Death to Bullshit | Hacker News Reader

Death to Bullshit

deathtobullshit.com

8 pointsMojah2 comments

The problem is that people's tastes differ, and what content someone will hate, another person will happily consume. For example, Brad Frost appears to hate 24-hour news network...I actually like them. Why? Because I find those 24-hour news networks "genuinely useful things". Brad Frost doesn't.

But let assume that we do live in a world where 90% of the Internet is trash, and we agree that they are trash. The idea that consumers will gravitate towards the remaining 10% still seems fairly odd. It takes a lot of time and effort to actually find good, quality content, and it seems more likely that consumers will just tune out everything, and avoid going anywhere.

This phenomenon can be seen on Hacker News from time to time, when people mistake what they personally like for "HN worthy" material, and what they personally don't as trash which didn't deserve the upvotes. The karma system and moderation policies here are designed to maximize the exposure of popular comments and users at expense of general conversation, in the name of reducing noise and improving signal, but of course, what 'signal' and 'noise' are, are somewhat (but not entirely) subjective.

Hacker News' actual guideline is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." What is a "good" hacker? It doesn't elaborate, but whatever arbitrary measure you use will still guarantee that some set of good hackers will disagree about their interests compared to others, and feel entitled to the correctness of their own opinion.

I think that most consumers gravitate towards what they want, and feel comfortable with, and consider that "quality." Brad Frost's inclusion of 24 hour news networks and "jargon" in the bullshit list with spam, dark patterns and outright fraud, seems to me to be basically the same thing. He doesn't see the value in them, so clearly there is no value to be found.

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