Ask HN: What makes HN the superior intellectual forum on the web? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What makes HN the superior intellectual forum on the web?

22 pointsabhiminator16 comments

Personally, I find these two below mentioned reasons for HN's appeal toward intense intellectual discussions, unparalleled to any other place on the web --

1. Bare-bones design -- This acts as a great filter and barrier-to-entry of sorts, wherein only those who _actually_ want to consume (or contribute) content stick around.

2. Text heavy content -- Again, I personally find this super appealing. Text only content keeps the reader's focus on what the author is trying to convey, which more often than not brings out the best in one's writing. Contrast that with many competing 'multimedia-heavy' forums where there's a greater chance of a reader getting distracted by unrelated content (suggested, similar, etc).

Bonus: Well implemented nested comments -- Following two HN users have a go at each other (respectfully, that is) in a fine display of one-upmanship is absolutely gratifying with a super-low chance of it going ad hominem.

What'd you guys think?

That's quite a premise! I disagree with it extremely strongly.

People mostly don't go back to any HN thread that's more than a day old. So any conversation that requires more than a few hours of thinking can't happen here, because by the time you finish thinking hard about what you just read, no-one is reading anymore. How could that possibly lead to the superior intellectual forum on the web? It's a place for people to share their initial opinions about something in response to news. That can be good! Often people have interesting first opinions! But it's not the pinnacle of intellectual thought.

Additionally, people commonly don't read the articles posted, then make comments asking about or mentioning things that are discussed in depth in the article, because they want to get in early and get those upvotes before the thread becomes too crowded.

But sometimes you get 'first opinions' by people who've thought deeply about the topic for a long time. This is the value. I'd also add that for a site with very broad subject matter, the level of discussion can be quite high. Certainly not as high as some specialists forums (ie LtU).

There are a few things I appreciate; the spartan design, the focus on longer form posting (on the order of paragraphs) as opposed to drive by one liners or in jokes.

I really get to exercise my writing here, and read others as well.

I think the best way to reply to things a few days later is to write a post and submit the link as a post and not a comment so the algorithm treats it as new.

Occasionally, you can find great discussions on HN because HN has a large amount of domain experts on various sciencey topics. Apart from that, I don't really think HN is that incredibly fantastic.

If you compare it with your average social media (facebook, twitter, mainstream reddit), then yeah, you could say HN is more intelectually sophisticated than that.

The realest, greatest and most fantastic forums are the tiny ones, ones dedicated to a very specific topic, attracting only those who have a major interest in that topic.

Think of various tiny dedicated subreddits, or Lambda the Ultimate, or a huge collection of sites no-one here has ever heard of...

HN's great, but absolutely doesn't deserve the title of "superior intellectual forum on the web". That's way too much.

> Occasionally, you can find great discussions on HN because HN has a large amount of domain experts on various sciencey topics. Apart from that, I don't really think HN is that incredibly fantastic.

Exactly. HN has experts, especially in some areas of computing. But many people sound off without knowing what they are talking about. I usually wonder why I even bothered to comment on something related to space. Space seems to be a topic the HN loves, but there aren't a ton of people here with real domain knowledge in it.

If you want to compare Hacker News to Reddit, you have to compare it to subreddits that share its interests, not mainstream Reddit.

In that regard, I think it's worth mentioning that a lot of the content here gets posted from Reddit, so there's probably a lot of crossover between HN and technical subreddits.

Also, bear in mind that Facebook has group pages, so it's not impossible that there are dedicated, domain oriented communities there as well.

> "The superior intelectual"

??

I believe this is arrogant and wrong. Both the words the and superior give me that impression.

I also believe both points you mentioned are just characteristics that fits the culture of its members in a self-reinforcing loop. Not causation for the quality of its comments.

1. The actual people who choose to be here.

2. The reasons they choose to be here.

3. Good moderation, in part because it is paid, but in part for other reasons. (I know a forum where, in my opinion, the paid staff are The Problem.)

4. "Table Stakes" -- for some people here, there is potentially a lot on the line. This means the most influential people have intrinsic motive to reign themselves in and cooperate with the moderating staff's agenda instead of taking some big stand on principle etc.

5. The nature of those "table stakes" probably helps to combat classism, sexism, racism, etc.

Most submissions and comments here are far from intellectual. I don’t know what your frame of reference is, but seriously?!

It's the zeitgeist. HN aggressively self-moderates, the actual moderators have a light but objective touch. With exception to a few characters, I've chatted with people here who have not only changed my beliefs but also changed theirs. The community believes in scientific rigor, but also share illuminating anecdotes.

You can't distill HN into a formula. It is the sum of the participants.

While I do think the user base is intellectual, theres really not much conversation.

In the good old day there would be a proper forum with conversations that went for months.

None of the features you mention have any but the weakest relationship to the intellectual quality of Hacker News.

Take all of them together, you could describe Reddit before the rebuild. Minus the nested threads, you could be describing 4chan (which, despite being an imageboard, has a lot of textual content.)

I think the key is heavy handed moderating. It creates a culture where certain types of comments aren't allowed(aggressive, and flippant) which brings up the level of commentary.

... just like boards2go forums.

I think this thread is satire. Have a good one.

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