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Comment by titaniczero | Hacker News Reader

I feel that posts on forums are more elaborate. People there are not afraid of writing/reading long block of texts, IMO the information in forums is more specialized and of higher quality. On the other hand, on social networks is not unusual to come across comments like: "Too much text", "TLDR?", etc.

Forums don't reward immediacy.

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to me this is huge. HN, Reddit, twitter all encourage (or enforce) strict limits on post size. This seems to encourage a conversational aproach to discussion, and discourage longer discourse. HN certainly does have long posts, and I appreciate that, especially when it comes from someone with real world experience in a field under discussion. But something about forums seems to give people permission to give more detailed responses. I've read magazine article length posts on topics such as palladium printing or ARP 2500 schematics that have been amazingly informative, and weren't even topic starter posts but rather detailed answers to simple questions asked by a less knowledgable forum member.

In the real world, I'd rather read a book than have a conversation, so this appeals to me.

Experience on social media where one adopts a policy of blocking those who respond in that manner is markedly improved.

One of my Reddit handles has a policy (advertised in the name) of blocking idiots. I've yet to take that to the high extreme, but I'd really like to go through a number of subs and just start blocking users whose contributions are trivial and see what happens.

Many redditors have commented on the utility of blocking high-karma users. Up to a certain point, karma is a measure of quality. Beyond that, it's simply pandering and prolificity.

(HN is at least somewhat better in this regard.)

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