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Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it.
by suzzer99 2y ago
Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it.
- pyrolistical 2y agoThere are plenty of incentives to game this to distribute your whatever. It’s just that the moderation is pretty good
- lazide 2y agoAlso the crowd is brutally cynical, which tends to discourage a lot of it.
- DocTomoe 2y agoTo the contrary, this crowd is one of the most pleasant on the internet in 2024. A prime example of why gatekeeping is necessary and working.
- PhilipRoman 2y agoDo you consider pleasant and cynical as mutually exclusive? I had a chat with a former politician and he was definitely pleasant, but extremely cynical, he pointed out instances of corruption everywhere. Although to be fair he was probably just being realistic not cynical. Cynicism is a good filter against dumb trends, hustler types and "emperor's clothes" situations.
- HackeREDDIT 2y agoDon't delude yourself. There is quite a lot of stuff being put here for ungenuine reasons. If you want to find a platform with true signal to noise golden ratio, you either have to find one on the rise, NOT made by a well known name, and place a timer on it, or you have to find one people think is long dead.
- tivert 2y ago> Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it. There's tons of incentive to game it. If it wasn't, why would all kinds of startups and tech companies have alert bots and slack channels implemented to allow their employees to swoop in and participate in HN threads that are relevant to their marketing interests? IIRC, the one's who've come clean about doing that have been fairly scrupulous about, but I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.
- suzzer99 2y agoI guess I just avoid those threads but stick to the science, history and programming threads.
- InSteady 2y agoSame. We have simply learned to filter the noise. It helps around here that the noise takes on a similar and easily recognizable form in most cases.
- suzzer99 2y agoWhat I like is that there's always someone on here who's a legit expert on any subject imaginable. Like someone can post a pic of an obscure tape drive from the 60s and almost instantly someone can tell you all about it. Or a rigorous back and forth on the horse-riding tribes who spawned the Indo-European languages. Or people can put in context some outlandish quantum computing headline in a way that you'd never get from the actual article. That stuff is valuable.
- red-iron-pine 2y agolots of signal-to-noise -- you're just not looking in the right HN posts. lots of bots, and lots of spam, esp. in specific threads.