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I agree in the broad that much (most) of reddit is awful, wrong, and not worth viewing. (I wonder how you feel about HN over the years. To me HN got as bad as p

by Jach 4y ago

I agree in the broad that much (most) of reddit is awful, wrong, and not worth viewing. (I wonder how you feel about HN over the years. To me HN got as bad as parts of reddit were at some point, however reddit has gotten worse too so there's still a quality gap.) Still, it can be occasionally useful to filter it as a site for queries, like with HN. (It's fun to see if a company I've thought about working for has been talked about on HN at all.) Recently I found some useful travel posts on reddit, like how to best get to a destination with some tradeoffs highlighted for time sensitivity and helpful links for everything, and as an augment of location reviews, some offering quite a bit more context than the one or two paragraphs I usually see on google maps. Though to be fair, a sample of short reviews is usually good enough. Another use of reddit remains finding other people who want to talk about relatively niche things, but these days it's more common that it's just one way that leads you to a discord server whose contents are sadly invisible to search engines.

jrockway 4y ago
I actually like Reddit and HN in general. On Reddit, I like the comment threads where they trash politicians with escalating levels of absurdity, and the creative writing exercises disguised as AITA and TIFU. As for HN, I think it's fine. It really hasn't gotten worse over the years (people were saying that in 2010 too). Moderation here is excellent, and people mostly behave themselves. But, you do have to stay away from certain subject areas. If you see "it's a lab leak for sure!!!" with 2000 comments, I recommend bypassing that. Lot of people very mad at each other. Anything technical, though, lots of good discussions, even on popular topics, and I often learn something. The intersection of technical and social is mixed, but generally you don't feel terrible after reading them. HN does feel like it skews younger than it used to. Probably because I am now older than when I first started using the site. I read a lot of things where I think "you'll figure it out in a few years" more and more, but know that you can only explain so much. Lessons have to be learned firsthand, HN's average reader has many good life lessons to learn. So do I, of course!

by Jach 4y ago

jrockway 4y ago

I actually like Reddit and HN in general. On Reddit, I like the comment threads where they trash politicians with escalating levels of absurdity, and the creative writing exercises disguised as AITA and TIFU. As for HN, I think it's fine. It really hasn't gotten worse over the years (people were saying that in 2010 too). Moderation here is excellent, and people mostly behave themselves. But, you do have to stay away from certain subject areas. If you see "it's a lab leak for sure!!!" with 2000 comments, I recommend bypassing that. Lot of people very mad at each other. Anything technical, though, lots of good discussions, even on popular topics, and I often learn something. The intersection of technical and social is mixed, but generally you don't feel terrible after reading them. HN does feel like it skews younger than it used to. Probably because I am now older than when I first started using the site. I read a lot of things where I think "you'll figure it out in a few years" more and more, but know that you can only explain so much. Lessons have to be learned firsthand, HN's average reader has many good life lessons to learn. So do I, of course!