4 ms·

There is some truth in that, but I think HN is different, at least in how I use it. The overall quality of comments on HN is pretty high. I use the the comment

There is some truth in that, but I think HN is different, at least in how I use it. The overall quality of comments on HN is pretty high. I use the the comments to vet the article. If there are a number of thoughtful comments discussing what people got out of the article, I'll go and read it. If I have anything to add after that, I'll add a comment myself. At the moment, HN is the only forum I trust to do this, does anyone have others they would recommend?

mijamo 5y ago
The quality of comments is good for purely technical articles about software. For anything else it is more like pretentious people thinking they know what they're talking about and being thought provoking without any solid bases just for the sake of showing about better they are. Articles about economics often have the worst discussions together with anything related to social sciences but even physics and biology get a terrible treatment. Even reddit is better in that regard because even if the commenters are not necessarily more knowledgeable at least they don't take themselves too seriously. Unfortunately I don't have a great unified resource to propose as an alternative because the interesting people to follow in those domains are often not super active in the internet.
- ergot_vacation 5y ago
  The pompousness of HN is what makes it fun though. And for the record, reddit is plenty pompous too, just in a covert, hipsterish way.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
The assumption that the first thing you should do is read the article has never been backed up by any sort of logic. Doing so means that you must trust the metric that is the HN scoring system. A system that can easily be gamed by bots and fake users. As this is an unreliable metric, your behavior is exactly what we should prefer. You rely on the personal accountability of the peers that you have built up a rapport with to determine if an article is worth reading. Not only should this not be discouraged, this should be encouraged. There should be more ways to easily determine that the people that you have vetted as trustworthy have rated an article high enough to comment positively on it.

mijamo 5y ago

The quality of comments is good for purely technical articles about software. For anything else it is more like pretentious people thinking they know what they're talking about and being thought provoking without any solid bases just for the sake of showing about better they are. Articles about economics often have the worst discussions together with anything related to social sciences but even physics and biology get a terrible treatment. Even reddit is better in that regard because even if the commenters are not necessarily more knowledgeable at least they don't take themselves too seriously. Unfortunately I don't have a great unified resource to propose as an alternative because the interesting people to follow in those domains are often not super active in the internet.

ergot_vacation 5y ago
The pompousness of HN is what makes it fun though. And for the record, reddit is plenty pompous too, just in a covert, hipsterish way.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

The assumption that the first thing you should do is read the article has never been backed up by any sort of logic. Doing so means that you must trust the metric that is the HN scoring system. A system that can easily be gamed by bots and fake users. As this is an unreliable metric, your behavior is exactly what we should prefer. You rely on the personal accountability of the peers that you have built up a rapport with to determine if an article is worth reading. Not only should this not be discouraged, this should be encouraged. There should be more ways to easily determine that the people that you have vetted as trustworthy have rated an article high enough to comment positively on it.