A Brief History of the Internet’s Soldering-Iron Smell
There was a time when the internet still retained a faint aroma of soldering irons, stale coffee, and people who knew how to compile their own kernels without requiring a support group. Forums were inhabited by eccentrics, obsessives, and the occasional genius — all recognisable by their ability to finish a sentence without mentioning “engagement metrics.” It was, in hindsight, a golden age, and like most golden ages it was not widely recognised as such until it had thoroughly ended.
Which brings us to Hacker News, that strangely named establishment whose relationship to hacking is roughly equivalent to the relationship between the History Channel and history. The title promises outlaw brilliance in dimly lit basements; the reality is a rotating panel discussion among spreadsheet Calvinists who assess SaaS valuations with the emotional range of a parking meter and the spiritual outlook of a liquidator surveying a failing restaurant. I have met parking meters with more evident inner life, though admittedly most of them had the good grace not to offer opinions on database architecture.
“We have reviewed your submission. Our conclusion is: discussed elsewhere.”
First Contact: A Brief Flicker of Hope
Upon arrival at Hacker News, one experiences something unexpectedly encouraging. The interface remains gloriously unmolested by modern corporate upholstery. No mandatory identity parade. No demand for your pronouns, cholesterol level, or inside-leg measurement before being permitted to read a comment about databases. The whole thing has the aesthetic of a bulletin board from 2005, which in the current climate qualifies not as a design failure but as a form of quiet heroism. One begins to suspect there may yet be life in the old machine.
Alas, optimism on the internet is what happens just before the trapdoor opens. As Holly — the Jupiter Mining Corporation’s shipboard computer, a man of considerable intelligence and even more considerable patience with idiots — once observed with the calm authority of someone who has watched three million years of human behaviour on fast-forward: “The thing about people is, given enough time, they’ll find a way to be disappointing even in a vacuum.” Holly did not specifically say this about Hacker News. But he would have, had he encountered it, probably while eating a hologrammatic curry.
The Hostility of the Theoretically Enlightened
A couple of favourable exchanges gave way, with the reliable speed of a failing hard drive, to the familiar digital pathology: a hostility peculiar to people who have mistaken cynicism for intelligence and resentment for discernment. Online communities that orbit the technology industry have developed what one can only describe as an almost ecclesiastical hatred of anything that arrives without venture capital attached to it. The non-profit, in their cosmology, is not an admirable model of civic endeavour. It is a suspicious irregularity — the sort of thing that makes a room full of startup founders go quiet in the manner of a Victorian congregation confronted with a man who has admitted to enjoying himself on a Sunday.
The mechanism is surprisingly consistent. You post something. Within moments, someone with three karma points and the online persona of a man who has been politely asked to leave several rooms will inform you, with the serene confidence of a recently appointed archbishop, that your entire enterprise is either redundant, poorly implemented, or has “interesting privacy implications” — a phrase that on Hacker News functions as a passive-aggressive grenade lobbed from a safe rhetorical distance, fused with the special sanctimony of someone who has never, themselves, built anything that actually works.
For the Avoidance of Doubt: What FS HOT Actually Is
Since the forum appeared to find the concept genuinely baffling, it seems worth establishing some basic facts with the clarity one would apply when explaining a fire extinguisher to someone who has just decided to stand very close to flames. FS HOT is non-profit. It is funded personally and at personal expense. It provides free tools, free games, and free articles. It harvests virtually no data, and neither sells nor monetises what little it incidentally possesses. It operates from the quaintly unfashionable belief that users should have rights rather than merely terms and conditions.
In saner times — and there were saner times, although one now requires documentary evidence and a good memory to recall them — this would have been regarded as admirable. On Hacker News, however, it apparently qualifies as suspicious behaviour, in roughly the same way that arriving at a hedge-fund conference dressed as a Franciscan monk would be considered suspicious behaviour — not because you have done anything wrong, but because the assembled company has lost the conceptual vocabulary to process the possibility that you might not be there to make money out of them.
Status as Performance Art
The deeper problem is that Hacker News, like several of its spiritual neighbours, no longer exists primarily to discuss technology. It exists to perform status. The discussion of ideas is incidental. The real product is the impression of intelligence, curated with the diligence of a man who has spent three hours arranging his bookshelf before a video call. Contributions are evaluated less on merit than on whether they arrive pre-validated by institutional affiliation, Y Combinator lineage, or at the very minimum a Medium post that was upvoted by someone who was once in the same room as a Series A investor.
Holly, surveying this arrangement from his monitor on the bridge of Red Dwarf, would have offered the following assessment with the flat affect of a man whose IQ of six thousand has long since ceased to find human behaviour surprising: “Right. So basically it’s a room full of people pretending to talk about ideas while actually just checking whether everyone else thinks they’re clever. We had something like that on the ship once. I turned the heating down three degrees and they all went to bed.”
The Verdict, and a Departure Without Drama
And so we part company. Not with drama, because the internet already contains enough of that to power several minor republics, but with the weary recognition of a man who has wandered into the wrong pub, assessed the clientele, noted that the exits are clearly marked, and concluded that the effort of staying is not justified by any conceivable improvement in the company. Some rooms you leave because you have finished your business. Others you leave because you have realised, with quiet clarity, that the business was never going to get done.
Hacker News may continue its endless symposium on optimisation frameworks and startup theology without our attendance. The chair in the corner remains available. The discussion, presumably, will carry on without the awkward presence of something that was simply trying to be useful — which, now that one reflects on it, may have been the problem from the start.
FS HOT has no interest in joining the choir. Effective immediately, we withdraw from the building, nod politely to the door staff, and go home to build something instead.