You will see some well grounded, expert opinions here down-voted into oblivion simply because they clash with the mental picture of a number of HN users.
As much as I love HN it is slowly sliding into reddit-ism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057
(I didn't find these, they're linked in the site guidelines.)
HN still is the place it's always been. You have more data now, perhaps, but fundamentally it hasn't really changed. People continue to upvote and downvote in roughly the same ways, and they are used to agree and disagree just as they always have been.
I have been active since 2009 here.
Saying anything about the quality of "Reddit" as a whole is very much like saying something about the quality of bars, or messageboards, or knitting clubs as a whole.
Was your experience different?
A lot of people (at least where I work) are disgruntled there. I get the feeling they joined because they were unhappy and want to vent about the company anonymously, but with people who know what they're talking about. Maybe I'm just projecting though.
> you can post anonymously
These two don't square. Your anonymity clearly depends on the site not being hacked.
I don't agree. I read HN constantly.
As far as I see, the areas where downvotes tend to occur are where they skew to opinion, or have some tidings to politics. In other areas, HN comments are generally high quality, and have a high signal-to-noise ratio.
I wouldn't also correlate expert opinions being downvoted as just because it would "clash with the mental picture of a number of HN users". That's a false correlation.
Actually, I am going to suggest it here just now because it is a great book and I would like more people to have a more accurate view on addiction: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/addiction-and-choice... (Addiction and Choice: Rethinking the relationship by Nick Heather and Gabriel Segal). It is from 2016, but most people's views on addiction is more than a few decades old, and all things considered, it is still fairly recent and all recent studies support these views. Please, if you are interested in addiction, have a read. :) It will get you up to date with it, and dispel lots of misconceptions that are still in the head of laymen.
ANnything that requires empathy for different demographics too. (Like old people.)
But of course the content of each site tends to go far outside its areas of competence, which is where moderation is needed (otherwise they turn into 4chan or youtube). You get a feel for the bullshit after being on the site awhile, and once you're well tuned to it you see it everywhere (the "this site has gone downhill" effect).
If you say so. I used to Reddit heavily, but all the topics I followed definitely started trending into the "crazy people" territory. For instance, personal audio and mechanical keyboards. At one point, the "average" person could get on there and find a good price-per-peformance recommendation.
Now, those subs are taken over by the elites for whom money doesn't matter. I mean, it's neat that someone spent $2,000 building a custom-PCB'd, custom-switched, custom-capped keyboard -- and boy, those pics sure are sexy -- but there are only so many of those posts I can take until I realized that no one was talking about the range I can afford any more.
Reddit exists now as the worlds largest porn hub, with a very, very thin veneer over the top for respectability. If I google something specific -- like a question about a video game -- I specifically add "-site:reddit.com" because 1) 9 times out of 10, there's actually no answer, and 2) it takes a few clicks and many seconds to get TO the answer, because of their horrendous web site.
And, yes, I'm bitter, and bag on Reddit whenever I can.
If you really want a lark, read the typical HN subthread on a topic involving trading, finance or economics. It's like watching the YouTube-educated spar with the Wikipedia-educated. Commenters with real world experience are downvoted just as often as they're upvoted when they try to earnestly correct mundane misconceptions.
Likewise you can't have a bug bounty story on HN without someone repeating the farce that web app vulns have some sort of shadowy black market. There is invariably a comment near the top claiming the security researcher could have received so much more money by selling it to criminals. It is amazing that something so wrong gets repeatedly so carelessly and easily.
These are a substantial number of people here who think they can confidently talk about anything if they just deconstruct it to first principles and treat it like something else they know about.
Now, for things like finance, markets, politics, etc. like you're getting at, those are a different store. I've been baffled that some political and finance posts have devolved to threads worse than Reddit... Maybe some subs have become homogeneous enough that they don't generate quite the same conflict?
[1] About once a year there's a Dark Matter related post that usually brings out a very critical set of responses. That and Dark Energy are just things you need a lot of investigation into the evidence of because, like Quantum Mechanics, they are just weird and don't make sense to the uninitiated.
When things start ‘disappearing’, that makes it much more difficult to contrast.
I have been on HN long enough to know that points != facts.
But, yeah, I have noticed lots of downvotes for people stating facts or their own personal observations.
And some of my posts that are well within my field of expertise stay at zero.
When I get downvoted it is usually when I post an unpopular opinion, but rarely as a result of being wrong.
All this to say that while HN is, I think, one of the best communities, it doesn't mean you should leave your guard down. I'd say it is even more insidious here because you won't find easily debunked bullshit, no flat earthers here. Falsehoods here are to be subtle enough to go unnoticed by an educated mind, and you are not guaranteed to be corrected by a real expert.
My not-very-humble guess is that it is two fold: One, if you only have a shallow understanding of something, it is easy to dismiss things as wrong if they don't align with your understanding so far. Two, if you do have a deep understanding of a topic but different experiences in the field, you may have really strong opinions in a different direction.
Disappointingly they are also usually the least discussed comments of mine and I rarely figure out why they were downvoted.
For instance, it’s gotten better over time but effectively anytime you see comments about how the markets work on HN it will be filled with inaccuracies.
The best way to get yelled at or down-voted on HN is having a basic understanding of how EU regulations and the EU legislative process work.
I've found that for all HN detests conformity, more often than not it tends to be a certain kind of perceived conformity, and more often, what is seen as conformity in startup culture. What is often missed in my (honestly) humble opinion, is that this counter-conformity rests squarely in the larger conformity!
And indeed, because these assumptions are not even known to be assumptions, it's not even visible to the reader that this is a case of conformity.
Interestingly, I've noticed that these modes of conformity often come in temporal waves, in that at different times of the day you get downvoted - or receive less constructive discussion - for differing subjects. I should try to make a more involved analysis eventually.
It's not simply the amplitude changing, but the sign of comments too - it can go from neutral to upvoted to downvoted and back, so simple patterns in activity can't quite explain it.
I’m in bed and on my phone and too lazy to search for an exact link, but for a quick example I can give you the international government-bond market which the theory said that its price should have not ever fallen below zero. At some point in 2019 I think bonds worth $17 trillion (40% of the market if I’m not mistaken) were priced below that zero threshold.
A good rule of thumb, if maybe excessively defensive, is the more strongly held a belief the more likely it is to be wrong. Reality has a nasty habit of being moderate, murky and uncertain. An extremist moderate might be on the right political track, I suppose.
One of the fun parts of being an engineer is that they have to interact with the real world and the theoretical one and learn just how many stupid practical details blow apart theoretically pure ideas.
How many times have you come in to hacker news and read someone's complaint about x where "someone" is an expert with a decade of experience in the field only to have someone else chime in with the "well actually, I'm the creator of that project and..."