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… and then you hit a COVID related thread and realize it’s really just Reddit for people with more self confidence.

by walls 4y ago

JBits 4y ago
In general, I don't think hn is great for politics. In general, people here seem good at using articles submitted as a prompt for discussions. I think this works wonderfully for tech as lots of people have interesting adjacent knowledge and it helps put things into context. The thing with this though is that reading the article properly isn't always necessary to join the conversation. For politics, I find that people tend to fixate on certain points while ignoring the rest of an article's argument.
pavlov 4y ago
Epidemiology isn’t an obvious core competence for a site named Hacker News, though. IMHO the best part of HN is anything that benefits from a perspective on software history because somebody will jump in with “Yeah I was there at Sun in 1986…” and tell the story. The closer it gets to everyday politics or JavaScript framework du jour, the worse the signal-to-noise ratio.
Semaphor 4y ago
Or cryptocurrency-related. Or Europe-related. All threads, where reading the comments usually gives you very little information besides how toxic a decent chunk of the userbase can be.
mc32 4y ago
Indeed. People have a hard time knowing when they are going outside their areas of expertise and sometimes extrapolate their confidence in one area into others and can sometimes be right and other times wildly wrong. Diet and exercise might be one such topic, for example. Economics another. I'm not hammering speculation or suggestions, I'm specially referring to confident assertions.
michaelwww 4y ago
Maybe you skipped reading my sentence "People usually don't get away with b.s. because other experts will correct them."
- walls 4y ago
  My point is that a lot of them aren’t experts, they’re just educated enough to sound like one.
  - michaelwww 4y ago
    I get it. Well, I don't take HN comments as the last word on something I need to know
  - clove 4y ago
    To me, this is why HN is sometimes worse than Reddit. At least with Reddit, it's pretty easy to tell when someone is objectively wrong. With HN, I feel sometimes, after reading something convincing, that perhaps I've just been hypnotized by good rhetoric. I see people making objectively wrong comments here on HN all the time in my own niches. So, I'm sure when I'm reading something outside my niche here that I'm reading BS - but it doesn't read like BS. The only thing outside my niche that I know I can trust here is tech stuff, and that's why I started coming here many years ago. But I've also seen HN's quality go down over the past few years, slowly becoming Reddit-like, unfortunately. I think dang's emphasis on discourse style will ultimately keep HN's quality satisfactory, though, no matter how many Redditors migrate here. HN will probably remain the best forum for discussions on a wide variety of subjects for the near future.
    - michaelwww 4y ago
      > I feel sometimes, after reading something convincing I feel like I get good arguments from both sides here, then it's up to me to decide. The pros and cons arguments are usually better here than any other site open to the public

… and then you hit a COVID related thread and realize it’s really just Reddit for people with more self confidence.

by walls 4y ago

… and then you hit a COVID related thread and realize it’s really just Reddit for people with more self confidence.

In general, I don't think hn is great for politics. In general, people here seem good at using articles submitted as a prompt for discussions. I think this works wonderfully for tech as lots of people have interesting adjacent knowledge and it helps put things into context. The thing with this though is that reading the article properly isn't always necessary to join the conversation. For politics, I find that people tend to fixate on certain points while ignoring the rest of an article's argument.

pavlov 4y ago

Epidemiology isn’t an obvious core competence for a site named Hacker News, though. IMHO the best part of HN is anything that benefits from a perspective on software history because somebody will jump in with “Yeah I was there at Sun in 1986…” and tell the story. The closer it gets to everyday politics or JavaScript framework du jour, the worse the signal-to-noise ratio.

Semaphor 4y ago

Or cryptocurrency-related. Or Europe-related. All threads, where reading the comments usually gives you very little information besides how toxic a decent chunk of the userbase can be.

mc32 4y ago

Indeed. People have a hard time knowing when they are going outside their areas of expertise and sometimes extrapolate their confidence in one area into others and can sometimes be right and other times wildly wrong. Diet and exercise might be one such topic, for example. Economics another. I'm not hammering speculation or suggestions, I'm specially referring to confident assertions.

michaelwww 4y ago

Maybe you skipped reading my sentence "People usually don't get away with b.s. because other experts will correct them."

walls 4y ago
My point is that a lot of them aren’t experts, they’re just educated enough to sound like one.
- michaelwww 4y ago
  I get it. Well, I don't take HN comments as the last word on something I need to know
- clove 4y ago
  To me, this is why HN is sometimes worse than Reddit. At least with Reddit, it's pretty easy to tell when someone is objectively wrong. With HN, I feel sometimes, after reading something convincing, that perhaps I've just been hypnotized by good rhetoric. I see people making objectively wrong comments here on HN all the time in my own niches. So, I'm sure when I'm reading something outside my niche here that I'm reading BS - but it doesn't read like BS. The only thing outside my niche that I know I can trust here is tech stuff, and that's why I started coming here many years ago. But I've also seen HN's quality go down over the past few years, slowly becoming Reddit-like, unfortunately. I think dang's emphasis on discourse style will ultimately keep HN's quality satisfactory, though, no matter how many Redditors migrate here. HN will probably remain the best forum for discussions on a wide variety of subjects for the near future.
  - michaelwww 4y ago
    > I feel sometimes, after reading something convincing I feel like I get good arguments from both sides here, then it's up to me to decide. The pros and cons arguments are usually better here than any other site open to the public