Hacker News Reader

Case in point: Hacker News comments vs. Reddit comments vs. Digg comments.

Sure, there's a population bias. But Reddit used to have mostly intelligent comments. Not anymore.

And even stronger: digg is now better than reddit. Digg is somewhat moderated, reddit isn't at all.

Subreddits have moderators. Some of them have really excellent communities.

Digg is still an absolute wreck. Reddit is actually pretty good once you're away from /reddit.com and /politics and /economics.

4chan

4chan is brighter than it lets on. But recently it's become a parody of itself. What once began hilarious and meme-laden has become a bunch of people repeating memes, which aren't funny unless they're clever.

I honestly think that 4chan has some of the highest comment standards of any board I can think of, particularly for initial posts (comments can be fairly vacuous). A lot of people go to /b for the trolling, and a lot of trolls go completely ignored or get called out almost immediately.

Sure the board isn't first-order intelligent, but intelligence (along with timing and a certain type of wit) certainly helps when trying to get people riled up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com