone from SV than a programmer from Boise or Bangor.
The SV way of thinking is present to some extent in most urban people of similiar socioeconomic class. A plumber from SF will not necessarily take the same things for granted that a programmer from SF will.
I think class is definitely a part of it, but I believe SV's paradigm is notably distinct from other geographies. A programmer from Chicago is much less likely to talk about disruption as an unalloyed good, or to take a militant free-speech line that refuses to consider race or class.
I wanted to strike a balance between conveying the point and respecting the poster's deletion, so I left out those specifics. But I hope the poster turns that list into an expanded essay; I thought they were great. And yes, I loved the word.
The (disruptive) power of Silicon Valley stems mainly from investors. Make a pile of money high enough, and you can disrupt anything; that's the premise, basically.
It is not really the power of tech that we should be worried about, but instead the power of investment without regard for anything other than shareholder returns. Google and Facebook could be better companies if they didn't have to sell their users to their real customers.
Yeah! The rise of addictive, short-term reward technologies seems deeply tied to the fact that Silicon Valley companies make money based on showing growth numbers to investors.
Business models shape the space of architectures that companies are incentivized and disincentivized to make. For people that don't like the current landscape of addictive free technologies, I'd say Silicon Valley has a business model problem, not a technology problem.
Facebook operates mostly in the realm of social communication/organization and general information sharing, so that is where the "disruption" would take place.
I'm rather skeptical of Facebook though. I think there are major issues with its current incarnation.
Facebook operates mostly in the realm of social communication/organization and general information sharing, so that is where the "disruption" would take place.
Sure, but GP was talking about technological disruption.
i doubt visiting would change your view, because your view--ie, what is the "appeal" and the "values" sounds about right. I've been here eight years and if there's some magic, i haven't seen it yet--just stale ideas conceived in isolation and enough frantic iteration to convince someone to pay for more adolescent experiment
Do you think it's worth it to make a location-based social activity layer for existing social forums like HN? So people could meet up, date, hire for jobs etc.
No one's actual location would be revealed. But when people post something, others would know they are probably nearby.
With respect, that's been done. It was called Yik Yak. It was a disaster for the high school kids of my neighborhood; the geographic steering of messages allowed them to insult and stalk one another. The FOMO factor (fear of missing out) so carefully instilled in them by Instagram and the like made it very hard for them to just delete the app.
That's not a fundamental flaw with the idea though, it's just that the specific community Yik Yak developed was terrible. You could do the same thing but have it target, say, LinkedIn's demographic instead of old-time MySpace's.
There actually was a startup in DC that was doing something like this, called SocialRadar. They had a lot of funding but failed due to lack of adoption. They had a real name policy and didn't have any of the same problems that Yik Yak did.
As an interesting aside, that's how BBS's worked pre internet. Long distances calls were so expensive, BBS forums were largely localized. We would have get togethers and people's houses or at libraries, to meet each other once or twice a year, drink beer, play volleyball, etc.
Maybe visiting might change my view, but the realizations in the article seem obvious and late enough that I think I understand the appeal but don't share the values.