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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> There were many large forums that hit a tipping point where low-effort posting and polarization drag everything down. How does HN resist the slide?

It doesn't.

Admittedly, HN discussion is generally of higher "quality" than Reddit, at least for large subreddits, but that's a very low bar to hurdle.

> The HN welcome page lays out two cardinal rules: don’t post or upvote crap links, and don’t be rude or dumb in comment threads.

These cardinal rules are routinely violated.

A rational person would just read the linked articles and ignore the comment section. HN is still the best link aggregator, I think. Unfortunately, I'm irrational and prone to pointless argumentation, which is why I sometimes show up in the comments. (Duty calls.) I usually regret it, though.

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I find myself going to the comments before the article. There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect", and I feel that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind before digging into the meat.

> There's so many times where one of the first comments are something like "I work in the industry, and the base assumptions of this article are incorrect"

There are so many times where the top comments are totally full of crap, including and especially from people who work in the industry. It's a large industry with countless subspecialties. What reason do you have to trust a comment over an article? If you're going to be skeptical, be skeptical of both, but be especially skeptical of some cursory dismissal of a work that obviously took significant time, effort, and expertise.

I'd love for these commenters to write their own articles and see what's it like to be commented on.

Discussion here is generally of higher quality because of the people who come here. Lots of developers of all kinds, tech company employees, insiders, people who invented the algorithms you read about in the books, people who invented the programming languages we use.

I for one ignore the articles and go straight for the comments. I care a lot more about what smart people think than the articles themselves. The news that get posted here are just provocation to get them to post their opinions. Chances are any truly important information will be directly quoted by HN comments anyway.

> I care a lot more what smart people think about the articles than the articles themselves.

Frankly, I'd say that the article authors are smarter on average than the article commenters and in any case are vastly more careful and informed on average than the article commenters. There are of course exceptions to the averages, but it doesn't balance out, because the worst article commenters are infinitely worse than the worst article authors and wreck the discussions for everyone else.

> The news are just provocation to get them to post their opinions.

That's precisely the problem!

Reading the comments on non-tech submissions that a person has some basic knowledge of should make them aware that the vast majority of comments are simply confidently pronounced ignorance. (This is particularly evident on medical and health related submissions.) Then they should start to notice that, to almost as high a percentage, the comments on tech are just as much confidently pronounced ignorance.

You see, I disagree. In all fairness, I am not in the health care industry but I have had a lot of bad experiences trying to get subtle health problems diagnosed and have done a ton of personal research that has greatly improved my life, despite the healthcare industry not helping me. Hearing about the research that other smart, determined individuals have done is always interesting to me. As a matter of fact, it was a random comment from someone on HN that pointed me in the right direction to help with my problem.

I have learned that a determined laymen can sometimes outperform an average industry professional in all kinds of areas.

> This is particularly evident on medical and health related submissions.

HN users, tech people in general, are biased against doctors and medicine. I don't think that can be generalized to technology discussion.

I've seen a few doctors posting here on HN. I'm among them. Medical discussion is useful to me since I can gain perspective on how medical practice works in other countries.

He users and tech people are biased against doctors? Wha? That doesn’t sound right

Here's an example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32534550

Absolutely. Anything nutrition or fitness related too. The quackery floodgates open every time! Something about these topics brings all the laymen "dOiNg ThEiR oWn ReSeArCh" out of the woodwork.

this. the HN discussion on subjects outside of computing and startups is awful. When it gets to anything else I know something about it's all overconfident sophomore bullshitters proclaiming and being deep. see especially health, aerospace, and economics

Only occasionally. I think this was more true 10 years ago when the pool of commenters and topics on the site was smaller.

At this point I'd agree with GP that HN conversations are only better than large subreddits, a bit worse than most focused medium-sized subreddits, and a lot worse than more focused subreddits. The level of in-depth conversation you'll get about Go on r/golang or Emacs on r/emacs is much, much higher than this site. In fact you can get a decent amount of arbitrage karma bringing links from those subs onto here :)

I think the sweetspot of this site is a technical topic that's a bit out of the mainstream. These threads usually take a couple hours to really develop but because of that they usually avoid the kneejerk negative/contrarian toplevel posts that the community posts on more accessible topics which usually derail conversation quality. As such you usually get thoughtful, well-developed, good-faith takes on these threads. A good example is a Lisp or Forth related thread.

Unfortunately, I'm irrational and prone to pointless argumentation, which is why I sometimes show up in the comments. (Duty calls.) I usually regret it, though.

Ditto. Reading HN through Lynx helps, though. As with a lot of things in life, adding a little bit of friction can make everyone happier.

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