Maybe Bluesky has "won"

My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.

A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people"

It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc.

To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules.

I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That

(1) Immediately improves my feed, but also

(2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and

(3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play

My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".

See, your post is exactly what OP is talking about.

Making an argument that fascists are taking over the world may indeed be what gp doesn’t like.

But gp (and yourself, presumably) not liking it doesn’t make it untrue, and certainly doesn’t mean the argument should be censored.

> I try to filter out political tweets.

> Seriously!? But don't you realize that ${political.outrage.tweet.792305}??

I agree largely with what you wrote but have a small disagreement. I don't actually think the character count has that big of an effect. I've seen plenty of self-righteous posts on places like here (HN) and the LessWrong forums that just use more words to do the same thing.

I think the kind of person that's energized to comment online generally feels more strongly about the issue than most lurkers. This means that online conversations are dominated by the most passionate, most invested, and often least interested in impartiality. This post [1] comes to mind.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

You’re right that people can write hateful, divisive and othering content with many words. The trouble with the short content platforms is that you can’t do anything else.

The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance. I have a strong interest in interacting with cybersecurity professionals, so infosec.exchange was perfect for me, either browsing subscribed or local posts. Browsing all is something I do only when I'm bored, because many posts are not what I'd like to see. You can always migrate your account if you want.

https://instances.social/

That being said, BlueSky is simpler and easier because there's no real federation yet, and even if they have a "Discovery" algorithm, you get many options to control what you want to see. It's feels great, like Twitter before their 2012(ish?) IPO.

Interesting point, I'm inclined to agree. I'm curious now about how many Likes and Reposts a thread on Bluesky gets vs a compact emotional response. I run a firehose ingester so maybe I'll test this out.

EDIT: I realize you specifically called out politics here and that makes me even more inclined to agree.

> The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance.

I was very disappointed to find out that whatever instance you choose can essentially hold your identity and content hostage.

I'd been hoping for something where my identity comes from a private key that I could take elsewhere.

I agree - short form content doesn't leave enough space to have a nuanced arguement and conversely it leaves a lot of space open for misinterpretation and encourages hot takes and mic drops over expression of cohesive thoughts.

Being censored is not the same as not being amplified.

The rational thing to do for someone who (1) thinks of themselves as a human being first and something else second is to join mastodon.social and (2) cares about visibility (why else are you on social?) is to join the biggest instance you can find.

Most notably people can only follow hashtags from accounts that are on their server so if you insist on joining some micro server please save yourself the hassle of putting hashtags on things.

I don't think myself as a human being is the right thing to upload to the internet! I'll stay right here thanks.

Instead I join specific interest-related communities that offer what I can't find in real life: the one person in the world that's had and overcome the same problem with their table saw.

> The trouble with the short content platforms is that you can’t do anything else.

I'd agree MBP are poor media for nuanced debate but can work well for info broadcasting.

Pre-echochamber Twitter was an excellent venue for disseminating important news - news that actual news orgs were too distracted or deferential to publish.

Or, freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.

"something where my identity comes from a private key that I could take elsewhere" is a literal technical description of how Nostr works. Relays/servers are basically dumb pipes. You own your data and can repost to different relays (and encouraged to do so.) Problem is if your key is lost or stolen, you're kinda screwed.

I looked into running my own instance, but.... It was non-trivial.

I’m on social to interact with folks I know. Visibility to anyone outside that circle is the _last_ thing on my mind.

But not really. I only ever want to see people I follow in my feed. And I can follow people from wherever, not just my instance. So the decision of what instance I chose was inconsequential.

> My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable.

The activation energy of moving ones home is very different from moving a social profile. I also find in some old, dead communities I was a part of, the most toxic people can't pull themselves away and stick around

Them providing a counterargument with a cited source?

Eh, there are some aspects of the human condition I'd rather opt out for the time being. Strangely, I find Facebook and WhatsApp more useful to keep in touch with people I care about, and likely won't join the Fediverse any time soon.

> The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance.

Consider using a self-hosting service, like https://togethr.party/ , to have your own instance on your own domain. Much like email, you should never be beholden to another party for your identity; your hosting service should be an invisible detail that can change without anyone interacting with you needing to notice.

I've watched several instances shut down over the years, and have never once regretted the decision to have an instance on my own domain. My social network handle is now the same as my email address, with an extra @ in front.

Yeah, self-hosting the whole stack can be a lot (like Mastodon). I only signed up via the Primal mobile app and left it at that. Private key stays local.

Mastodon allows you move instances with minimal effort. You can redirect your old profile to the new one in another instance, or permanently move it keeping your follows and followers.

No one there wants to hold your information hostage, you can always export it, and while it doesn't support importing, you can repost it through their API if you really want to.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

I think you can but you will get no interaction. No one (relatively, not literally) cares about “nice” or informative - they care about things that make them angry or otherwise emotive.

I’d also add that no one (again, relatively) reads anything, anymore. A couple of paragraphs and you’ll see your engagement drop off a cliff. But a quick, “witty” slap? A stupid pun thread on Reddit? Easy money.

I think your point is generally right - not trying to disagree, but I think these platforms are simply effective tools to mirror back their users and what their users want, rather than the inherent, specific problem themselves. That is, it’s not Twitter that’s the problem - it’s that Twitter users really like the behaviors Twitter rewards.

Except Nostr is mainly populated by crypto bros, that's not something I'd like to read on a daily basis.

You can 1/n but no one’s gonna read that. The “trouble” is not with the platform but with the reader selection it provides. The greater auditory doesn’t want to read you, because there’s too many you. That’s why it filters itself into short messaging. Too much of “hey listen to my thousand words”, all with varying depth, coherence and clariry, per reader perspective. It’s not your, platforms or readers failure, that’s how humans work. There’s a natural limit to every specific level of community. Expecting everyone to dive deep into each others thoughts at scale is too idealistic.

if you care too much about visibility I think mastodon will be disappointing. They just don't want to be popular, it feels like it's designed to be antipopular.

Idk deleting a comment is kinda the definition of censorship. It’s not governmental censorship, but that’s not the only kind, just the worst one. Censorship is justified sometimes of course, tho I’m both sad and surprised that our two kings have decided any discussion of authoritarianism deserves this treatment. What is HackerNews? What does it mean to stimulate intellectual curiosity when legal freedom of speech is at risk for the large majority of the user base?

I guess technically Thiel is into Trump so maybe influencing Graham, but I never got the impression he dictated moderation decisions here. The more likely explanation, IMO, is that they’re just trying not to rock the boat, and “ban all serious political discussion on sight” is still their way to do that

I regretted my decision to self host. It’s expensive (for what it is), there are federation issues with some instances, some admins don’t like smaller unknown instances, it requires a fair bit of active management to keep an instance healthy, and you can’t migrate post history.

A good self-hosting service should provide full access to extract all your data, such that you can import it into a different service later.

I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me.

You're right about federation issues, though that's more a limitation of the fediverse protocols and fediverse software that really needs fixing. Fediverse instances don't automatically fetch and show all replies to posts you see, even if it knows they exist, unless your server is already fetching other things from the server hosting those posts. So it's a little harder to see other people's replies, which contributes to the problem of 20 people replying with the same answers because they can't see that other people have already replied.

Large instances work around that because everyone's already talking to at least one account on that server.

I hope those limitations get fixed someday, but for now they're fundamental to the fediverse.

Providing different amplification to messages based on their political viewpoint is effectively censorship.

> It’s expensive (for what it is)...

I host my instance on an always free VM, don't put much work toward maintenence, and haven't had a problem with federation. Post migration is not really a thing from a shared instance, I don't think, so yeah, that sucks.

Honestly, the most expensive part for me is the domain, because I shelled out for a spiffy premium domain. But I'm weird.

You can extract your data, but you can't import your posts on another Mastodon instance. It's fixable, but thorny.

Personally, I think Bluesky is a mix of NIH with a dash of wanting to be a central point of control, that is doomed in the long run - anything that works well for Bluesky can be copied, but the real benefit for the Fediverse in the long run is that Mastodon is just one of many services, or types of services. Every new service gets to hook into an existing network instead of starting from scratch.

You think comments like mine should be flagged/invisible by default?

... Idk man, seems kinda fascist tbh.

OP made blocking rules as a personal preference - 100% fine.

Expecting censorship of political topics like rising fascism as the default - dangerously naive.

> Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.

I think what you're saying here is not that politics are terrible on microblogging platforms, but that microblogging platforms are terrible, which is a pretty valid sentiment.

> My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

For Mastodon, it's not just political, it's cultural

It's too out there for most people (as in, any random popular public instance you go to)

Filtering 'political tweets' on Mastodon is fine by me.

It's expecting that behavior as the default which I take issue with, and denying the specter of rising fascism. (Because yeesh, why care about a year of genocide funded with our own taxes and enabled by our leaders?)

Some people actually do care about what's happening in the world; say, for example, the UN calling out a genocide backed by Western powers with our tax money. I believe they ought to be able to discuss these things without being flagged/shadowbanned/banned etc, especially on decentralized fora.

The major platforms already suppress such discussion. If you want to avoid making custom filters, just stay on those.

Sad to see such a logical and straightforward statement being grayed out :/

Especially when the political viewpoint in question is "Guys maybe we should worry about this looming fascism, evidenced by just about every possible indicator".

> I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me.

I very much agree with you in owning your identity on this sort of thing, but I wouldn't pay $7/mo in order to participate in any social network.

I have my own email domain, and I can host it myself, or have someone else host it for me, on shared infrastructure. Fastmail charges me ~$4/mo, and that's for email, something anyone on the internet requires in order to interact with online services. I think $4/mo for a communications necessity is reasonable, and there are cheaper (even free) providers if I wanted to go that route. $7/mo for a social network is nuts.

I'm not sure how services like togethr.party work, but is it safe to assume that they have to spin up a completely new copy of the server software for each domain? That seems like a big problem, and is probably why this is so expensive.

I recently set up my own Matrix instance (using Synapse) and found it to be pretty wasteful, resource-wise. This is a solved problem with email servers, where one server can host as many domains as you have storage and processing power for; not sure why the chat/social platforms haven't caught up architecture-wise.

Good news! You just described how Bluesky works

Is there any structural reason that will prevent Bluesky becoming like Twitter in the future?

Not really, microblogging is great to get quick news or life updates from people you follow. Yes, if you're trying to engage in discussion then it's not that useful but that is not its only use case.

I'm not sure Bluesky filters out angry content at all, as this is what I see when I don't follow anyone or have any followers [0]. I wish there was way more filtering than what I currently see as it makes me not want to even interact with Bluesky if that's what I see as a new user.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/XHmidRt

It's distributed in some degree.

> My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

It's certainly a better name, if nothing else. Names like Mastodon, Diaspora, are just terrible. One sounds lika a dinosaur, the other like an unpleasant condition of the large intestine (yes I know what diaspora means).

>> My social network handle is now the same as my email address

Spammers sure love you :)

>> to have your own instance on your own domain

Domain is likely linked to your identity. What might look like an innocent *eet today, might end you on a wrong list down the road.

Except for that, as discussed in TFA, Bluesky isn't actually decentralized (yet).

> though that's more a limitation of the fediverse protocols and fediverse software that really needs fixing

I don't believe ATProto has the same issues, and I believe it would take quite a rearchitecture of ActivityPub to solve.

> such that you can import it into a different service later

This is the key issue. There is no way to import posts in Mastodon without manually fudging the database (which I also had to do when running my own instance). As another commenter mentioned, it's a tricky issue, in large part because it's not part of the federation protocol.

Bluesky solves this by separating the storage from the other parts of the distributed system, such that you don't need to move your storage to change your identity, hosting, moderation, etc. Keeping them independent is a smart move.

I was surprised to learn recently that Rousseau, who is usually seen as a radical egalitarian, hated the democratization of publishing. [1]

His reasoning was complex but a lot of it revolved around the simple fact that as you get more people publishing, the intellectual quality of the average published work goes down.

I'm not ready to roll back the printing press, but in retrospect the digital era has proven him right about this. For instance his position kind of predicts Eternal September - the easier it gets to post online, the more numbskulls you have doing it. Microblogging is the ultimate expression of this and frequently the content you find on microblogging platforms is the absolute worst hot takes and generally the most vile stuff the moderation rules will permit because shock value generates impressions. It's every idiot on earth competing to be as flagrant and base as possible.

We usually hold up free speech as a virtue in Western societies and there are a lot of good reasons for that, but I'm increasingly inclined to treat microblogging less like publishing, and more like alcohol/tobacco/gambling, like it's something people do but they know it's not good for them, they do it anyway because it's addictive and easy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8ucJ29O1kM

I may have been misremembering Lemmy instead.

> You can redirect your old profile to the new one

Is that true even when the reason for the change is because the instance operator wants to silence you? If you can't put up a metaphorical "Go Here Instead" sign, could they also stop you from "proving" that your new home is legitimate and that you're the same author as before?

You are completely off topic.

Does every platform need to become the frontline of American politics?

This. Enshittification is imminent: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yoursel...

Quick news is usually poor-quality news, and "life updates from people you follow" is another way of saying "pointless trivia from people you don't know actually know".

Again, not really. News can just be links to articles, or just headlines. The quickness of the news conveyed has no bearing on its quality. And life updates can be similar, for example a creator is making a new library I'd want to use, or updates an existing library I currently use, it's useful to know that information. If that's how you feel about updates from people then I honestly don't know what to tell you.

Eh, the never ending cycle. People just don't seem to care about the fediverse, because... I don't really know.

I'm on a small fediverse instance and never had any politics or something filling up my feed, just wonderful graphics related content. You just have to be a bit cautious which instance you pick, that is all.

That’s a pretty broad sweep (mis)characterization of Rousseau’s work. He was neither a radical egalitarian or hated the democratization of publishing.

He argues for a society where people are both free and equal, but he recognized that some forms of inequality could coexist with freedom, provided they were rooted in merit or necessity, rather than arbitrary privilege. Also, when he talked about the Rights of Man, it wasn’t a rhetorical flourishes, he did mean man.

It’s a mischaracterization too to say he hated the democratization of publishing. His own ideas gained traction precisely because publishing allowed them to reach broader audiences. His critiques of printing and arts weren’t aimed at access itself but at the unintended consequences that came with it.

This is incorrect. Censorship is eliminating someone’s voice. Amplifying views you like is called running your own social network.

Honestly not true. At its best, Twitter educated me on many subjects including many non-political ones. And as for journalism, well I’m not sure much that I would recognise as high-quality has survived the economic pressures of the internet in any format.

In my experience the people who left first were the funny and interesting ones. I left a while later because I was bored.

Turns out HN is my Colorado.

Not yet. Maybe later... https://bnewbold.net/2024/atproto_progress/

First, a few points:

* The genocide in Israel isn't just an American project. Many countries leaders and media are complicit.

* Fascism isn't just rising in America.

* American politics affects the entire world. Simply look at a map of US military bases, or the threats we level against courts and regulators and leaders.

* Most platforms heavily suppress huge swathes of political content which falls outside the current Overton window (which has, indeed, been moving toward fascism for decades across the West).

Second, Mastodon is a decentralized forum. Complaining about political content on it, in a time of historic inequality, and then asking if all platforms need to be a "frontline of American politics" is really quite silly. It would be like complaining about all the business news on HN, then asking if every platform needs to be so relentlessly capitalistic.

> To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read)

I guess you'd be a year early but I mean, the outwardly fascist candidate just won the US presidency so I'm not sure what your point is?

Nope.

> censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good.

(Brittanica) - note 'changing' and 'suppression', rather than 'elimination'.

> Any regime or context in which the content of what is publically expressed, exhibited, published, broadcast, or otherwise distributed is regulated or in which the circulation of information is controlled.

> The practice and process of suppression or any particular instance of this. This may involve the partial or total suppression of any text or the entire output of an individual or organization on a limited or permanent basis.

(Oxford) - note 'regulated' and 'controlled', and explicitly, 'partial or total', rather than elimination.

> Amplifying views you like

Ie, literally de facto censorship.

When every social network is owned by the yacht class, and they are "amplifying" everything except political views calling for a more equitable and less genocidal system, that's censorship. Definitevily.

Fediverse instance software is immature. I self host lots of stuff but I've tried 3 times to self host a fediverse instance and stopped all three times. I get things running, but the amount of care and feeding software like Mastodon requires is unacceptable for someone like me who doesn't have time to babysit server software.

That just sounds like Mastodon users, many who are academics, are more to the left than you are, and you are cleverly framing their culture as more "divisive", "performative", and/or "tribal" compared to your own arguments which arguably are also just as tribal and performative.

> You can redirect your old profile to the new one in another instance, or permanently move it keeping your follows and followers

But you lose all the posts and interactions. Most importantly, you are not keeping your identity, but merely creating a new account with a copy of your follower/following collections.

> No one there wants to hold your information hostage,

Tell that to a friend of mine who got banned from their instance for committing the crime of being an Ethereum developer. The admin suspended his account and didn't let him go back or initiate the migration process.

FWIW, $7/month is a figure for running a whole server just for your domain. Mastodon absolutely sucks for single-user instances. I offer Takahe hosting for $39/year if you want to use your own domain, or Mastodon + Matrix + Funkwhale + Lemmy for $29/year if you just want an account on the communick servers.

I would argue that people in academia or other tightly coupled bubbles where your career and thus well-being are far more reliant on how your peers evaluate you (especially in humanities where peer reviews are nearly the sole factor of success) is far more tribalist than a typical blue-collar or office environment.

https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/how-dumb-ideas-capture-smart...

Oh yes. Very much. But that is what left any kind of impression from the screenshot.

Oracle Cloud Free Tier ARM instances are really good, I don’t host Mastodon on mine but I assume you can, of course you still have to pay for a domain name but you can get a cheap one

They recently shipped some changes to Discover to make Show Less and Show More actually work. If I understood right[0], they only collected data from them until that point.

The result isn't perfect, but I do notice it's much more in line with what I want in a timeline.

[0] I should save more links! The devs talk openly about what they're working on and the changes that end up in the app and protocol, so I have the knowledge that something changed, but not always a link to the source of that knowledge since it was just another post in the timeline.

I don't see any of that because I've gone to the effort to Show Less on that sort of commentary in the Discover feed. None of it is in Following because I don't follow any of them.

I don't know exactly how they populate that with no following, but I can prove it's filtered by showing you this completely unfiltered view: https://firesky.tv

Have Ctrl+F4 ready to go. Good luck.

The user who's username is a first and last name probably worries less about people finding out their identity than someone who's username is EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK. But someone who's technically savvy and privacy conscious could buy a new domain name with crypto, one not linked to their identity, if that's a concern.

It doesn't show images which is likely the biggest source of angry images, as I see on my feed. My point is that as a new user, I shouldn't have to see such content as I posted, because it turns people off using the platform entirely. I shouldn't have to Show Less, it should ideally be filtered like that automatically.

It’s generally true that the literary quality of a movement goes down as it grows and gets larger —- early adopters are often better writers if not smarter than the people who follow them

From the viewpoint of a library patron, for instance, feminism is a literary movement because it has left behind a large literature frozen in amber.

The earliest authors of the second wave, say Friedan, Steinem, or de Beauvoir were good reads but in 10 years the movement becomes a lot more “vulgar” (in the Latin sense of “common”) and at its worst you find large format books, cheaply bound and typeset with illustrations that probably got mimeographed before they saw the lithography camera full of radical and sometimes hateful rants.

Basically what I did is just follow some people I knew from twitter, and from that I discovered a few follow lists and block lists that I liked. Within a couple of days I had a pretty well curated and very busy feed of things I was interested in seeing and interacting with.

I have bluesky and mastodon accounts and I’m always surprised at how people extreme people call them. I have them just as my music/photography accounts. So the people I add are doing the same stuff. My feed is just as extreme as Flickr aka zero extremeness. Just pictures of bridges and music and normal thoughts.

A redirect is a pale imitation of a real move.

That's true, I paid crypto for my namecheap domain, still easy to track it to my real identity.

Okay, then don't grandstand and downvote on here and just get on some group chats instead? This is the kind of overemotional comment that degrades social networks anyway.

That's just a lot of words to dismiss academia as an ivory tower, and to ad hominem leftism as being part of the ivory tower, which is a bad argument.

It is true that the academic clerisy is a problem and a few leftists actually argue that this social class is a block on social progress. However, sometimes their ideas are right, ranging from the sciences to social justice issues, such as racism and sexism and so on.

I really appreciate this comment as I always try to read the original authors but what little actual Rousseau I have read was over 20 years ago. I might be relying too much on short takes and what other people say about him. He is on the list for a proper reading eventually!

Am academic -- the culture IS more divisive, performative, and tribal.

Sometimes their ideas may be right, but it is no less of an elitist, pretentious, ego-inflated ivory tower.

One of the big downsides of most microblogging platforms (and social media in general) is that they consolidate everything into one undifferentiated aggregation, rather than facilitate the creation of many distinct bounded spaces.

Traditional online communities -- BBSes, IRC channels, Usenet groups, even standard blogs -- are all self-contained spaces that have their own norms and expectations, and so preserve the ability to have communities with high standards and high-quality discourse amidst others that fall victim to the kind of regression to the mean you're talking about. HN is a great example of this (as compared to other sites), as is Reddit, where the differences between various subreddits are very apparent.

But social media lumps everything together into a single space, where each participant is looking at a slightly different subset of the whole, and this causes the rot to overwhelm everything pretty rapidly.

Nothing they said dismisses academia as an ivory tower anymore than anyone pointing out how ridiculously pervasive the replication crisis is dismisses academia or ad hominems leftism as untrustworthy.

There is no need to be defensive when how perverse the incentive structure for academia is, is pointed out. You can be a diehard leftist and also hate the present day institutions of academia.

Freedom of speech means you are allowed to say whatever you like. You are allowed to write it down. You are allowed to make copies of it and distribute it.

It does NOT mean that others are COMPELLED to carry or distribute your message.

I recognize this can create uncomfortable situations, such as when a corporation that controls the stack of modern communication decides your speech is forbidden. That is, I think, a very related but separate issue. At the end of the day, you can stand on a box on the corner of your street and yell.

Disagree, previous commenter specifically said - paraphrase - "Academia (researchers) is MORE tribal (≈ incentive structured) than companies (office and blue-collar workers)".

This specific, comparative argument is used by industry and conservatives to undermine academics and progressives, it is very prevalent on Hacker News when they shit on academics. It has zero to do with the replication crisis which you mentioned, or "publish-or-perish", or the neoliberalization of academia - which as an ex-academic leftist I am very well aware of and have been materially harmed by it.

There is a nuanced distinction between the two forms of argument. The former is a prevalent bad take on Hacker News by folks who unilaterally shit on academia, saying things like "industry is actually more innovative" and other half-baked nonsense like that.