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This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends. I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. I

This is an interesting move, and a topic I've been discussing with friends. I've stopped using sites like Reddit, because the comment sections are just toxic. I've gone as far as installing Chrome extensions that make comment sections disappear from popular sites like YouTube. It's too easy to get drawn into the negativity, and I'm completely over it. "Social Networking" has reached it's low point as far as I'm concerned. Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.

gr3yh47 10y ago
>Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. the interesting thing about this is that HN comment system seems to discourage dialogue - i.e. you are not notified when someone replies to your comment. It seems to be more geared towards comment-it-and-forget-it.
- overcast 10y ago
  I think it's prohibitive enough to not allow things to spiral out of control in some crummy argument. I feel it's more of a peer review system. State your comment on what you've read/seen, and move onto the next thing. Which honestly is fine with me.
- e40 10y ago
  Yes, and this has always bothered me. There's a chrome extension (Hacker News Enhancement Suite, broken at the moment due to recent HN changes) that made it easier to see your own comments. Since I no longer use the extension, I rarely check for replies. Bums me out.
  - overcast 10y ago
    Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?
    - iLoch 10y ago
      Sometimes I'll ask a question and forget I asked it, or someone will ask me a question. I'd like to know about those cases more reliably. But if it contributes to any degradation of HN's high quality comments then I'd prefer to keep things the way they are.
      - overcast 10y ago
        Fair, I think they could simply just sort by most recently commented posts you've created, and that would just solve that issue.
        dnautics 10y ago
        Click on your username in the upper right corner, then navigate to "comments" on the left.
        overcast 10y ago
        That's the same function as "threads" in the main heading.
    - e40 10y ago
      Didn't realized that was what "threads" was... thanks.
  - whatever_dude 10y ago
    I click on "threads" on the top menu. Not sure when it was added but it shows all my comments with replies inlined.
    - overcast 10y ago
      The issue op has, is that it's difficult to sift through that, especially older comments.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    I use hnreplies.com for this
- SyneRyder 10y ago
  The threads link at the top should work for recent topic replies, but you can also use a service like HN Watcher if you want to be emailed when someone replies to you. While I find the emails useful, I don't think it improves the quality of my comments.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  But you can still easily see comments if you look at your page. Unlike Slashdot where you have to drill down quite a bit.
- runesoerensen 10y ago
  It encourages dialogue between more than two people, which is often a good thing. The quality of a discussion usually improves when more people participate. It's rarely a problem if someone forgets to follow up since someone else will usually do it, at least if their views are shared by other people. That being said, the "threads" page is useful for finding and responding to new comments in your threads if necessary.
- striking 10y ago
  What if you try http://www.hnreplies.com/ http://www.hnreplies.com/ ?
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  It really is annoying. It allows for a very brief and mostly superficial conversation on whatever happens to be on the front page in the last few hours, and then it's done. That's no way to have a legitimate, in depth discussion. And the result is definitely a stunting of the quality of the conversation in the name of... I'm not sure, forestalling flame wars, keeping people interested by keeping the front page churning, I don't know.
- nikdaheratik 10y ago
  In my opinion, that's a feature not a bug. While it probably reduces some of the sense of community, it also makes it much more difficult to keep flaming on until the thread becomes a dumpster fire. A user has to actively seek to pick a fight and keep up with it which most normal people don't have time for.
e40 10y ago
It depends on the subreddit. There are many where civil conversation is the norm. r/politics and places like that are horrible. Just remove them from your default set.
- overcast 10y ago
  You know, I get this response every time I talk about this topic. I really dislike the "well no one is making you use / buy / watch / listen" to something. People can be critical of something they want to succeed. It happens a lot in certain game communities. What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash.
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    > You know, I get this response every time I talk about this topic. I really dislike the "well no one is making you use / buy / watch / listen" to something. People can be critical of something they want to succeed. It happens a lot in certain game communities. What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash. You're missing the point of e40's response (and others of its kind). It's not "stop whining, don't use it if you don't like it". It's informing you that there are still parts of Reddit you can get value out of if you change your usage patterns a little bit, instead of your blunt-instrument approach that leads to losing gems like (e.g.) /r/AskHistorians just because /r/politics is terrible. There's of course nothing _wrong_ with you deciding that Reddit overall isn't worth the effort, but there's nothing wrong with someone giving you an alternative in case you were unaware. When Reddit blew up in popularity, almost everyone I know who'd used it for a long time got sick of the default feed (both submissions and comments) and then at some point found out that being parsimonious in your subreddit subscriptions can give you a pretty high-quality feed. Reacting with defensiveness and hostility to someone giving you that advice in case you didn't know is frankly just bizarre.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    That's probably due to the nature of politics. It certainly tends to get a lot of people riled quite easily. What's that thing about polite company not talking about politics, religion, or sex. The average person, myself definitely included, probably doesn't have much worth listening to on the subject anyway. To paraphrase PJ O'Rourke: though there certainly are many political commentators who might be worth listing to. Under some circumstances. In a crisis. Maybe.
Balgair 10y ago
Then make sure to NOT talk about HN. Hidden gems only stay gems if you do NOT blab about them.
- overcast 10y ago
  HN doesn't appeal to the general population. It works because it's niche to a specific crowd, that is probably more educated, and working towards a specific goal of improving things in general.
- SuperPaintMan 10y ago
  Rule No. 1.
ebertx 10y ago
I've always thought of technology as being the sole driver behind the fragmentation of communities into small niche communities. It's interesting seeing that comments appear to be one aspect of technological change that drive people to seek niche communities (going off of another comment that it's better to frequent smaller subreddits rather than the larger, default ones).
wutbrodo 10y ago
> Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. Funnily enough, right around the time I made an acct here (4+ years ago, after ~1 year of lurking), I saw an internal post by a well-known Googler talking about the recent drastic decline of HN comment quality and looking for a replacement. I still get value out of HN comments (clearly), but it's definitely changed substantially in the last few years, and not really for the better. I've resigned myself to every high-quality Internet community without heavy, opinionated moderation being a slow treadmill towards popularity and then mediocrity, or worse. Though this is of course something of a "you're not in traffic, you are traffic" problem.
- overcast 10y ago
  There is always going to be the elitist attitude of newcomers ruining things for the "OG" people. However there is certainly no way HN compares to the rest of the drivel out there. Always going to be a fine line between popularity, and trash.
  - wutbrodo 10y ago
    > However there is certainly no way HN compares to the rest of the drivel out there Shrug, that just depends on where people choose to set their standards; there are much worse fora and much better ones. As I said, I still clearly find HN comments at least worth reading, but the distinction isn't as binary as you seem to think it is.
- gruyere 10y ago
  You and I are around the same group, but I've long since abandoned participating in these conversations. Honestly I am in these comments because I had hoped this was the conversation being had. The HN community drove me away long ago.
  - intended 10y ago
    Maybe for the next community you need to figure out where it is in order to be self selected for membership.
kayla210 10y ago
I actually enjoy articles that allow comments, because I like to read what people have to say about it before I actually read it. I don't really know why, maybe to gauge whether or not I want to get more information about the topic that the article title doesn't already provide. I haven't read the article this thread is about yet, either, because the title gives me all the information I need at this moment. I know how crazy the comments were getting for NPR, which I started reading regularly a while back because they allowed comments on their posts. Now, I skip the comments if I'm reading an NPR article because most of the time it's some guy spewing something about how Obama is destroying the country when the article has nothing to do with politics in the slightest.
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
you're an ignorant hypocrite. keep posting negative comments about negative comments, lady. you're all idiots.
eddieh 10y ago
Even HN has declined, but what bothers me most is that HN has a definite range of views that are acceptable. This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. While HN does stay civil, I think it is too limited in general. Don't get me wrong, the reason I use HN is because the discussion hasn't devolved into /. or reddit. However, HN would do well to encourage dissent. I also get that HN, being mostly about tech startups, has different priorities than me personally. I am forever in search of a place online to have good discussions and debate with a respectful community. The comment sections on news sites are rarely the place — even for very respectable publications. I'm fully in favor of NPR's move and other sites should follow.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. Can you give some examples where someone criticized Musk and was downvoted?
  - eddieh 10y ago
    Sure, let me dig some up. [edit, adding a link to a comment] Here is one (th13's reply was downvoted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030447 (This is more tedious than I thought, I'll see if I can dig up some more. Looks like in the future I should make note of these as I see them.) [edit, adding a second link to a comment] You may need to follow the 'parent' link to see the telltale gray of the downvote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10775287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10775287 (Seriously, this is tedious. I know there are more, but I won't dig up anymore unless I'm pressured to do so.)
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      I know that on HN, we shouldn't downvote unless something doesn't add to the discourse, but I'm pretty sure th13 is just factually wrong, his arguments are weak, and it really doesn't add much to the discourse (e.g.: An hyperloop is going to be a regrettable experience for everyone involved. I think the fact that it's difficult to find examples of this is proof that there's not as much of a slant as you think there is.
dibujante 10y ago
u wot m8? i will rek u i sware it on me mum
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
untilHellbanned 10y ago
HN is/will decline. It's fate according to Peterson's Hellbanned Laws: http://blog.timrpeterson.com/2016/06/03/hellbanneds-laws.html http://blog.timrpeterson.com/2016/06/03/hellbanneds-laws.htm...
markdown 10y ago
The problem is that you've now created a bubble for yourself. People did this on a national scale, then are surprised to see Donald Trump have so much support. Too much negativity is debilitating, but sticking your head in the sand has its downsides.
ewoodrich 10y ago
Same boat. No longer frequent Reddit except for a very small number of subs. I have Adblock/Tampermonkey rules to hide comment sections from most news sites that I frequent. (If someone could point me to an extension that handles this, I'd be quite happy...) I consider comment sections (or even comment counts) to be visual noise that distracts from grokking the actual content. It's unfortunate, because I like hearing a variety of perspectives. But without highly aggressive curation, reading comments is a net negative on popular sites.
syngrog66 10y ago
you had me until this: > Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. that statement floored me because historically, HN has been one of the most toxic comment forums I've seen. I've kept coming back despite it, not because of it. there's enough signal to justify it. but it's a kind of low-grade toxicity: a weird mix of passive aggressiveness, disagree-based-downvoting, "cite paper!"-ness, minutial edge case-oriented pedantry (that misses the forest for the trees) and neverending humblebragging. To give just one example I can't think of any place I've seen more humble-bragging and stealth-but-blatant self-promotion as on HN. Whereas on Reddit I know I can always read discussions where the participants are friendly, funny, insightful, mature, organic, etc. Not always, not everywhere, but I don't have to wade through a shit salad like I've had to do here on HN for years. I do think it's gotten better in the last year, maybe due to the work of dang and some of the other UI improvements. I do agree that on sites like CNN, YouTube, the comment threads tend to be overrun with the LCD behavior. Lots of noise there.
- nikdaheratik 10y ago
  If this is one of the most toxic forums you've come across, you must be very fortunate almost to the point of being sheltered. Not saying this is the best ever, but it's nowhere near the worst. The worst traits on HN seem to be an abundance of nitpicking with some disagreements on a few pet topics. Many other sites have active anti-social posters that abuse users for fun, start flamewars for the "lulz" and will argue any side of any issue that causes grief to someone. Not even close to seeing that sort of nonsense here.
  - syngrog66 10y ago
    you're right and wrong. :-) (which is the best kind of right/wrong? haha) what I mean is... I tried to make a subtle point, but it didn't come across. what I was trying to say was this is one of the most toxic sites I've seen for a certain mix of toxic behaviors: mostly passive-aggressive, hyper-nerdy/autism-spectrum types of comments, humblebragging, etc. I agree with you wholeheartedly, from my own experience that yes there are other sites where there is more direct abuse, more direct trolling and harassment, which doesn't happen (or nearly as much) here on HN. what I'm saying is, on the flip side, I see a lot more of a certain kind of... there needs to be a word for it... the slang terms I learned for it were douchebags, pinheads, compulsives, booksmart-yet-streetdumb, etc. I just have never encountered that as much over on Reddit (itself a broad category because so much variance between subreddits there, and front page vs not) as I have here on HN. again, I wasn't saying there's no signal here, and no politeness. I see lots of politeness and maturity here. also lots of muck. thus my slang term "shit salad" -- mix of good and bad. my point was that there's a different assortment of bad behavior I see here than on Reddit, CNN etc. it does appear to me to have improved a lot, especially over the last several months. we'll see. YMMV.
perseusprime11 10y ago
Not sure where I stand in this one but when we removed a distribution list for all the condo owners, all the negativity which usually comes from few people stopped and all the owners lived happily ever after. So maybe taking some of the online discourse out it is not as bad as we think. People now come to condo meetings to talk about burning issues.
hemmail 10y ago
So true, there is maybe 10% comments of actual value anymore on reddit. The most valuable sources of info on the web used to be forums or comments, now there is very little. I used to search hackernews comments for useful info, but that is getting less and less. We really need a good place for expert info and opinions. Hopefully my friend working on a reddit like site, but with a whole new voting algorithm will help fill this void.

gr3yh47 10y ago

>Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. the interesting thing about this is that HN comment system seems to discourage dialogue - i.e. you are not notified when someone replies to your comment. It seems to be more geared towards comment-it-and-forget-it.

overcast 10y ago
I think it's prohibitive enough to not allow things to spiral out of control in some crummy argument. I feel it's more of a peer review system. State your comment on what you've read/seen, and move onto the next thing. Which honestly is fine with me.
e40 10y ago
Yes, and this has always bothered me. There's a chrome extension (Hacker News Enhancement Suite, broken at the moment due to recent HN changes) that made it easier to see your own comments. Since I no longer use the extension, I rarely check for replies. Bums me out.
- overcast 10y ago
  Threads serves the purpose for recent stuff though right? I mean, do you really care about people commenting on stuff from days ago?
  - iLoch 10y ago
    Sometimes I'll ask a question and forget I asked it, or someone will ask me a question. I'd like to know about those cases more reliably. But if it contributes to any degradation of HN's high quality comments then I'd prefer to keep things the way they are.
    - overcast 10y ago
      Fair, I think they could simply just sort by most recently commented posts you've created, and that would just solve that issue.
      - dnautics 10y ago
        Click on your username in the upper right corner, then navigate to "comments" on the left.
        overcast 10y ago
        That's the same function as "threads" in the main heading.
  - e40 10y ago
    Didn't realized that was what "threads" was... thanks.
- whatever_dude 10y ago
  I click on "threads" on the top menu. Not sure when it was added but it shows all my comments with replies inlined.
  - overcast 10y ago
    The issue op has, is that it's difficult to sift through that, especially older comments.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  I use hnreplies.com for this
SyneRyder 10y ago
The threads link at the top should work for recent topic replies, but you can also use a service like HN Watcher if you want to be emailed when someone replies to you. While I find the emails useful, I don't think it improves the quality of my comments.
djsumdog 10y ago
But you can still easily see comments if you look at your page. Unlike Slashdot where you have to drill down quite a bit.
runesoerensen 10y ago
It encourages dialogue between more than two people, which is often a good thing. The quality of a discussion usually improves when more people participate. It's rarely a problem if someone forgets to follow up since someone else will usually do it, at least if their views are shared by other people. That being said, the "threads" page is useful for finding and responding to new comments in your threads if necessary.
striking 10y ago
What if you try http://www.hnreplies.com/ http://www.hnreplies.com/ ?
InclinedPlane 10y ago
It really is annoying. It allows for a very brief and mostly superficial conversation on whatever happens to be on the front page in the last few hours, and then it's done. That's no way to have a legitimate, in depth discussion. And the result is definitely a stunting of the quality of the conversation in the name of... I'm not sure, forestalling flame wars, keeping people interested by keeping the front page churning, I don't know.
nikdaheratik 10y ago
In my opinion, that's a feature not a bug. While it probably reduces some of the sense of community, it also makes it much more difficult to keep flaming on until the thread becomes a dumpster fire. A user has to actively seek to pick a fight and keep up with it which most normal people don't have time for.

e40 10y ago

It depends on the subreddit. There are many where civil conversation is the norm. r/politics and places like that are horrible. Just remove them from your default set.

overcast 10y ago
You know, I get this response every time I talk about this topic. I really dislike the "well no one is making you use / buy / watch / listen" to something. People can be critical of something they want to succeed. It happens a lot in certain game communities. What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  > You know, I get this response every time I talk about this topic. I really dislike the "well no one is making you use / buy / watch / listen" to something. People can be critical of something they want to succeed. It happens a lot in certain game communities. What if I WANT to talk about politics, in a civil manner? Any sufficiently popular subreddit, just devolves into complete trash. You're missing the point of e40's response (and others of its kind). It's not "stop whining, don't use it if you don't like it". It's informing you that there are still parts of Reddit you can get value out of if you change your usage patterns a little bit, instead of your blunt-instrument approach that leads to losing gems like (e.g.) /r/AskHistorians just because /r/politics is terrible. There's of course nothing _wrong_ with you deciding that Reddit overall isn't worth the effort, but there's nothing wrong with someone giving you an alternative in case you were unaware. When Reddit blew up in popularity, almost everyone I know who'd used it for a long time got sick of the default feed (both submissions and comments) and then at some point found out that being parsimonious in your subreddit subscriptions can give you a pretty high-quality feed. Reacting with defensiveness and hostility to someone giving you that advice in case you didn't know is frankly just bizarre.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  That's probably due to the nature of politics. It certainly tends to get a lot of people riled quite easily. What's that thing about polite company not talking about politics, religion, or sex. The average person, myself definitely included, probably doesn't have much worth listening to on the subject anyway. To paraphrase PJ O'Rourke: though there certainly are many political commentators who might be worth listing to. Under some circumstances. In a crisis. Maybe.

Balgair 10y ago

Then make sure to NOT talk about HN. Hidden gems only stay gems if you do NOT blab about them.

overcast 10y ago
HN doesn't appeal to the general population. It works because it's niche to a specific crowd, that is probably more educated, and working towards a specific goal of improving things in general.
SuperPaintMan 10y ago
Rule No. 1.

ebertx 10y ago

I've always thought of technology as being the sole driver behind the fragmentation of communities into small niche communities. It's interesting seeing that comments appear to be one aspect of technological change that drive people to seek niche communities (going off of another comment that it's better to frequent smaller subreddits rather than the larger, default ones).

wutbrodo 10y ago

> Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. Funnily enough, right around the time I made an acct here (4+ years ago, after ~1 year of lurking), I saw an internal post by a well-known Googler talking about the recent drastic decline of HN comment quality and looking for a replacement. I still get value out of HN comments (clearly), but it's definitely changed substantially in the last few years, and not really for the better. I've resigned myself to every high-quality Internet community without heavy, opinionated moderation being a slow treadmill towards popularity and then mediocrity, or worse. Though this is of course something of a "you're not in traffic, you are traffic" problem.

overcast 10y ago
There is always going to be the elitist attitude of newcomers ruining things for the "OG" people. However there is certainly no way HN compares to the rest of the drivel out there. Always going to be a fine line between popularity, and trash.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  > However there is certainly no way HN compares to the rest of the drivel out there Shrug, that just depends on where people choose to set their standards; there are much worse fora and much better ones. As I said, I still clearly find HN comments at least worth reading, but the distinction isn't as binary as you seem to think it is.
gruyere 10y ago
You and I are around the same group, but I've long since abandoned participating in these conversations. Honestly I am in these comments because I had hoped this was the conversation being had. The HN community drove me away long ago.
- intended 10y ago
  Maybe for the next community you need to figure out where it is in order to be self selected for membership.

kayla210 10y ago

I actually enjoy articles that allow comments, because I like to read what people have to say about it before I actually read it. I don't really know why, maybe to gauge whether or not I want to get more information about the topic that the article title doesn't already provide. I haven't read the article this thread is about yet, either, because the title gives me all the information I need at this moment. I know how crazy the comments were getting for NPR, which I started reading regularly a while back because they allowed comments on their posts. Now, I skip the comments if I'm reading an NPR article because most of the time it's some guy spewing something about how Obama is destroying the country when the article has nothing to do with politics in the slightest.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago

you're an ignorant hypocrite. keep posting negative comments about negative comments, lady. you're all idiots.

eddieh 10y ago

Even HN has declined, but what bothers me most is that HN has a definite range of views that are acceptable. This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. While HN does stay civil, I think it is too limited in general. Don't get me wrong, the reason I use HN is because the discussion hasn't devolved into /. or reddit. However, HN would do well to encourage dissent. I also get that HN, being mostly about tech startups, has different priorities than me personally. I am forever in search of a place online to have good discussions and debate with a respectful community. The comment sections on news sites are rarely the place — even for very respectable publications. I'm fully in favor of NPR's move and other sites should follow.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> This limits useful discourse. e.g. someone should be able to criticize Elon Musk without being downvoted to hell. Can you give some examples where someone criticized Musk and was downvoted?
- eddieh 10y ago
  Sure, let me dig some up. [edit, adding a link to a comment] Here is one (th13's reply was downvoted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11030447 (This is more tedious than I thought, I'll see if I can dig up some more. Looks like in the future I should make note of these as I see them.) [edit, adding a second link to a comment] You may need to follow the 'parent' link to see the telltale gray of the downvote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10775287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10775287 (Seriously, this is tedious. I know there are more, but I won't dig up anymore unless I'm pressured to do so.)
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    I know that on HN, we shouldn't downvote unless something doesn't add to the discourse, but I'm pretty sure th13 is just factually wrong, his arguments are weak, and it really doesn't add much to the discourse (e.g.: An hyperloop is going to be a regrettable experience for everyone involved. I think the fact that it's difficult to find examples of this is proof that there's not as much of a slant as you think there is.

dibujante 10y ago

u wot m8? i will rek u i sware it on me mum

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

untilHellbanned 10y ago

HN is/will decline. It's fate according to Peterson's Hellbanned Laws: http://blog.timrpeterson.com/2016/06/03/hellbanneds-laws.html http://blog.timrpeterson.com/2016/06/03/hellbanneds-laws.htm...

markdown 10y ago

The problem is that you've now created a bubble for yourself. People did this on a national scale, then are surprised to see Donald Trump have so much support. Too much negativity is debilitating, but sticking your head in the sand has its downsides.

ewoodrich 10y ago

Same boat. No longer frequent Reddit except for a very small number of subs. I have Adblock/Tampermonkey rules to hide comment sections from most news sites that I frequent. (If someone could point me to an extension that handles this, I'd be quite happy...) I consider comment sections (or even comment counts) to be visual noise that distracts from grokking the actual content. It's unfortunate, because I like hearing a variety of perspectives. But without highly aggressive curation, reading comments is a net negative on popular sites.

syngrog66 10y ago

you had me until this: > Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point. that statement floored me because historically, HN has been one of the most toxic comment forums I've seen. I've kept coming back despite it, not because of it. there's enough signal to justify it. but it's a kind of low-grade toxicity: a weird mix of passive aggressiveness, disagree-based-downvoting, "cite paper!"-ness, minutial edge case-oriented pedantry (that misses the forest for the trees) and neverending humblebragging. To give just one example I can't think of any place I've seen more humble-bragging and stealth-but-blatant self-promotion as on HN. Whereas on Reddit I know I can always read discussions where the participants are friendly, funny, insightful, mature, organic, etc. Not always, not everywhere, but I don't have to wade through a shit salad like I've had to do here on HN for years. I do think it's gotten better in the last year, maybe due to the work of dang and some of the other UI improvements. I do agree that on sites like CNN, YouTube, the comment threads tend to be overrun with the LCD behavior. Lots of noise there.

nikdaheratik 10y ago
If this is one of the most toxic forums you've come across, you must be very fortunate almost to the point of being sheltered. Not saying this is the best ever, but it's nowhere near the worst. The worst traits on HN seem to be an abundance of nitpicking with some disagreements on a few pet topics. Many other sites have active anti-social posters that abuse users for fun, start flamewars for the "lulz" and will argue any side of any issue that causes grief to someone. Not even close to seeing that sort of nonsense here.
- syngrog66 10y ago
  you're right and wrong. :-) (which is the best kind of right/wrong? haha) what I mean is... I tried to make a subtle point, but it didn't come across. what I was trying to say was this is one of the most toxic sites I've seen for a certain mix of toxic behaviors: mostly passive-aggressive, hyper-nerdy/autism-spectrum types of comments, humblebragging, etc. I agree with you wholeheartedly, from my own experience that yes there are other sites where there is more direct abuse, more direct trolling and harassment, which doesn't happen (or nearly as much) here on HN. what I'm saying is, on the flip side, I see a lot more of a certain kind of... there needs to be a word for it... the slang terms I learned for it were douchebags, pinheads, compulsives, booksmart-yet-streetdumb, etc. I just have never encountered that as much over on Reddit (itself a broad category because so much variance between subreddits there, and front page vs not) as I have here on HN. again, I wasn't saying there's no signal here, and no politeness. I see lots of politeness and maturity here. also lots of muck. thus my slang term "shit salad" -- mix of good and bad. my point was that there's a different assortment of bad behavior I see here than on Reddit, CNN etc. it does appear to me to have improved a lot, especially over the last several months. we'll see. YMMV.

perseusprime11 10y ago

Not sure where I stand in this one but when we removed a distribution list for all the condo owners, all the negativity which usually comes from few people stopped and all the owners lived happily ever after. So maybe taking some of the online discourse out it is not as bad as we think. People now come to condo meetings to talk about burning issues.

hemmail 10y ago

So true, there is maybe 10% comments of actual value anymore on reddit. The most valuable sources of info on the web used to be forums or comments, now there is very little. I used to search hackernews comments for useful info, but that is getting less and less. We really need a good place for expert info and opinions. Hopefully my friend working on a reddit like site, but with a whole new voting algorithm will help fill this void.