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Comment by pfarnsworth | Hacker News Reader

This is why reddit-style upvoting works well. Of all of the systems I've seen, reddit has hit enough critical mass such that the upvoted comments are truly great.

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Wow really? I have the opposite opinion: easy and safe (for reddit's hive mind / what is currently popular / anti-popular) rise to the top, things people disagree with get downvoted.

The effect lessens the further you get from the front page, but the formula is the same.

NB: this is not true for some of their highly moderated subreddits like AskScience / AskHistorians or whatever. The rest of reddit does not operate that way though.

Right, but (per parent), it's still better than the alternatives. You can cite flaws, but it was an improvement over what we had before (yabb, slashdot, etc).

You can do better -- like the AskScience/AskHistorian forums -- but only at the cost of investing a lot more work. Is there something more scalable?

> You can cite flaws, but it was an improvement over what we had before (yabb, slashdot, etc).

FWIW I considered /. to be a better system than reddit. But I mean, it all depends on what you consider "better". Reddit is certainly more popular, so clearly it's better by some metric.

Yeah, reddit tends to dogpile. Mildly controversial comments in popular subreddits get massively upvoted or massively downvoted depending largely on the first few votes.

I wouldn't describe Reddit politics discussions as "truly great."

Reddit is better than HN political discussions, which overwhelming praise Hilary Clinton and call any Trump supporter a bigot.

It would be great to be able to have debates over Trump's policy positions, but until that becomes possible, one has to simply guess at motivations of supporters.

If the people are explaining politely why Trump is a bigot and why they support Hillary, what's the problem? Just because people having a discussion don't share your viewpoints doesn't make the discussion less valid.

> HN political discussions, which overwhelming praise Hilary Clinton

I'd really like to know how HN has implemented the feature which occasionally allows posts from readers of instances of HN in alternate universes to be shown on the instance of HN in our universe.

As you can see here: http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/

The engineering profession is about 2:1 Democrat to Republican, and software engineering in particular is about 3:1.

It really doesn't work though. Maybe it works for the Pokémon Go subreddit or whatever, but the hive mind is out of control on issues where there are multiple sides. Even sports subreddits suffer from it, and those are hardly that serious.

I love reddit, but I don't think a lot of upvotes indicates "truly great".

Not so much, imo:

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/53sqkv/protests_e...

It depends on a subreddit. I think that top comments on The_Donald would be downvoted to hell on TrollXChromosomes and vice versa.

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