Your point about the system being subtly broken is spot-on. Sane people have moved on because of the subtle breakages. The site ends up full of older people who either a.) haven't realized the world is bigger and better things exist or b.) started using /. when it was new and somehow developed a perverse loyalty to "the first tech discussion site" and they refuse to move on. People stuck in their ways don't make the best conversational partners.
Obviously not everybody there is bad, but the baddies shift the tone of the discussion towards lunacy.
I think there needs to be a new rule of the internet, something along the lines of "the worst, troll-y content of any news aggregation site will always be found in a story about Apple".
There are few companies out there more polarising in internet discussion these days.
>There are few companies out there more polarising in internet discussion these days.
I don't think they're trolls per se, but it's divided between worshipers,haters and those who don't see the point of worshiping or hating a multinational company motivated by profit.
No wonder the discussion degenerates into people who see the light vs. the people who don't.
For example, from Gruber's take on the iPhone 5 event:
>And what shows they were. When Schiller unveiled the iPhone 5, it rose from the stage floor on a smoothly-rising and rotating pedestal, pinpoint spotlights hitting the phone and only the phone. The rotation of the iPhone atop the pedestal was in perfect sync with the rotation of the iPhone projected on the big screen at the back of the stage. There’s no store where you buy such pedestals; Apple designed and engineered it specifically for this event. It was on stage for about a minute.
>Likewise, when Cook introduced the show-closing Foo Fighters, the screen rose and from behind the screen slid the band, on a raised dais that smoothly rolled to the front of the stage. Such stagecraft is one of the rewards Apple can reap from its $100 billion (and growing) war chest
For people on the opposite sides on the Apple fan spectrum, those two paragraphs elicit very different emotional responses. One HN comment said reading it make him/her feel physically sick while an Apple fan might get goosebumps.
Also curious is the fact that the Apple blogger network Gruber/Siegler etc. seem to be very bent on hating on and being snarky on all things not-Apple and rivals i.e Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook etc.
Your point about the system being subtly broken is spot-on. Sane people have moved on because of the subtle breakages. The site ends up full of older people who either a.) haven't realized the world is bigger and better things exist or b.) started using /. when it was new and somehow developed a perverse loyalty to "the first tech discussion site" and they refuse to move on. People stuck in their ways don't make the best conversational partners.
Obviously not everybody there is bad, but the baddies shift the tone of the discussion towards lunacy.