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Comment by dan-robertson | Hacker News Reader

I read lots of highly ranked comments here that I think are pretty wrong. There are lots of quite idiosyncratic opinions that are popular on hn but tend to be pretty wrong. On this site you’re mostly looking at a small subset of programmers who tend to spend a lot of time online and the conventions on this site tend to encourage authoritative and contrarian opinions, so while there are a lot of comments and many are good, you can get quite a biased sample. I think it would often be unwise to follow all the advice in high-ranking (or low-ranking) hn comments but I have no advice for differentiating what is rot from what is not.

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I agree. I have deep knowledge of a somewhat narrow aspect of tech (and a very shallow knowledge of a much broader base, like many of us.)

Comments regarding the areas I have expertise in are frequently quite wrong, but worded confidently.

It makes me wonder how wrong comments about other areas are - ones I'm not well-versed enough in to disprove.

I think when I'm looking for a discussion I'm not really after a single answer that is "right". Rather, you're looking at the things in common and different between multiple answers, finding out how people weigh tradeoffs, and so on.

Sometimes entire comment sections can be wrong/bad. One way is for early comments to be wrong and for the corrections to fail to overcome the feedback cycle of bad takes pushing each other up. Another is for threads to devolve into repetitive flame wars which can create a lot of comments and mislead someone who might think that opinions repeated in many comments are commonly held (rather than strongly felt and easily regurgitated by a few).

For this reason, I don’t think a wisdom-of-the-crowds approach is valid.

If you are going to blindly follow HN or other site's comments, then it will not help. But as far as giving different perspectives HN and reddit/programming etc are good

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