Comment by jarboot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarboot | Hacker News Reader

While HN is also one of my most visited websites, I agree about the "opinion" articles. I have enough of an intuition now to spot them and not click through them, focusing more on news, technical articles, and releases of software.

For most of these comments, it just comes down to "why are you right? What's your experience?" There's so many armchair speculators that get upvoted. If I can't go through your post history or look at your cred, why should I trust you to be correct about complicated topics that I might not understand? Do you even write code? Humans judge this stuff based on accomplishments and reputation in real life so why not on the internet?

I only realized this after coming across these kinds of comments about fields I specialize in or have a lot of experience with, and seeing blatantly wrong comments being upvoted and affirmed by other comments. If it's like this for exporting I have experience with, it's probably the same for stuff I don't know. Upvotes and affirmed comments should not be taken as truth.

And in the end opinion doesn't really matter unless you have influence in a community. Otherwise nobody that matters will really listen. Write a longform blog or something more captivating rather than some sneaky comment on HN that people will forget about after a week. Same goes for this comment I guess ;)

>For most of these comments, it just comes down to "why are you right? What's your experience?" There's so many armchair speculators that get upvoted. If I can't go through your post history or look at your cred, why should I trust you to be correct about complicated topics that I might not understand?

It's a discussion, you're supposed to evaluate the other's arguments and exchange ideas, knowledge and opinions about the subject, not a lecture where you're supposed to trust the other to educate you.

I would go farther and say that when credentialism creeps into a community, it's done.

That said I very much appreciate the genuine experts who post here, and hate seeing them driven away by disrespectful people.

HN walks the line between experience and openness better than any other community I know of. It's not perfect but it's still amazing.

I don't think this is really about credentials. It's about sources. What are your inputs? Outputs (opinions) are usually not that interesting without good inputs.

Sometimes you don't have any personal experience and then the best thing you can do is post a link to something interesting you read.

If you do have some personal experience, you can tell a story based on it.

The phenomenon of someone recognizing a source as inaccurate for their area of expertise, but still trusting other information from that same source, is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

Have you heard the ancient tale of Unidan The Redditor?

Unidan had credibility when it came to biology and ecology. When he commented on matters within his domain of expertise, he got all the upvotes. It was great having someone like that around. When there was a topic/thread/question about biology that one needed a credible answer to, all one had to do was summon Unidan typing his name.

It's a great pity he broke the rules and was banned.

Ehhh, that's a bit of simplistic take on the Unidan story, a lot of scientists were happy to see him go. He spent a lot of time marketing himself so that he became THE biology guy on reddit. The problem is that biology is a pretty broad field, so a lot of his answers were basically wikipedia recaps paraphrased into his "Unidan" voice - answers by people actually knowledgable in the matter at hand would get drowned out (and downvoted by Unidan's alternate accounts, of course).

The problem with credentials is that they don't seem to prevent quackery. Most anti-vaxxers can name a doctor with anti-vaccine views for instance. Same goes for homeopathy, diets, etc.

Your experience mirrors mine.

Well said!

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