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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit.

Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification).

There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overall it has a culture of people who write well but their reasoning stinks. They have strong opinions and make assertions speculatively. I can't read any real estate investment, market or nerdy thread on Reddit without encountering armchair bullshitisms from people who happen to write well but don't research anything, and respond with hostility when questioned.

So maybe this is my way of saying, don't change HN too much.

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> There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex)

I had to unsubscribe from that sub. In the past you could find some potentially interesting conversations with knowledgeable responses if you sifted through the noise. Lately, the general vibe has become uncomfortably welcoming of incel-adjacent topics or exploring weird alternative medicine ideas. The general vibe is that "normie" stuff is bad, contrarian takes are default good, and "rationalists" are the only ones who see the world for how it really is. The contrarian superiority is becoming vaguely reminiscent of conspiracy theorist circles. Everything is written in pseudo-intellectual style that makes it feel extra truthy, despite being recycled content from other domains.

I finally unsubscribed after a series of posts where posters wrote at length about their frustrations with dating, blaming their failures on women and women's behaviors as if women were a foreign species. The straw that broke the camel's back was when someone complained about taking women out on dates and not receiving sex in return for their effort, which I assumed would have been readily downvoted and dismissed. Instead, it was upvoted (100+ votes) and most of the upvoted comments agreed with the OP's take. When weird incel ideology becomes front and center accepted in a community, I'm out.

>Everything is written in pseudo-intellectual style that makes it feel extra truthy, despite being recycled content from other domains.

I think I know what you mean about that sub and some slightly oddball 'aggrieved men' sort of pile-on conversations.

To your point here - that's one of the points I was making above, that I'm coming to realize (and perhaps there's a bit of looking in the mirror here) that good writing can cover up shoddy thinking. I've made a concerted effort to sometimes pause when I'm replying to something, and look things up to make sure what what I just said is true is actually true. Probably because I ran into smart people who questioned things here on HN.

One time I was replying to some sort of big article/thread in a real estate sub which touched upon housing affordability, the number of unregulated versus unregulated units in my city. I replied with a pretty neutral tone and linked the city's yearly datasheet in a PDF format which backed up what I said in terms of the breakdown of housing types in the city. There was a pie graph in the PDF document.

Well, I got downvoted to grey/invisible and there were a ton of replies in the style of "How arrogant that you think you're going to make us read THAT." I thought it was incredible how the people reacted.

I do not know what kind of comment you wrote, so I in the interest of curiosity I'll ask:

Could it be that instead of stating in the comment both the relevant, precise figures and a conclusion derived from them, you merely linked out to the PDF in a way that only by reading the PDF could your point be fully seen?

By and large, on forums and social media it is heavily frowned upon to rely on outlinks and open ended reasoning. As in the line of thought: "if you will not state your point clearly for everyone to see at a glance and then back it up with sources, why should I bother?".

It may seem unreasonable or even anti-intellectual at first until you draw parallels with in-person discussion: imagine someone describing their point in detail for 10 minutes only for the other person to hand over a whole book and say "you're ignorant, go read this and learn why you're so wrong".

I will repeat again: I do not know what you actually said in that comment, but I've seen this play out a few times and my gut tells me that unless the point was extremely controversial, a deluge of downvotes is likely explained by this scenario.

> good writing can cover up shoddy thinking

I’m afraid this is the primary value proposition for ChatGPT. It’s a power tool for writers like that. So the signal to noise ratio is about to get much worse.

Rant: I was banned from Reddit once again yesterday (for the 100th time) because of my harassing behavior. The comment that caused this was about "daily Scrum meetings that were way too long in most companies." I'm dumbfounded about who would have reported this, and who confirmed that this was harassment.

Reddit may be fine for very specific subs, but overall it's a real mess where power hungry mods have fun without any kind of accountability.

HN does not have this kind of behavior and I don't really miss the lengthy conversations that can be found in other forums.

As Raylan Givens once said: If you ran into an asshole in the morning, well, you ran into an asshole. Keep running into assholes all day, you're the asshole.

I've been on reddit since before subreddits existed and I've never been banned. Now I'm sure you've had your run-ins with some unhinged mods now and then but to be banned 100 times, you should probably take an honest look at your own behavior.

The "100 times" aside, some subs actually have rules about posting facts and will bann you for it. For example antiwork will bann anyone talking slightly positive about companies, which includes correcting false information. If you're into politics (90% of /r/all nowadays), it doesn't require a lot in some subs.

One really has to wonder about the mindset of people who would enforce such a rule.

Do they really think they are a force for positive change?

Isn’t every other fictional story some parable about how the means don’t justify the ends? It feels weird to me that people don’t absorb that idea at some point.

I believe they feel that their ideology is the ultimate force for positive change, and they become so lost in it that they are willing to do objectively wrong things under the rationalization that they're nuetralizing a threat to the idealogy.

Again, that's just what I think makes sense and personally believe. It's certainly possible I'm incorrect.

>As Raylan Givens once said: If you ran into an asshole in the morning, well, you ran into an asshole. Keep running into assholes all day, you're the asshole.

Has this person never been around a group of assholes for more than a few hours at a time? Some places are toxic and attract toxic personalities. Reddit is one of those places(the internet as a whole, really)

If you are in a place full of assholes how likely are the chances that you aren't also one?

> Rant: I was banned from Reddit once again yesterday (for the 100th time) because of my harassing behavior.

Did a moderator ban you from a subreddit?

Or did Reddit ban your account?

Some subreddits have trigger-happy mods that will ban people for everything from the wrong tone to simply holding the wrong opinion. Subreddits like the Lex Fridman sub are famous for banning anyone who posts comments that aren't in total glowing agreement with Lex Fridman, for example.

But getting banned from Reddit, the platform, is a rare occurrence. If you're getting repeatedly banned from Reddit (not just individual subreddits) then you really should step back and take a look at how you're writing your comments.

Trash mods really do hurt that place. I reported a physical assault, some punk kid with an airsoft taking potshots at pedestrians, to my local sub to warn others. Turned out the guy had been at it for weeks all over town.

Three months later, somebody didn’t like a political comment I made, went through my history, reported that earlier post, and voila. Banned for threatening violence because I warned people about a criminal’s behavior. Heh.

Banned from Reddit alltogether, banned from a subreddit, or banned by Reddit because you were previously banned on this subreddit and were ban evading?

There are so many possible reasons for being banned in a subreddit.

Mods on Reddit are pretty free to do what they want. There are guidelines by Reddit but they are nothing more than suggestions and unless the mods of a subreddit are racists, they won't do anything. Sometimes not even then look how long it took for /r/TheDonald to being banned.

>daily Scrum meetings that were way too long in most companies.

I've said far more hostile things out loud about Agile at my workplace to senior management.

...and this tiny fragment from the self-report of one aggrieved party is quite possibly far less hostile than whatever full comments/history actually triggered a "100th time" subreddit ban.

"The comment that caused this was about "daily Scrum meetings that were way too long in most companies.""

Ok, but what was your comment?

And next question, would you have phrased that comment around here in the same way?

This perfectly captures my frustration with Reddit. I can't stand it these days. It's been eye opening to read about technical subjects on Reddit that I personally know a lot about only to see heaps of confidently spewed misinformation in the comments. Makes me question the validity of everything I read where I'm not very knowledgeable. I'm very grateful HN is a lot more thoughtful and open to questioning.

What's worse the well-written bullshit gets upvoted while the actual true answer gets downvoted because "It doesn't sound right" to the average visitor. Not that it is any different for any other social network tho.

I'll fact check comments I read at random sometimes when I question their validity. A few years ago, I feel as though reddit was an amazing places for all sorts of niche information from diverse places. There was some misinfo definitely, but for the most part it seemed as though information was posted for the sake of sharing information. Now I find it's not nearly as trustworthy, and people almost always have an agenda

There's a videogame subreddit that frequently downvotes comments from top tier players. It has gotten to the point where most good players will no longer engage with reddit because of the extreme hostility and incompetence.

Top tier players aren't always going to be right about everything, but the things for which they often get downvotes are absurd.

Just name the subreddit, otherwise we can't do much with your comment.

Well, in this case I'm referring to the Heroes of the Storm subreddit, but I'm sure it's applicable to other games as well.

It’s not really different here… Just recently, with the ballon stuff, sooooo many commenters were super confident how hard it would be to get up there and shoot down a ballon, how a missile would not work, etc. Like, unless you are all in the air force, you have no clue. I did not, and that’s okay, and I just didn’t say anything.

I stopped using Reddit over a year ago and found a couple of traditional forums to replace it with. Sure I don’t have enough discussion to soak up hours of my day but in turn I’ve just started reading more books. My mental health has greatly improved.

I was there with, what, 1M+ karma and one night, when I realized I was arguing with an immature teenager I realized how much this impacts me.

I deleted the account immediately and never regretted it once. I recreated a new ne to engage in purely technical discussions.

I use the word Reddit as a pejorative.

“I stopped watching after the second season. The writing had become so reddit.”

“The steak itself was good but this sauce is a bit reddit.”

“Rose Street is a good night out but Raeburn Place is completely reddit.”

I just invented one:

"Redditsplain"

v. "To make confident, even angry assertions about facts without a strong backing, but in a literary and well-reasoned style. To make bold statements about a subject where one is still a dilettante."

This is hardly unique to Reddit, and happens on HN as well.

I read each of these three examples several times and I still have no idea what you meant, outside of general displeasure. Maybe this is the point. So in a strange twist of meta your examples are way too reddit for me.

This year one of my resolutions was to finally give up Reddit because I kept recognizing the site frustrating, annoying, or disappointing me. Whether intentional or not that seems to be the type of content generated there.

Download Apollo and unsubscribe from all mainstream subreddits + remove all and popular, is the key.

I did this myself, but it only kicked the can on my eventual leaving. Sure, niche subreddits are generally better in their content and discussions, but I still noticed that the same behaviors end up being rewarded. It's the format that's the problem, not the content, and that's the one thing shared by all subreddits.

Most subreddits I visit are low volume and haven't noticed much difference in behaviour other than acceptability of short funny replies. What do you mean about the format, isn't it the same as HN (OP link/text and comments)?

I do recall a comment/thread saying how HN comments/behaviour was starting to resemble Reddit, so there may be something to that (though I'd chalk it up to becoming more popular/mainstream).

HN only works because of supplemental rules and heavy moderation, which both look very different on Reddit. Even if a subreddit reaches a good set of rules, enforcement is usually poor, due both to mods being volunteers and a generally negative view towards moderation (can you imagine "Mods are gay" flying on HN?)

Any moments of "lightning-in-a-bottle" can certainly result in memorable periods where a subreddit truly adds value to one's life, and that can make the whole website hard to give up. However, after a decade of redditing, I never saw one subreddit maintain that momentum once the larger audience poured in, which always came as a result of the perfect balance. Members of /r/subredditA will hear that /r/subredditB is similar but with better discourse, and then the wave of rufugees from /r/subredditA will pour in, ruining /r/subredditB (eg /r/Gaming and /r/Games.)

On HN, if you don't like the rules, you go find a different website.

> Any moments of "lightning-in-a-bottle" can certainly result in memorable periods where a subreddit truly adds value to one's life, and that can make the whole website hard to give up.

I would mention /r/credibledefense as a counter example. It was a niche subreddit before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the aftermath got popular, but still managed to keep its quality.

But I agree with your general point, it's not a huge problem for me, though. Some subreddits get popular and thus bad, some new subreddits get created. Reddit's relative anarchy is its saving grace, communities can split/fork, but still stay within reddit platform.

Isn't "reddit format" essentially exactly the same as the "hacker news format"?

Format certainly influences the quality of interactions, but there are some other strong factors as well.

I’d love to see AI that automatically curates the comments so that all the ‘witty’ takes can be collapsed under one category. But I think I’m with you in that it’s probably just time to move on. I’ve found a lot of my discussions have migrated to Discord for better or worse

This wasn't always the case. I've used Reddit since the Digg days and in the earlier days it was long form comments with sources and the vote system was actually used as a "this is true" signal instead of an "I don't agree with this". The thing that killed it in my opinion was the layout change to embed media directly in Facebook style. Sure there's always old.reddit.com , but the problem is that because of the default interface change it drives a certain type of ecosystem for submissions and discussions that's not as enjoyable.

Tl,Dr when it was primarily a text based website the discussions were better. The gifs, video, meme layout is like junk food.

I was thinking that HN shows only the writer what the 'value' of the post is (number of upvotes). In Reddit, most subs seem to show that number to the whole world.

So if this comment had 100 upvotes, and another one 20, you're the winner, everyone can see it. I speculate it at the minimum encourages subconscious behavior of trying to game votes upwards, and also biases people that it's a good comment. Because your brain will process "100" before reading a paragraph of words.

HN used to have points! It was a long time ago though, and hiding them was probably the right decision.

Reddit caters to the young audience, it's mostly them who go on emotional crusades as they have little experience to back up their words. In real life, you wouldn't engage in a serious argument about real estate market with 10 year olds, but on Reddit you can and do.

This has been a challenge in online communities for quite sometime. Some approaches I wanted to mention are what Metafilter does, which is require people pay to sign up and comment, and when they sign up they have to wait 30 days to comment. This cuts down a lot of noise and reactionary Twitter type trolling. Another I think is worth mentioning is r/NeutralPolitics on reddit. They have a pretty strict moderation policy that makes for some string signal to noise but due to it's heavy handedness I feel like it does not get enough different perspectives because the least thought out or explored do not get enough attention.

This is such a routine, generalized rant it almost becomes the problem it describes.

Short, spiteful condescension that circles back to the authors preferences (HN). No explicit language, I guess, but I learned nothing except some internet rando has a BS opinion.

If you did any research you’d see the same on HN.

Public forums are noise generators which, once reasoned around, makes it more fun. I email academics doing work I find interesting for the best signal; most reply.

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