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I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their adv

I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again. I've witnessed this pattern in an array of subreddits spanning from hobbies to coding to gaming. Ultimately they become discussion forums for the lowest common denominator of skillsets.

code_duck 7y ago
I’ve seen this on medical subs. Doctors get downvoted and their posts disputed. This is often because members have had poor experiences with doctors and the doctors underestimate the level of sophistication of the patient members, and their own level of knowledge is not always what one would expect.
GFischer 7y ago
Maybe some subreddits, but on other subreddits you get actual top people - I´m in a couple of card game ones and I sometimes get answers from a top 50 player. You also get advice from not so good players too of course.
- marblar 7y ago
  That seems like an unusual case because you have an external way to verify the expertise of a top 50 player. You don't have the same for a finance subreddit.
  - NicoJuicy 7y ago
    Yes they do. They require proof of payment
cookiengineer 7y ago
> I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again. /r/programming in a nutshell.
- sli 7y ago
  /r/programming is not an anomaly. My experience is that programming-related discussion boards everywhere are like this, almost from day one. The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong, to the point where even typos can cause a relentless dogpile and accusations that said person "has clearly never written real software in their life." You simply cannot make even one mistake, no matter how minor. Consequently, I haven't discussed programming on an open forum in over a decade, because I've never found a single programming forum that wasn't openly toxic in this way.
  - noizejoy 7y ago
    > rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong Could that be, because so much of programming is a group activity (understanding, maintaining, and evolving other people’s code), and thus actually benefits (in an evolutionary sense) from simplistic group think more than from innovation and perfection?
    - ethbro 7y ago
      I'd chalk this one up to folks with enough time to endlessly post on Reddit not spending those hours building and maintaining software. Professionals have time for the internet as a hobby. Hobbyists have time for the internet as a job.
  - na85 7y ago
    >The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong Frankly, that's my perception of HN, too. Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy, for example, and then prepare to fend off the throngs of people clamoring to be the first to tell you that email is hard (tm), and only fastmail can save us from Google's dragnet, oh also email is deprecated and we should just use signal or some other proprietary walled garden.
    - shadowprofile77 7y ago
      And the irony that your comment gets downvoted for pointing out that HN too suffers from a tribalist mentality about certain things (it does)... All these sharp minds don't like to be reminded of their own strange little obsessions and failings as human beings.
teach 7y ago
My wife gets this a lot with nutrition. She has a freaking PhD in Nutrition Science and also is a registered dietitian but god forbid she suggest that maybe bacon isn't the mostly healthy of foods in most subreddits.
- Muuuchem 7y ago
  Well nutrition isn't exactly a settled science. There are many problems with studies and as a result we have a wide variety of sometimes contradictory conclusions from them. New conclusions and findings come out but the nutrition community is unable to achieve a consensus understanding on these types of aspects of a diet. There are too many confounding factors involved in studies and it is nearly impossible to design a study that will show the exact effects of eating bacon on the diet without other dietary considerations tainting the results. Like for instance lots of new studies are coming out recently claiming that our disdain for saturated fats is highly misguided. However, nutritionists cannot come to a consensus because old school people stick to what they learn in school without keeping up with studies, people distrust the new studies or argue in favor of the many contradictory studies, etc...
  - teach 7y ago
    Way to make my point for me. The science is settled, but like everything else, untrained people can't tell the difference between a good study and a bad study, and the media reports on them all. Check out the book _How Not to Diet_, which is the most recent masterwork on evidence-based nutrition.
    - aggie 7y ago
      > The science is settled It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    > settled science That seems like an odd turn of phrase.
tomlu 7y ago
I have experienced this first hand. I wrote a novel multiplayer algorithm for a game that shipped on the consoles at the ,time and weighed into a conversation about lag on Battlefield. Downvotes everywhere...
76543210 7y ago
I have a data heavy website, and posting links on most subreddits isn't okay. So I could format my data for Reddit, or post a simple summary (which looks as authentic as any random poster), or I don't post at all. I have the highest quality, low cost food Data, but can't post it. But hey Aldi astroturfs and gets away with it.
travmatt 7y ago
I’d describe the drift towards anti-expertise in terms of size rather than time - I’ve found that the best subreddits are fairly small or have heavy moderation if they are large. /r/askhistorians has kept up their quality through removing top line answers that are not properly cited, sometimes entire posts have nothing other than [deleted]. I think most smaller communities are still pretty valuable, maybe because they are too small or infrequently used to have their users coalesce around a single set of ideas. I think/r/asknetsec is still a pretty good resource even though it’s in the bigger end of small, I’m not sure how it’s kept it’s quality though.
- noizejoy 7y ago
  > I’ve found that the best subreddits are fairly small or have heavy moderation if they are large. Maybe that’s just reflecting how our species seems to work. The larger the group, the more it turns into a mob unless increasingly tightly structured.
palebluedot 7y ago
My favorite example of this is that Popehat (Ken White) was banned from /r/legaladvice.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Just the opposite. /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated to keep it clean and high quality. Ken White was banned for deliberate persistent rule breaking and hijacking the sub to make it popehatLegalAdvice. https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_is_the_feud_between_popehat_and_rlegaladvice/ https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_i...
  - palebluedot 7y ago
    I don't really see how that fails to fit the pattern of "I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again." While /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated, it is not particularly high quality.

code_duck 7y ago

I’ve seen this on medical subs. Doctors get downvoted and their posts disputed. This is often because members have had poor experiences with doctors and the doctors underestimate the level of sophistication of the patient members, and their own level of knowledge is not always what one would expect.

GFischer 7y ago

Maybe some subreddits, but on other subreddits you get actual top people - I´m in a couple of card game ones and I sometimes get answers from a top 50 player. You also get advice from not so good players too of course.

marblar 7y ago
That seems like an unusual case because you have an external way to verify the expertise of a top 50 player. You don't have the same for a finance subreddit.
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  Yes they do. They require proof of payment

cookiengineer 7y ago

> I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again. /r/programming in a nutshell.

sli 7y ago
/r/programming is not an anomaly. My experience is that programming-related discussion boards everywhere are like this, almost from day one. The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong, to the point where even typos can cause a relentless dogpile and accusations that said person "has clearly never written real software in their life." You simply cannot make even one mistake, no matter how minor. Consequently, I haven't discussed programming on an open forum in over a decade, because I've never found a single programming forum that wasn't openly toxic in this way.
- noizejoy 7y ago
  > rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong Could that be, because so much of programming is a group activity (understanding, maintaining, and evolving other people’s code), and thus actually benefits (in an evolutionary sense) from simplistic group think more than from innovation and perfection?
  - ethbro 7y ago
    I'd chalk this one up to folks with enough time to endlessly post on Reddit not spending those hours building and maintaining software. Professionals have time for the internet as a hobby. Hobbyists have time for the internet as a job.
- na85 7y ago
  >The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong Frankly, that's my perception of HN, too. Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy, for example, and then prepare to fend off the throngs of people clamoring to be the first to tell you that email is hard (tm), and only fastmail can save us from Google's dragnet, oh also email is deprecated and we should just use signal or some other proprietary walled garden.
  - shadowprofile77 7y ago
    And the irony that your comment gets downvoted for pointing out that HN too suffers from a tribalist mentality about certain things (it does)... All these sharp minds don't like to be reminded of their own strange little obsessions and failings as human beings.

teach 7y ago

My wife gets this a lot with nutrition. She has a freaking PhD in Nutrition Science and also is a registered dietitian but god forbid she suggest that maybe bacon isn't the mostly healthy of foods in most subreddits.

Muuuchem 7y ago
Well nutrition isn't exactly a settled science. There are many problems with studies and as a result we have a wide variety of sometimes contradictory conclusions from them. New conclusions and findings come out but the nutrition community is unable to achieve a consensus understanding on these types of aspects of a diet. There are too many confounding factors involved in studies and it is nearly impossible to design a study that will show the exact effects of eating bacon on the diet without other dietary considerations tainting the results. Like for instance lots of new studies are coming out recently claiming that our disdain for saturated fats is highly misguided. However, nutritionists cannot come to a consensus because old school people stick to what they learn in school without keeping up with studies, people distrust the new studies or argue in favor of the many contradictory studies, etc...
- teach 7y ago
  Way to make my point for me. The science is settled, but like everything else, untrained people can't tell the difference between a good study and a bad study, and the media reports on them all. Check out the book _How Not to Diet_, which is the most recent masterwork on evidence-based nutrition.
  - aggie 7y ago
    > The science is settled It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.
- ethbro 7y ago
  > settled science That seems like an odd turn of phrase.

tomlu 7y ago

I have experienced this first hand. I wrote a novel multiplayer algorithm for a game that shipped on the consoles at the ,time and weighed into a conversation about lag on Battlefield. Downvotes everywhere...

76543210 7y ago

I have a data heavy website, and posting links on most subreddits isn't okay. So I could format my data for Reddit, or post a simple summary (which looks as authentic as any random poster), or I don't post at all. I have the highest quality, low cost food Data, but can't post it. But hey Aldi astroturfs and gets away with it.

travmatt 7y ago

I’d describe the drift towards anti-expertise in terms of size rather than time - I’ve found that the best subreddits are fairly small or have heavy moderation if they are large. /r/askhistorians has kept up their quality through removing top line answers that are not properly cited, sometimes entire posts have nothing other than [deleted]. I think most smaller communities are still pretty valuable, maybe because they are too small or infrequently used to have their users coalesce around a single set of ideas. I think/r/asknetsec is still a pretty good resource even though it’s in the bigger end of small, I’m not sure how it’s kept it’s quality though.

noizejoy 7y ago
> I’ve found that the best subreddits are fairly small or have heavy moderation if they are large. Maybe that’s just reflecting how our species seems to work. The larger the group, the more it turns into a mob unless increasingly tightly structured.

palebluedot 7y ago

My favorite example of this is that Popehat (Ken White) was banned from /r/legaladvice.

lonelappde 7y ago
Just the opposite. /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated to keep it clean and high quality. Ken White was banned for deliberate persistent rule breaking and hijacking the sub to make it popehatLegalAdvice. https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_is_the_feud_between_popehat_and_rlegaladvice/ https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_i...
- palebluedot 7y ago
  I don't really see how that fails to fit the pattern of "I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again." While /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated, it is not particularly high quality.