PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

After the demise of slashdot (around 2008?), I hung out on technocrat.net, which was run by Bruce Perens. It was great, but then Perens decided to kill it because it was too stressful to run. (If memory serves me correctly.) Then I found HN.

Language is too fragile & brittle to convey most of what we would like it to convey. People keep falling into this trap, and then getting irate when things go off the rails. This is a terrible confusion to have: if the meaning is not in the words, then where is it? The meaning is in the context, not in the symbols.

Context _and_ intent.

Things go sideways when false assumptions are made. Assuming a safe community is hostile is a path to unnecessary conflict. Assuming a well-intended statement is intended to be malicious is a path to complete communication meltdown.

PC-ness and call out culture has hype-reduced human communication to mere words. That's not to how communication evolved.

Yes. Words matter. But they are not the way humans communicate.

> Words matter. But they are not the way humans communicate.

People communicate any way they can. On online forums, we have to communicate with words as there is no other way (so far).

> Assuming a well-intended statement is intended to be malicious is a path to complete communication meltdown.

You're right, but this is just as much, and probably more so, the fault of the writer than the reader. Because like you said, so much of our communication is not using words, when we are limited to words, we have to be extra careful about which words we use and how we craft our message because the chance of being misunderstood is much higher.

My fave comms goto is:

"It's not what you say, it's what they hear."

- Frank Luntz

Unfortunately, it pre-dates cancel culture and such. We've allowed "always assume the worst" to be normalized. We've made one (event) into a pattern.

Communication is a two way street. If one side (i.e., the receiver) is intentionally undermining "the contract" then the processes is doomed. You can't have a two-way process where one half is trying their best to communicate, and the other is trying their best not to do so. It doesn't work that way. Which is obvious at this point. Insanity is at an all time high.