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Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

There is definitely a hive mind that is reinforced by the mods here. Reddit is far worse, but realize that Ycombinator has certain goals as an organization and if your comments stray into direct opposition, they will delete things. I don’t think this is an indictment of HN, just highlighting that there is an implicit bias in every discussion forum.

Discussion is of high quality as long as it remains aligned, which is true 99% of the time.

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> Reddit is far worse,

I would re-characterize it as "some Reddit subreddits are far worse" - because your experience can vary widely. All the subreddits I subscribe to (hobby and interest related, not news/politics) are actually self-policed very well. I tend to think the toxic subreddits are actually in the minority even though they get all the attention.

I also like the subreddits I subscribe to, and the volunteer mods generally do a great job. But I do think that HN mods (who are paid, I assume) have a more difficult job in content filtering, in that HN is ostensibly a general discussion forum. Even as it skews towards tech and startups, just about every topic is eligible for discussion, including political debate. In r/netsec, for example, submitted links and discussions are generally good, but the mods are also very strict about the content -- technical posts, only. I suspect the quality of discussion would change drastically if they allowed anything remotely political or even just non-technical, such as various Troy Hunt posts [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16636453

Reddit is far worse in reinforcing subconscious self-moderation to adhere to the majority opinion. It's present on Hacker News too, since most people use the downvote as a "I disagree" button.

I think it depends on the subreddit. The ones I subscribe to aren't that bad with respect to downvotes.

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