Yes, social media and maybe even the internet as a whole will radicalize its users. Facebook is a groupthink incubator. So is hacker news. I've witnessed many people change their political beliefs to match whichever group they belong to.
Likes and upvotes. I was off the social media for a couple of years and now I can say for sure that it's screwing with peoples heads. For some reason it makes you care about some meaningless numbers and that incentivizes people on the social media to go along with the status quo.
There are many Taboo opinions and thought tracks on HN that guarantee downvoting and as a result anyone not exposed to them in advance might be inclined to think that they must be heresies that should never be considered by the intelligentsia.
And things that contradict The Great Stallman teachings like TiVoization (even in self-driving cars) or saying that something can be done more efficiently with Windows (or just not Linux/OSS in general) or that plenty of ML is outright useless BS that does more harm that good.
Edit: Thanks to whoever unflagged the HN post! Let's see how long it'll stay unflagged this time!
I loved developing all kinds of command line and UI tools for Windows, so I might be a little biased, but I found the Linux equivalents..well..not as easy and straightforward to say the least. But, there is countless posts here passionately defending and stating otherwise, that I don't even know if I should bring it up in a discussion.
>I loved developing all kinds of command line and UI tools for Windows, so I might be a little biased, but I found the Linux equivalents..well..not as easy and straightforward to say the least.
Well, I think very often commands have very not intuitive names of parameters, very often some seemingly random letters
When it comes to me,
I use Linux for server related stuff, hosting my things and stuff, also I like raw terminal Linux because there's nothing happening, so no distractions
Not sure I agree that HN "radicalizes" but I would say that the obsession with the need for sources and the tendency to apply algorithmic-level logic to comments leaves this place lacking imagination and/or a touch of humanity that the world otherwise applies to thinking. In other words, there isn't much reading between the lines or "zooming out", it's a lot of nit-picking.
Can one be too logical? Too empirical? Too scientific?
HN for me is far too convinced of its own rationality and the rationality of others, leading to arguments based on weird idealised versions of human behaviour at odds with the real world. It could do with being a lot more empirical to be honest, but it's about what I expect from a site with a lot of Silicon Valley-flavoured naïve libertarianism.
It makes certain ideas look more common than they are.
For example, if you've been hanging around here for the last few months, you might pick up on a sizable percentage of the population believes that paying people who live in SF more than people who live in Minneapolis is literally the worst thing ever.
Radicalizing is the wrong word, but this is a pretty strange bubble and it's easy to lose sight of that.
Try telling HN that you can generally "only do what Apple allows you to do on a Mac" and how that basically makes it "less of a general purpose computer" than others and see how people respond.
To be fair, I don't think of these people as radicals so much as they are suffering from Stockholm syndrome. The bubble that protects them is strong here.
