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Isn’t Hacker News a form of a comment section?

• Etheryte 2y ago
  It is, but HN has the saving grace that dang is an angel and Y Combinator pays him to do the chores every day.
  • bluebarbet 2y ago
    That's important, and what gives it the edge over peers, but IMO it's more than that. It's mainly that this is a specialized forum (so its community already has something in common beyond the lowest common denominator of politics) and it's dedicated to highly technical subjects (so contributors here tend to be more literalist and, let's say, spectrum-tending, which really helps with text communication). That's how I explain it.
    • vacuity 2y ago
      As much as I like HN, I'm not sure the average discussion is all that, and for all its supposed virtues I don't see them in practice usually. But when there's a good thread, it's really good. I think it's worth navigating the churn for those. In real time or as an archive, there's lots of gold to be found.
    • rchaud 2y ago
      But without moderation, there is decay over time. It will just happen more slowly in a purposeful forum, but it will happen. Before HN, there was Slashdot after all.
      • bluebarbet 2y ago
        Yes, I agree. That's why I say it has the edge over its peers, i.e. Slashdot. But AFAIK Slashdot is still operating just fine. It's probably helped by its sophisticated distributed-moderation system, but surely mainly because it's the same kind of users as here.