> I mostly agree with you, but would ask: Why are you here, reading this thread? This isn't, like, a thread about something interesting that is being tragically drowned out by all this gossip. It's just an entirely bad thread that we should (and probably do) all feel bad about getting sucked into.

I was just reading the comments after reading the article to see if anything new came up, and was pretty appalled at the quality of commentary here. I'm not participating in the thread more because it's not worth it.

> But the tiny sliver of disagreement I have with "this is a bad thing to discuss here and we should all feel bad" is that some people who frequent this site are sometimes some of the people involved in making decisions that might lead to threads like this. And it might be nice for those people to have read some comments here that push back on the narrative that it's actually fine to do stuff like this, especially if it's legal (but maybe also if it isn't, sometimes?).

I've been involved in big decisions in other Big Tech companies. I'm proud of having fought to preserve Tor access to our offerings because I believe in Tor despite the spam and attacks it brings. I don't know about other folks in these positions, but if I were to read discussion like this, I'd roll my eyes and close the thread. If a random incoherent drunk ranter told me something was wrong with my ideas, I'd dismiss them without much hesitation.

> The way I see this particular discussion is: outside the tech bubble, regardless of the new facts in this article, people see yet another big name tech leader doing yet another unrelatable and clearly sleazy thing.

Because journalists know there is anti-tech sentiment among a segment of the population and so they stoke it. I don't know that much about this case, but a different story I've been following for a while now is the California Forever creation of a new city adjacent to the Bay Area. Pretty much every article written about it calls the city a "libertarian city" or "libertarian, billionaire dream". I'm involved in local planning conversations. I've read over their proposals and communications. They never, ever, mention anything about libertarianism. They're not proposing anything libertarian. They're working with existing incorporation laws; they're literally acting as a real-estate developer the same as any other suburban tract developer anywhere else in the US. But the press, desperate to get clicks on the story, bills it as some "libertarian city".

This "bubble" that you speak of is literally just a bubble created by journalists. I'm not saying that tech hasn't created some new, big, real problems nor that we shouldn't discuss these problems, but we need to recognize low-effort clickbait where we see it. This [1,2] article and thread talks about the reasons why, and it's not simple or straightforward, but at this point I consider most (not all) tech journalism to basically be tabloid journalism. It's meant specifically to drive clicks.

The only silly thing is some folks on HN think this site is somehow more high-brow than some general social media conversation on the news. It's the same social media as everywhere else, it's just more likely that the person talking is a software nerd, so the clickbait they fall for is different. My comment is my attempt as a community member to remind us to strive for something better. If we want to be more than just another social media site then we need to act like it. That means reading articles and not reacting to headlines, having good-faith conversations and not bringing strong priors into the conversation, and actually responding to the best interpretations of our peers' comments not just dunking on them.

[1]: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/debugging-tech-journalism

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201818