I hear that sentiment from a lot of right wing friends in US fwiw. IME here it's more a coded speech and / or an escape from difficult conversations. The coded speech part steers it towards general conspiracy topics, which are often a simple way to blanket discard everything "liberal".
An actual example: "What did you think about Bill Gates climate book?" (they'd read it) -> "He was associated with Epstein, he's a creep. I don't trust anything he says". Then, "What do you think about Trumps delaying and denying of Epstein associations" -> "There's so much back and forth, who knows what to believe."
To be clear I think your take is correct, its just I think that if the space were saturated in a direction that were more convenient towards their "team", they won't have much difficulty taking a clear stance.
It will make a _small_ difference, and then also banning individuals from owning multiple homes would be a bigger difference (and then building enough supply, the biggest). We can do all three.
Possibly but that is not the main argument. The main argument is about the lesser of two evils. Do we want to prioritize the open market of SFH ownership, or do we want to prioritize (maximize) the number of people who can own a SFH. Banning multiple SFH ownership would target the latter, with the tradeoff of a restrictive ownership path for wealthy individuals.
This would certainly drive down prices - how much is an open question. But I think its a fair compromise, UNTIL we actually do have enough homes for everyone. Until then something has to give - right now its people who can't own a single home that are yielding, but IMO it would be much more fair to ask people who already own a home to yield (not buy more than one). Ultimately that's the tradeoff to discuss.
It bugs me but also it comes with the territory - HN attracts an awful lot of programmers, and most programmers skew hard to pedantry (more specifically, noticing and correcting minute details). I'd love the exact same community minus the pedantry, but if losing the pedantry costs the programmers, but am not sure how possible that is (without more sophisticated moderation).
This is well known, and why forums that wanted to maintain their quality would consistently lock such threads going back at least 20+ years when I started using forums. Reddit, Facebook, et al, do the opposite. Its why they feel so bad to use over time - they are engineered to tap into this and to promote it. HN thrives because they very consciously do the opposite.
I'm sure many of us would take it much further, but I hope we can appreciate its not an easy task.
The thing that I got stuck on most in 2025 is how often we complain about these centralized behemoths but only rarely distill them to the actual value they provide. Its only if you go through the exercise of understanding why people use them, and what it would take to replicate them, that you can understand what it would actually take to improve them. For example, the fundamental feature of facebook is the network. And layered on, the ability to publish short-stories on the internet and have some control over who gets to read it. The technological part is hard but possible, and the network part well - think about how they did it originally. They physically targeted small social groups and systematically built it over time. It was a big deal when Facebook was open to my university, everyone got on about the same time, and so instantly you were all connecting with each other.
I believe we can build something better. But I'm also now equally convinced that it's possible the next step isn't technological at all, but social. Regulation, breaking up the monopolies, whatever. We treat roads and all manner of other infrastructure as government provided; maybe a social platform is part of it. We always lean these thoughts dystopian, but also which of us technologically inclined readers and creators is spending as much time on policy documents, lobbying, etc, as we are schlepping code around hoping it will be a factor in this process. This is only a half thought but, at least these days I'm thinking more about not only is it time to build, but perhaps its time to be building non-code related things, to achieve what we previously thought were purely technological outcomes.
I really like the story and in these times of genAI a story about a virtual idol makes it worthwhile reading it again. Also compared to Gibson's other works I find it a much easier read.
Also, I sometimes like to compare it to Coupland's Microserf's but Microserf's is notably dated by now.
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