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This is a consequence of scale. The larger the community, the less you see each individual, the less you are able to understand the other person. One of the mos

This is a consequence of scale. The larger the community, the less you see each individual, the less you are able to understand the other person. One of the most important posts I read on here was on weirdness budgets. Most people want to speak with people with opinions +/- 5% of their own. If you go beyond that limit, people will ignore you and seek feedback from those within their circle. If someone like TeMPOraL makes a weird argument I am going to pay attention, because he has proven himself as a member of the community. One of the big related problems I've found is that people are replying wrong. You should almost never reply to the person that you are disagreeing with. If you do so, and your argument is a good one, the most likely result is that the person you disagree with will be down-voted(even if their argument was in good faith and is their viewpoint was common beforehand!), and your post will follow their post all the way down the page, and no one will see it. This is much worse on reddit, where your post will be hidden. Instead you should reply to their parent, so that your comment and their comment are at the same level, and by up-voting and down-voting you get to compare the different viewpoints directly.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> If someone like TeMPOraL makes a weird argument Well, speaking of weird arguments... the one you make in the last two paragraphs is very weird to me. It's like... not how this is supposed to work, dangit! My take has been: you reply to the person whose comment you want to address. You reply in parallel if you want to present your point standalone - as a counterweight to a sibling comment, but not something to be read as a direct reply. I like it when discussions follow a nice, logical order in the tree (hence I'm replying to you, and not to your parent). Not sure how upvote/downvote tree pans out in practice - myself I upvote high-quality comments that I disagree with, and doubly so if someone else replies to one with a quality rebuttal, as to keep the whole subtree up. But I guess others have other patterns. HN threads are usually small enough that I don't think it matters where a given discussion subtree is happening on the page. But I see the pragmatic value of your suggestion.
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  I mostly agree with your reply, and can thus, using my own rules, reply to you. I don't think I am 100% right. I don't think replying is 100% right. At this point the only person who will ever see this message is you, so it's clear that my reply should 100% be to your comment. I've picked up habbits on Reddit, and on Reddit replying like this is absolutely correct. On here it matters less(perhaps not at all), but the more people join, the more it matters. I've got a feeling this is result of the reply system having a single option. It's to simple, so we get issues like this. I look to sites like StackOverflow that have Answer - Comment - Chat hierarchy for guidance here. I think if someone is going to over-take Reddit, this being done correctly will play a big part.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> If someone like TeMPOraL makes a weird argument Well, speaking of weird arguments... the one you make in the last two paragraphs is very weird to me. It's like... not how this is supposed to work, dangit! My take has been: you reply to the person whose comment you want to address. You reply in parallel if you want to present your point standalone - as a counterweight to a sibling comment, but not something to be read as a direct reply. I like it when discussions follow a nice, logical order in the tree (hence I'm replying to you, and not to your parent). Not sure how upvote/downvote tree pans out in practice - myself I upvote high-quality comments that I disagree with, and doubly so if someone else replies to one with a quality rebuttal, as to keep the whole subtree up. But I guess others have other patterns. HN threads are usually small enough that I don't think it matters where a given discussion subtree is happening on the page. But I see the pragmatic value of your suggestion.

ItsMonkk 5y ago
I mostly agree with your reply, and can thus, using my own rules, reply to you. I don't think I am 100% right. I don't think replying is 100% right. At this point the only person who will ever see this message is you, so it's clear that my reply should 100% be to your comment. I've picked up habbits on Reddit, and on Reddit replying like this is absolutely correct. On here it matters less(perhaps not at all), but the more people join, the more it matters. I've got a feeling this is result of the reply system having a single option. It's to simple, so we get issues like this. I look to sites like StackOverflow that have Answer - Comment - Chat hierarchy for guidance here. I think if someone is going to over-take Reddit, this being done correctly will play a big part.