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Occasionally, you can find great discussions on HN because HN has a large amount of domain experts on various sciencey topics. Apart from that, I don't really
by azeirah 8y ago
Occasionally, you can find great discussions on HN because HN has a large amount of domain experts on various sciencey topics. Apart from that, I don't really think HN is that incredibly fantastic.
If you compare it with your average social media (facebook, twitter, mainstream reddit), then yeah, you could say HN is more intelectually sophisticated than that.
The realest, greatest and most fantastic forums are the tiny ones, ones dedicated to a very specific topic, attracting only those who have a major interest in that topic.
Think of various tiny dedicated subreddits, or Lambda the Ultimate, or a huge collection of sites no-one here has ever heard of...
HN's great, but absolutely doesn't deserve the title of "superior intellectual forum on the web". That's way too much.
- planteen 8y ago> Occasionally, you can find great discussions on HN because HN has a large amount of domain experts on various sciencey topics. Apart from that, I don't really think HN is that incredibly fantastic. Exactly. HN has experts, especially in some areas of computing. But many people sound off without knowing what they are talking about. I usually wonder why I even bothered to comment on something related to space. Space seems to be a topic the HN loves, but there aren't a ton of people here with real domain knowledge in it.
- krapp 8y agoIf you want to compare Hacker News to Reddit, you have to compare it to subreddits that share its interests, not mainstream Reddit. In that regard, I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of the content here gets posted from Reddit, so there's probably a lot of crossover between HN and technical subreddits. Also, bear in mind that Facebook has group pages, so it's not impossible that there are dedicated, domain oriented communities there as well.