Hacker News Reader

Comment by djent | Hacker News Reader

I come to Hacker News for the comments. Reddit comments sections usually are filled with jokes and chit-chat rather than further information on the subject. In addition, Hacker News has a better moderating system I feel, in that dang and possibly others are always reading comments and detatching off-topic threads and banning disruptive users.

That doesn't mean Hacker News is perfect, but it's the best I've found so far.

View on HN

I very much agree with this. I quite often check the comments before the story on HN. On reddit (programming), the comments are rarely as good as on HN. Also, the turnover of stories on Reddit is much slower.

For the time being, the standard for discussion on HN just tends to be better. Not "civil" or inoffensive, but more in that discussion seems to be the focus. The idea of "on topic" or at least "good" discussion seems well understood by commenters, and most of the time it seems like people are okay with either posting specifically to the topic or thread at hand, or they're happy just not commenting and simply voting.

The very idea that people collect here to talk about a topic at hand means that it's keeps the conversation a bit higher than elsewhere. I don't think I've ever seen people here push their number of upvotes as something that mattered. There is a lot of buy-in from users to ignore joke comments, even if they're on-topic jokes. How the community became like this I can't say since I have only been here about half a year/year I think, but it's a refreshing change of pace when you just want to discuss something.

I agree, the Karma and voting here are harsh. It's really hard to get upvotes, especially on sensitive topics.

For reference, my grandparent post's karma comprises almost 8% of the total karma on my 1200 day old account.

> It's really hard to get upvotes, especially on sensitive topics.

It's kinda crazy what people here are "sensitive" about! For example, today I have managed to offend Hacker News by questioning the universality of maths. It's a subject on which I am rather qualified to have an opinion, but since it does not match others' I got downvoted. That's just a recipe for homogeneity.

This is honestly my biggest issue with HN as well. The community has a tendency to downvote well-reasoned, substantive posts simply to express disagreement. I think this is poisonous behavior that will eventually turn HN into yet another echo chamber if left unchecked.

I think downvotes should be removed entirely. Either flag a post for being off-topic, inappropriate or adding nothing of substance to the discussion, or reply with a counter argument to express disagreement to well-written posts that deserve it. The ability to silence opinions different to your own with minimal effort can only hurt the quality of discussion here, in my opinion.

Slashdots different types of karma were great: Insightful, Informative, Interesting, Funny... you could add Agree, Disagree and a few others.

On Reddit, one reads comments more so for their entertainment value, rather than actual substance or relevance to the topic posted by the OP. Of course, this is not always true and tend to vary by sub-reddit.

It used to be slashdot, filled with geeky insightful comments. Then DIGG was pretty good, then reddit was great, now HN. Each time one gets popular the comment section is reduced to crap.

I think because HN is focused on non-popular topics it may avoid the masses of idiots.

Slashdot had a grassroots tradition of horrible reference humor and trolling. I have to assume the consequences of that tradition were in mind when creating the HN culture.

I think this can be described as the ongoing eternal september [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Reply on news.ycombinator.com