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Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

HN comments are full of naive political opinion, groupthink, and a tendency to blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit too.

It's also probably the only place left on the net where, from comments, I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic, and sometimes talk with the guy who invented it. My ADHD brain loves the depth that side topics can get explored and being surrounded by people far cleverer than me.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

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>I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic

If you stay off the default subreddits and only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits, then I honestly think reddit is better for this. The amount of expertise on reddit is astounding. It's very easy to find someone to rigorously challenge any view I have. I'd go so far as to say that it's the smartest place on the internet (except for maybe places like MathOverflow and some other specialty blogs/forums). They do have a natural advantage because of their huge userbase.

Business startup ideas are essentially experiments in economic theory.

Yet HN comments are vastly inferior to Reddit's when regarding anything to do with economics.

It didn't used to be this way, and I kind of miss the HN of old... where logic and fearlessness were valued more than affiliation or keeping up of brand appearances. I've been finding it increasingly disconcerting that the incentive here lately has been to discredit or silence (bury) comments from anybody whose opinion points out something like: yeah -- Airbnb's "business model" might be creating way more more problems than it's claiming to solve. Or that collusion in and among YC-funded companies might (or maybe should) yield some Antitrust issues. The tech commentary can be pretty good, and there are plenty of active HNers whose opinions I respect. However, it is leaning heavy on becoming selection-biased and just plain mean to anybody with an original idea.

Reddit is a swamp of filth wrt economics comments.

Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. I'm friends with the mods of /r/economics and they have a really hard time reigning in the masses of ideologues (on all sides) ruining what should remain pure economics discussions.

Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are really high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment.

I think you can extend the same judgement out to entire threads --- the best Reddit threads being so much better than HN's that it's hard to even imagine what HN could do differently to compete, and the median HN thread being better than the median Reddit thread.

Another interesting thing is that the comparison would probably fall apart completely if not for the heavily-moderated subreddits that produce the best comments. If the Reddit comment cohorts included only the lightly moderated subreddits, HN would probably win on all metrics other than volume and diversity of topics.

I find it hard to agree with you, but I don't go on reddit much. Can you supply a few reddit threads you feel are exceptionally high caliber? I mostly consume /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians. One of the problems I have with reddit (and this might come from not working hard enough at it) is not knowing how to find active, high quality, specialty subreddits.

You want to find the niche expert subreddits. The ones you named are good. So is /r/badhistory, /r/badeconomics [1] which are generally hangouts of experts to make fun of people claiming things. /r/netsec is generally good, so is /r/machinelearning. Even niche job-specific subreddits (like meddit or /r/protectandserve) are interesting to observe.

Because economics gets politicized so much, it's very rare to find sound discussion in popular forums. It's a ton of people cheering for their "team's" policies.

[1] Full disclosure: I'm recently been made a mod there. /r/badeconomics is probably the highest signal/noise economics place on the internet at the moment though. I learned more there than in school in the years I've spent there.

I didn't know about badeconomics, and I'm enjoying a lot, but I can already see ways in which its moderation reduces the average comment quality. For instance: there's a whole lot of insubstantial snark. A lot of it is funny, but you have to pick through it to find the actual information.

That's not a criticism of badeconomics! Just an observation on how moderation choices can affect total thread quality in different ways. It is also totally legitimate to optimize for highest-possible-highs.

Yeah it's going through reforms in the next week or so, to improve overall quality.

The subreddit has tripled in subscriber base over the last year, and growth like that can be harmful if you're aiming for a higher signal/noise ratio.

Snark is not frowned upon as long as it's based on something meaningful. I'm guilty of snark, but I try to craft high quality posts. Making fun of people because they disagree with your viewpoint is not fine if you don't explain why in an objective manner, though.

But the subreddit is such that a lot of people bring their personal ideology and hope for the regulars of that subreddit to back them up. So there's a balance to be struck.

While I still think HN probably has the better median, the quality of what you're exposed to on reddit is mostly up to you. Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more.

Not that you're doing this with your comment, but it has always struck me as odd to treat reddit like it's a single website with a single experience for all users. Yes, there's a base, universal experience, but it's truly up to the user to tailor that experience into what they want. You want memes and fart jokes? There are subs for that. You want to look at breathtaking photos? There are (poorly named) subs for that. You want to discuss why obscure Warcraft character A is behaving so oddly toward Warcraft character B? There's a sub for that. To me, that will always be Reddit's strength.

No matter what reputation it gets, no matter how much shit goes on in the defaults, there's always my little specialty subreddits filled with meaningful content to consume.

> Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more.

Honest question: What are some actual techniques to effectively find these gem subreddits?

I see this sentiment expressed regularly, but nobody explains how actual effective discovery works. If the answer is spending hours wading through a bunch of noise only to find one or two gems, it's a completely rational response to just give up on Reddit itself, because the reward/time spent tradeoff is too low.

So that's the obvious response, and I agree, I think --- the comparison does get trickier if you take just, say, AskHistorians versus HN (there are casual Redditisms condoned even on well-moderated subreddits that are annoying enough to keep the comparison tricky).

But if you compare the basket of subreddits relevant to HN --- programming, crypto, etc --- right now, I feel like HN is winning handily. Reddit only starts crushing HN when you broaden out into topics that aren't really in HN's bailiwick.

I find /r/crypto much better than HN for crypto discussions; you have more than one crypto person there ( as opposed to essentially just you).

AFAIK HN has more than one qualified crypto persons.

/r/boardgames is pretty much always a positive community, unless you proclaim your love of Munchkin. Anything interesting news or links about board games tends to get posted there too. But there's also people asking the same questions over and over again (I like blah and blah, and don't like blah, what should I buy next?), but I don't mind that personally.

I remember specifically when GamerGate discussion was poisoning just about every video game community and someone tried to bring it to the board games subreddit and tie it in with board games, and the admins made an executive decision to squash it. Probably one of the best things they ever did, because the board has remained very civil and friendly since.

I've had good experiences with /r/keto too. I almost never check anything else there anymore.

But yeah, niche subreddits.

The problem with this analysis is that each Reddit subreddit is its own community. So "median Reddit {comment,thread}" is largely useless and misleading for purposes of the comparison.

I sense that you know this, though.

> /r/badeconomics

The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments?

No thanks.

This is a non-negotiable requirement, no non-democratic entity should have power over the highest democratic entity.

That’s the fundamental issue that makes traditional ISDS problematic, and why ICS and the new ISDS alternative in CETA were created in the first place.

But /r/badeconomics ignores that entire political problematic.

This:

> The subreddit arguing that it’s reasonable to give companies power over democratically legitimated governments

Is a massive strawman if you're referring to ISDS (which is what it seems). If you want a trade agreement, the terms need enforcement to be unilateral. But political actors in each respective countries will be incentivized not to respect that by internal pressures.

So there needs to be a way to settle those disputes, or else you might as well not have any trade agreement. You can dispute the merits of the current court system; I won't, I'm not an expert in that.

But saying that this means "companies have power over democratic countries" is absurd. Go look at supreme court cases in any country. How many are "[person] vs [state]" or "entity vs country"?

Democratically elected governments can act in ways just as abhorrent as any other entity; that's why the president doesn't have control over, say, what is constitutional or get to control monetary policy.

> Go look at supreme court cases

The supreme courts are democratically determined and justified.

For ISDS courts, half of the judges are appointed by the company that is suing.

For ICS courts, all the judges are appointed by the nations taking part.

That’s why ICS is acceptable, but ISDS is not.

> Democratically elected governments can act in ways just as abhorrent as any other entity

Correct, but democratically elected governments are put under checks and balances to prevent them from doing so, foreign companies are not.

For ISDS courts, half of the judges are appointed by the company that is suing.

The ISDS provision in NAFTA uses a panel of three arbitrators; one appointed by each of the nations involved, and one which is appointed either by consensus or from the third NAFTA nation if consensus cannot be reached. Investors don't get to appoint any arbitrators.

That's then closer to CETAs solution, too.

Classical ISDS trials have 1 determined by the suing company, 1 by the nation sued, and one both have to agree on.

> Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful.

You probably mean "Basically all the subreddits related to economics except ..."

> they have a really hard time reigning in

Reigning monarchs have it hard these days.

Not that reining stubborn mules is much better.

(Pet peeve, but really paying forward a good correction someone gifted me a few weeks ago. Otherwise quit, really ;)

Regarding /r/economics, if you find it bad now you should have seen it before. I for one doesn't miss the Austrian bullshit that used to be very common there.

What's an example of a pure economics discussion?

https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/58tf3h/the_go...

"Yet HN comments are vastly inferior to Reddit's when regarding anything to do with economics."

I find that HN is pretty weak on economics. But it's a tech blog, so ...

And I'm not so sure that 'business ideas' are about economics. Usually, they are simply about doing things using newly available technology, in ways that are obvious in hindsight.

I don't think that AirBnB conceptually is rocket science - it's the great experience they provide for everyone. It's really well put together. AirBnB done by a lesser team of people would be something you never heard of.

"I don't think that AirBnB conceptually is rocket science "

People have been doing what they're doing on individual or household level on ad hoc basis for decades. The problem persisted all the way up to AirBnB's time. There was no efficient, integrated, widely-available solution to the problem. They provided that. They exploded in growth followed by other founders looking for similar problems in unrelated markets like business trips. Several markets forming as a result.

Basic concept is simple and was always there, though. Just needed someone to solve it in an economical way. :)

I beg to differ!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12556160

I agree there are some smart Econ things here, but when there's a tech article that wavers into Econ elements, I find it all to be lacking, generally.

My point: HN folks are not thinking about market power, value chains, supply chains, forms of financing, currency markets - they're thinking about tech.

At the risk of getting 100 down-votes - this is best exemplified by Bitcoin. It's a very powerful, cool technology - but almost nobody seems to grasp what it means from a financial perspective, i.e. as a currency, as a store of value etc. etc.. HN readers see it in 'techno-social' terms, i.e. 'cool tech' and 'free from big banks' 'decentralization' etc..

Reddit is the new Usenet with all the good, the bad and the silly.

The advantage of small subreddits over HN is that links don't get buried.

Reddit a crossroads of the usenet and 4chan cultures: it's where they meet. However, Reddit actually doesn't totally adopt the common-carrier approach, and aren't decentralized: they try to take responsibility for their users to a greater degree than either of the previous sites ever did, resulting in things like hateful subreddits getting taken down, and the voat split.

> Reddit is the new Usenet with all the good, the bad and the silly.

And none of the decentralization that was Usenet unfortunately.

You also find a whole lot of echo chambers, fanboys and wannabe-intellectualism. This because anyone can set up a sub-reddit, and thus also moderate them.

On most things that aren't programming (and some things that are) HN can be the same way

The game of life meets the Dunning Kruger effect.

> only go on the intellectual/debate subreddits

Any recommendations?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ is unrivaled in its signal-to-noise ratio.

>It's also probably the only place left on the net where, from comments, I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic, and sometimes talk with the guy who invented it. My ADHD brain loves the depth that side topics can get explored and being surrounded by people far cleverer than me

This is pretty much why I use HN at all: it doesn't make me feel smart, but I learn new, exciting things constantly.

> This is pretty much why I use HN at all: it doesn't make me feel smart, but I learn new, exciting things constantly.

Thanks for articulating it so well.

...okay. You're welcome, I guess, but I'm not sure what's so hard about articulating it that makes doing so praiseworthy.

Or were you just being nice? If so, that's totally fine, never mind.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the difference between the right phrasing and the almost right phrasing is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. We're here for the lightning.

...And that was totally the right phrasing.

Thanks for explaning so well.

^ Very similar for me. A good criticism that invites me to better understand a different viewpoint is worth a lot.

It's worth more than any other type of comment, IMHO, save maybe construtive criticism. All that's left if you take those out is banal agreement, something some of the more aggressively PC communities out there don't realize, IMHO.

> blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit too.

I've seen plenty of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" in the comments and complaints about engineers always trying to use the newest technology.

Yes, using any tool or language that came out after the commenter started programming is "hipster".

And you see a lot of xkcd 927 and "I can't help thinking effort would have been better spent on an existing project" when someone writes any program of any type where other examples exist.

>Yes, using any tool or language that came out after the commenter started programming is "hipster".

I see this a lot, and I don't think it's a valid criticism of the issue.

It assumes either that all periods in IT are equally good, or that there's monotonic progress (both of which are wrong), and that there's no such thing as a fad, so anybody pointing one is clearly a "get off my lawn" person.

I'm with Alan Kay on this: computer science is a pop culture.

It's not a "criticism" of an "issue", it's a description of a behavior that may in some cases and out of some mouths have a point, but is not necessarily rooted in anything worthwhile.

The behavior is frequently ad hominem in use and often seems to express insecurity of some form, mixed with the conservative bias towards freaking out about flaws in new things while brushing them off in existing things.

I only post a 927 when there are >6 different standards in the field, and there's no way a new one will catch on. As for the effort better spent posts, those are awful. Never post those. Instead post about how great emacs is compared to vim: you're more likely to spawn useful discussion.

And if you post the xkcd link to a discussion about a piece of software and not a new standard for which many already exist, (and I see that post,) I will proudly downvote you no matter how many examples exist.

Just be glad I don't have the magic ability to force anyone to use QED to program their next project in Fortran on a CTSS box.

Yeah, just don't post 927 on software: that's dumb.

Note I said when a new one won't catch on, or is unlikely to do so, particularly of it doesn't have any significant benefits over what's already there.

> As for the effort better spent posts, those are awful. Never post those.

Except, the issue is when there’s already dozens of standards in the field, and someone decides to make yet another one, and publish factually wrong articles about existing standards to get an advantage.

I think that it's interesting that there is an etiquette developing on when which XKCD is appropriate.

XKCD is always appropriate when it's relevant, pretty much. There's only etiquette for 927.

Well, here. It's still popular on Reddit to be the first to post an "obligatory" link to a vaguely relevant xkcd. Here, that usually gets downvoted fast.

I do it sometimes, but only if the XKCD is actually highly relevant. As a result, I've actually never gotten downed for it.

It depends on the subject. Take Mars colonization or self-driving cars. There's recently been a few posts (with a large number of upvotes) that were more or less press releases from companies, with the majority of the comments being very positive and the most up-voted comment in each post complaining about the existence of a few comments that were skeptical.

Yep it seems anything by Elon is sacrosanct with much of the HN crew.

I'm pretty critical of technology and modernity in general, and this Cult of Elon is a large part of the reason I dislike the man and his endeavors.

It has nothing to do with his intelligence or person. He's clearly intelligent, and I'm not quite sure he's a person (ha) but I don't know the dude.

It's just that he has revived so much technological optimism in a time when skepticism is pretty important, at least imo. He seems to bandy about these technical solutions that are dazzling, for sure --- and extremely interesting --- but just don't cut it, or come with a slew of potentially unintended consequences, or simply aren't putting the focus in the right place.

For example, his talk of Mars colonization as an escape hatch to our degradation of biodiversity / carbon emissions / etc. is just awful. What kind of idea is that?

It's infuriating because when I say things like, "I'm not convinced that collapse or technical decline would be a bad thing," people can immediately see the criticisms, chief among them being "Won't a lot of people die?" Which is fair.

But there is little to no skepticism when Musk presents his idea, when there certainly should be. How many people do you think will make it on those spaceships, and who do you think those people will be? At least in a case of economic or technical decline, many people will have a fighting chance at it not being totally awful.

> For example, his talk of Mars colonization as an escape hatch to our degradation of biodiversity / carbon emissions / etc. is just awful. What kind of idea is that?

To be fair, that's not a good characterization of why he's into Mars colonization. He's not advocating colonization so we can disregard life on Earth. He seems very much into preserving life on Earth. Mars colonization is a backup plan (or the initial stage of a backup plan) for the inevitable moment when Earth will have to be abandoned regardless of how well we behave.

Regarding “a lot of people dying” angle: the difference is in magnitude of “a lot of people”, and choice. However many people die on SpaceX spaceships, the number can never reach millions or even billions that would result from the collapse or technical decline. People also, in general, will choose to get on a spaceship and dwell on Mars, but they neither choose to be involved in dying from civilization collapsing, nor to have to fight for survival in such a situation — it would be completely forced upon them.

Thanks for clarifying his position. I didn't mean to suggest that he intended it to be anything other than a backup plan, but my wording might have been ambiguous because others, like Martin Rees, have suggested similar things and tend to regard them as one of the more likely outcomes of humanity's future, if the species is to survive.

> However many people die on SpaceX spaceships,

Maybe you misunderstood me. I mean that the people who don't go on SpaceX spaceships would die in a situation where that is critical to the survival of civilization.

Your choice thing doesn't convince me, but I do understand and think it is an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.

I did say tendency!

I still get surprised the way opinion goes for some posts. I won't be betting on the likely sentiment any time soon! Whichever way opinion leans it rarely stifles discussion.

I've also seen a fair amount of people actually cognizant of the dangers our technological society poses. It's not the majority, but there are far more people here than most discussion-centered places on the internet.

It's also full of people who readily classify deviating opinions under naive political opinions, groupthink, and a tendency to blind optimism on all things technology or new.

I do agree with you second statement though, often before forwarding a link to colleagues I read the comments and see if my enthusiasm is not easily killed, it often is (and rightly so, in most of the cases).

I keep meaning to scrape my comments over the years, collate the most upvoted ones, then publish in a blog/ebook somewhere with a bit of commentary on what it appears that HN "likes". The API doesn't quite facilitate this, unlike most sites which will just let you sort your comments by votes.

On HN politics, while the comments often have a substantial presence of doctrinaire libertarians, I feel that the voters skew much more liberal/social democrat. Unless there's a bout of "anti-SJW" downvoting and flagging on e.g. "discrimination in tech" stories.

(Provisional title "Silicon Valley on ten upvotes a day")

> unlike most sites which will just let you sort your comments by votes.

If you just want to see your comments sorted by net upvotes, use this link: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:pjc50&sort=byPopularity&pre...

You can get all of your comments as JSON via this URL using a site I built: http://hnuser.herokuapp.com/user/pjc50/json/ You can then run that data through a sort and filter to get what you want.

Thanks, that looks extremely useful.

Long ago, someone wrote a little app that did this. I can't seem to find it now. The premise was something like "you've probably already written a book's worth of HN comments".

I took a shot at this here https://hn.icymi.email/

I've also had this idea.

I was going to write a similar comment, but you said it better in every way. HN comments are a frighteningly important part of my day.

What you see as "groupthink" is really your bias attempting to dismiss any number of people for disagreeing with you. I understand the point of your post, I just don't find that particular bias funny enough to let it pass uncommemted.

Or, it could actually be groupthink, and your bias is acting to prevent you from having to admit that a group you identify with expresses positions that are wrong.

There's actually no way to prove that either case is true. However, you expressed a position as a certainty -- "what you see as groupthink is really..." -- that is in reality just another opinion. Therefore, your comment is equally as ill informed and myopic as OP's.

Great comment, though I'm not sure 'naive political opinion' even exists. If a topic is political then it's controversial and sophisticated expert opinions count just as little as naive layman opinions.

that's because you generally agree with those political opinions and groupthink

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