> The general tone here can at times feel like an uncritical adoration of the valley ecosystem
This is a classic perceptual bias. Everyone feels like HN is full of whatever they identify against, because those are the things we notice the most. Since you identify against "the valley ecosystem", HN seems full of uncritical adoration for it. It's a mirror of your own preferences.
There's also the enormous home-team advantage that anything "anti" has in the human brain, which gives rise to all the snark, cynicism, and rage-fests that take over online communities by default.
This is fascinating. I want to turn as many of my biases as possible from unknowns to knowns, so I appreciate you pointing this out.
An exercise I've now decided to undertake is as follows:
Every time I see something that I feel is "uncritical adoration" I will challenge myself to look for evidence for the opposite of that in the same thread. I'll start with HN, but if this works I want to extend that elsewhere.
Well, you made my evening by actually getting that particular point and finding it interesting. That is so rare! And it's such an interesting phenomenon.
I stumbled on this because the moderation job involves reading tons of comments I wouldn't otherwise see, and the various descriptions of HN they contain are quite incompatible. But they all fit the pattern described above.