I understand that the core similarities are there, but I disagree. The comparisons have been around since I started browsing HN years ago. The moderation on this site, for one, emphasizes constructive conversation and discussion in a way that most subreddits can only dream of.
It also helps that the target audience has been filtered with that moderation, so over time this site (on average) skews more technical and informed.
This sites commenters attempt to apply technical solutions to social problems, then pats itself on the back despite their comments being entirely inappropriate to the problem space.
There's also no actual constructive discussion when it comes to future looking tech. The Cybertruck, Vision Pro, LLMs are some of the most recent items that were absolutely inaccurately called by the most popular comments. And their reasoning for their prediction had no actual substance in their comments.
And the crypto asset discussions are very nontechnical here, veering into elementary and inaccurate philosophical discussions, despite this being a great forum to talk about technical aspects. every network has pull requests and governance proposals worth discussing, and the deepest discussion here is resurrected from 2012 about the entire concept not having a licit use case that the poster could imagine
HackerNews isn't not exactly like reddit, sure, but it's not much better. People are much better behaved, but still spread a great deal of misinformation.
One way to gauge this property of a community is whether people who are known experts in a respective field participate in it, and unfortunately there are very few of them on HackerNews (this was not always the case). I've had some opportunities to meet with people who are experts, usually at conferences/industry events, and while many of them tend to be active on Twitter... they all say the same things about this site, namely that it's simply full of bad information and the amount of effort needed to dispel that information is significantly higher than the amount of effort needed to spread it.
Next time someone posts an article about a topic you are intimately familiar with, like top 1% subject matter expert in... review the comment section for it and you'll find just heaps of misconceptions, superficial knowledge, and my favorite are the contrarians who take these very strong opinions on a subject they have some passing knowledge about but talk about their contrarian opinion with such a high degree of confidence.
One issue is you may not actually be a subject matter expert on a topic that comes up a lot on HackerNews, so you won't recognize that this happens... but while people here are a lot more polite and the moderation policies do encourage good behavior... moderation policies don't do a lot to stop the spread of bad information from poorly informed people.
One of the things I appreciate most about HN is the fact that experts are often found in the comments.
Perhaps we are defining experts differently?
There was a lot of pseudo science being published and voted up in the comments with Ivermectin/HCQ/etc and Covid, when those people weren't experts and before the Ivermectin paper got serious scrutiny.
The other aspect is that people on here think they're that if they are an expert in one thing, they instantly become an expert in another thing.
> There was a lot of pseudo science being published and voted up in the comments with Ivermectin
Was there? To me it look like HN comments were skeptical way before the public even knew what the drug was.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873687
This is of course true is some cases and less true in others.
I consider myself an expert in one tiny niche field (computer generated code), and when that field comes up (on HN and elsewhere) over the last 30 years the general mood (from people who don't do it) is that it's poor quality code.
Pre-AI this was demonstrably untrue, but meh, I don't need to convince you, so I accept your point of view, and continue doing my thing. Our company revenue is important to me, not the opinion of done guy on the internet.
(AI has freshened the conversation, and it is currently giving mixed results, which is to be expected since it is non-deterministic. But I've been doing deterministic generation for 35 years.)
So yeah. Lots of comments from people who don't fo something, and I'm really not interested in taking the time to "prove" them wrong.
But equally I think the general level of discussion in areas where I'm not an expert (but experienced) is high. And around a lot of topics experience can be highly different.
For example companies, employees and employers come in all sorts of ways. Some folk have been burned and see (all) management through a certain light. Whereas of course, some are good, some are bad.
Yes, most people still use voting as a measure of "I agree with this", rather than the quality of the discussion, but that's just people, and I'm not gonna die on that hill.
And yeah, I'm not above joining in on a topic I don't technically use or know much about. I'll happily say that the main use for crypto (as a currency) is for illegal activity. Or that crypto in general is a ponzi scheme. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it really is the future. But for now, it walks like a duck.
So I both agree, and disagree, with you. But I'm still happy to hang out here and get into (hopefully) illuminating discussions.
Do you have any sources to back up those claims?
Frankly, no. As an obvious example that can be stated nowadays: musk has always been an over-promising liar.
Eg just look at the 2012+ videos of thunderf00t.
Yet people were literally banned here just for pointing out that he hasn't actually delivered on anything in the capacity he promised until he did the salute.
It's pointless to list other examples, as this page is- as dingnuts pointed out - exactly the same and most people aren't actually willing to change their opinion based on arguments. They're set in their opinions and think everyone else is dumb.
> Yet people were literally banned here just for pointing out that he hasn't actually delivered on anything in the capacity he promised until he did the salute.
I'd be shocked if they (you?) were banned just for critiquing Musk. So please link the post. I'm prepared to be shocked.
I'm also pretty sure that I could make a throwaway account that only posted critiques of Musk (or about any single subject for that matter) and manage to keep it alive by making the critiques timely, on-topic and thoughtful or get it banned by being repetitive and unconstructive. So would you say I was banned for talking about <topic>? Or would you say I was banned for my behavior while talking about <topic>?
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Aside from the fact that I highly doubt anyone was banned as you describe, EM’s stories have gotten more and more grandiose. So it’s not the same.
Today he’s pitching moonshot projects as core to Tesla.
10 years ago he was saying self-driving was easy, but he was also selling by far the best electric vehicle on the market. So lying about self driving and Tesla semis mattered less.
Fwiw I’ve been subbed to tf00t since his 50 part creationist videos in early 2010s.
I don’t see how that example refutes their point. It can be true both that there have been disagreeable bans and that the bans, in general, tend to result in higher quality discussions. The disagreeable bans seem to be outliers.
> They're set in their opinions and think everyone else is dumb.
Well, anyway, I read and post comments here because commenters here think critically about discussion topics. It’s not a perfect community with perfect moderation but the discussions are of a quality that’s hard to find elsewhere, let alone reddit.