4 ms·

Thanks for this thorough response! I'm fascinated by the point you raise about 'having no interest in commenting' until being far enough along in your career to

Thanks for this thorough response! I'm fascinated by the point you raise about 'having no interest in commenting' until being far enough along in your career to 'have actual insight to share on relevant topics'. Can you say more about what it was that made you feel ready to comment, and how doing so at that time, as opposed to commenting before, may or may not have changed your sense of participation in the HN community?

andrewzah 7y ago
Reddit is much more social. What I mean is people just post whatever whenever, and a lot of times it's bullshit. You wouldn't know unless you're knowledgeable about that topic/domain, and even then actual experts can be downvoted if what they say goes against that subreddit's hivemind. Each subreddit has a hivemind that you need to be aware of. The few exceptions are subreddits that are moderated with an iron fist: /r/AskHistorians, and to a lesser degree, /r/neutralpolitics. I think everyone being anonymous is a big factor. Source: I've used reddit under various anonymous handles since 2012. I've only been using HN for ~3 years now (lurking, mostly) but I've noticed that a lot more people use their real names and identities. I would think that helps towards not spouting bullshit without resources. (but controversial threads, e.g. highly political ones, tend to throw that out the window). Lobste.rs has the concept of "hats" that are given to specific people, and they can wear them to answer something in a specific capacity. [0] I wish HN had something like that. HN is moderated enough that I think a system like that could work. Other things about HN: 1) There are no thumbnails or image links, just links to articles or similar. Reddit suffers from images being allowed, because images take a few seconds to process and upvote, versus a longer article. Reddit is very good for sharing memes and cat pictures, but not so good for lengthy articles. Tild.es [1] is how reddit would be if it were text only (and orders of magnitude smaller). Picture and joke/meme replies also completely derail threads. 2) HN is highly focused and consistently moderated (in my opinion). At times more controversial discussion happens with political news, but it generally is focused on business / research / technology news, etc. Reddit is a mishmash of subreddits and each one is moderated differently (usually very minimally). With HN's culture I usually feel no need to comment on something unless I have experience with that or it's something I'm interested in. [0]: https://lobste.rs/hats https://lobste.rs/hats [1]: https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/
mdorazio 7y ago
Sure. On HN, after I worked in consulting and more specifically in automotive technology for a few years, topics would come up on which I actually had relevant first-hand knowledge to share beyond what most HN readers and commenters would already know. At that point it seemed helpful to the community to share via commenting. Prior to that, an aphorism of a friend always seemed to apply - "his sum total life experience could be chiseled on the side of a toothpick". I.e. when you're young and just getting started on your career, you really don't know much of anything and acting as though you do just pisses off people who are actual experts and adds very little to a community.

andrewzah 7y ago

Reddit is much more social. What I mean is people just post whatever whenever, and a lot of times it's bullshit. You wouldn't know unless you're knowledgeable about that topic/domain, and even then actual experts can be downvoted if what they say goes against that subreddit's hivemind. Each subreddit has a hivemind that you need to be aware of. The few exceptions are subreddits that are moderated with an iron fist: /r/AskHistorians, and to a lesser degree, /r/neutralpolitics. I think everyone being anonymous is a big factor. Source: I've used reddit under various anonymous handles since 2012. I've only been using HN for ~3 years now (lurking, mostly) but I've noticed that a lot more people use their real names and identities. I would think that helps towards not spouting bullshit without resources. (but controversial threads, e.g. highly political ones, tend to throw that out the window). Lobste.rs has the concept of "hats" that are given to specific people, and they can wear them to answer something in a specific capacity. [0] I wish HN had something like that. HN is moderated enough that I think a system like that could work. Other things about HN: 1) There are no thumbnails or image links, just links to articles or similar. Reddit suffers from images being allowed, because images take a few seconds to process and upvote, versus a longer article. Reddit is very good for sharing memes and cat pictures, but not so good for lengthy articles. Tild.es [1] is how reddit would be if it were text only (and orders of magnitude smaller). Picture and joke/meme replies also completely derail threads. 2) HN is highly focused and consistently moderated (in my opinion). At times more controversial discussion happens with political news, but it generally is focused on business / research / technology news, etc. Reddit is a mishmash of subreddits and each one is moderated differently (usually very minimally). With HN's culture I usually feel no need to comment on something unless I have experience with that or it's something I'm interested in. [0]: https://lobste.rs/hats https://lobste.rs/hats [1]: https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/

mdorazio 7y ago

Sure. On HN, after I worked in consulting and more specifically in automotive technology for a few years, topics would come up on which I actually had relevant first-hand knowledge to share beyond what most HN readers and commenters would already know. At that point it seemed helpful to the community to share via commenting. Prior to that, an aphorism of a friend always seemed to apply - "his sum total life experience could be chiseled on the side of a toothpick". I.e. when you're young and just getting started on your career, you really don't know much of anything and acting as though you do just pisses off people who are actual experts and adds very little to a community.