Hacker News Reader

Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

The only other forum most people know is reddit, which is mostly a braindead wasteland. In contrast to that, Hacker News is a masterpiece.

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That wasn't always the case, and there are still a few good sub-reddits to prove this.

In the case of Reddit, it was purposefully trashed by its new owners who decided that anything less than a east-coast-lib groupthink would prevent growth, or something - or maybe they are just incompetent. Feels a similar story with Stack-Overflow.

reddit is infinitely curate-able. if you remove all the default subs and sub to communities about topics you care about, it is a much better experience (except for large communities; those are trash, but large forums back in the day were also trash)

Unfortunately that’s probably true, despite the facts that

a) Reddit is a gigantic mixed bag of quality, and thinking Reddit is “all bad” is admitting to not understanding how to use it, and

b) being unable to understand that the category isn’t actually “forums” is sad. You can get this level of quality (which is to say, not the real draw of HN in the first place) by directly visiting the sites posted here.

I do enjoy a good forum, but most of the good content I see posted here isn't from a forum, and my favorite forum I'm most interested in (lambda the ultimate) is almost dead. Together, that means HN ends up having the most interesting content and discussion for the topics I care about that updates frequently.

a) Any community I ever found on reddit is, over time, infested by mediocrity, non relevant content and (leftist political & identity) hugboxing. Reddit attracts averageness and lowest common denominator content and that is just terribly boring and off putting. I really don't know how to put this in a way that doesn't appear arrogant. In the end the best summary I can offer is: Reddit is a garbage dump. You can find diamonds in a garbage dump, but don't expect it to happen often.

b) Hacker News and subreddits are variants of forum though? I understand your idea of being able to get this yourself on the linked pages, but I have to say I really enjoy the preselection hacker news users do for me.

On (a): Reddit can be extremely useful as a search engine. Adding site:reddit.com to a search for, say, a product or troubleshooting, will generally give you better results than the Google default. It's also pretty good for search for local issues (e.g., "Where can I find X in Y?") and for quick answers that are usually buried under a whole blog post otherwise for SEO purposes (e.g., "How do I unlock secret X in game Y?"). The latter Google default search will give you blog posts that get to the answer after several paragraphs of "Game Y is a game full of secrets, which is why gamers really love it" and "Secret X is really a game-breaking weapon that will make your character extremely strong for the last half of the game."

In short, Reddit serves a purpose that Google used to serve.

> In short, Reddit serves a purpose that Google used to serve.

That's true actually. I usually use google + reddit to find "real people (TM)" testimonials for medical treatments that can't be found otherwise.

a) I cannot emphasize this enough, but... So. Does. HN. It's actually a lot worse here, because it's faux intellectualism. The "hugboxing" here is so much more egregious, because people think they're above it.

b) The link aggregation and the conversations are two distinct features, and only some tiny percentage of good content actually makes its way here, and even when it does, HN is extremely temporal, so if you "miss" it, you're SOL.

But I really, truly, emphatically, want to make something clear: HN users are not in any way immune to any of the things you seem to take issue with over on Reddit. Your problem isn't with HN or Reddit, your problem is with people, as what you've listed is true and inherent in any collection of humans interacting with one another (specific ideology notwithstanding).

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