N-Gate

Our interactions online don't happen in a vacuum. They are to a decent degree an outcome of the real world we live in.

Sure, there's effects that are exclusive to the medium, like pseudo/anonymity, or related to the place, occasion and purpose of the interaction. But they are also influenced by our emotional state, personalities and life circumstances and everything that influences that in turn.

When you encounter people like that (they could be bots...) ask yourself what could be going on inside their heads. Are they on a mission? Are they in a bad spot and trying to cope? Are they trying to troll for amusement, fishing for attention?

A lot has been said about the internet becoming shittier and unfriendlier over time. Where it used to be (in my mind) an exuberant place to learn and meet new people or create entirely new culture, a third/fourth place outside the real world, we have seen that there's many more agendas at play. More eyeballs, surveillance, commercial interests, political influence, cheap entertainment and addiction. Too many cooks ruining the stew.

How do I deal with it? Use self-moderation if possible (e.g. I filter submissions by site, user and title on HN), find side alleys like special-purpose communities, save good stuff, so you don't forget what's possible (can't rely on search/recommendation engines or the permanence of anything anyway), and don't take it too seriously. I'm lucky to have been around for some time and know some older communities that…

There is plenty of sarcasm, but that's not really what the style of ngate's summaries was.

http://n-gate.com/

Here's an example:

> Github (business model: "Uber for README.MD") directs its employees to eat its own dog food. Because of Github's acquisition by Microsoft (business model: "Uber for customer abuse"), it turns out that what Github engineers are eating came out of the dog to begin with. Hackernews tries to figure out whether they, as customers of Microsoft's latest desperate attempt to get anyone to use Azure, have any control over their information, or whether they'd be better off remaining with their existing workstation-as-a-service provider, Apple (business model: "Uber for garden walls").

At least on Reddit people make jokes. At one point the most-gilded comment ever was a (honestly, pretty funny) one-line joke reply to a paragraph long heartfelt comment about grief and loss.

Here it's a loose game of word association. For example, title says "GNU" in any context so we get 300 comments with unrelated anecdotes about Stallman. The comments section becomes stories about whatever random nonsense is in the top 2-3 comments. When it was being published, n-gate[0] was great at highlighting this.

[0] http://www.n-gate.com/hackernews/

TL;DR: Do you have a stance on HN's change in culture?

It seems like HN comments are shifting from technical focus toward:

* Early Reddit's low-effort but tame "snark"

* Aggressively moralizing posts dismissing sardonic criticism as dangerous mental illness

I haven't seen much of OP's style lately, especially since n-gate[1] went inactive.

I'm wondering whether that's a bad thing. Although the tone is hostile on the surface, there's usually some aspiration toward competence associated with it.

[1]: http://n-gate.com/

Never mind!

Here

https://www.patreon.com/ngate

There's an offer of:

Limited Series A (5 remaining) just €43.50 (+VAT) per month

Limited Series B (7 remaining) just €431.50 (+VAT) per month

or

Limited Series C (1 remaining) just €862.50 (+VAT) per month

Brilliant!

(I must note that the circuit shown there is... somehow... inducing some negativity in me.... which probably isn't unintentional.)

And the main site has an about page too, in all its glory:

http://n-gate.com/about/

Bean counters have taken over. Ad in front of geek = $1 / 1000 impression. Ad in front of CTO = $10 / 1000 impressions. Then milk the cow, get the investment back and move on.

Anyway

https://www.theonion.com/

https://www.betootaadvocate.com/

Hopefully http://n-gate.com/ gets going again. (Type out the url, he detects HN redirects).