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Comment by shawnee_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

/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.

What's an example of a pure economics discussion?

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

> 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.

> /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.

"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 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..

"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. :)

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