Comment by crystalis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crystalis | Hacker News Reader

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I've lurked longer than I've trolled. There is a surface appearance of intelligence (thanks to a couple dozen prolific and intelligent participants) but a great deal of unproductive conversations.

Too often, people talk past each other.

Too often, people nitpick like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782752

Too often, edw519 gets upvotes for 'pithy' statements like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=864709

Too often, reposts galore, and even worse, from techcrunch: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743735

Too much non-contributing irrelevant self-promotion: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=kkleiner http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=kkleiner

Too often, votes are based on... zealotry? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902804 Why would jrockway get downvoted for answering a question as to why OSX didn't merit the Apple Tax for his purposes?

HN is useful for the domain knowledge and experience of some notable fellows, but a lot of the active user base dampens a lot of the remaining signal.

I hope you didn't get the impression that I thought your opinion was somehow less valuable than someone else's because of the amount of time you've been registered here. I think that's a weak argument and I hate it when people make it.

I look at people's time on the site when they say the community has changed because I want to know if they're contributing or consuming.

This is a community, and it can be reasoned with by anybody, as long as they take the time to try and do it.

I think for the most part, the responses on the threads you linked showed that. Sometimes people will reflexively downvote people because of a perceived slight. I have a feeling that some of the early voting trains get undone as the day goes on.

That being said, I'm sure I've personally contributed a significant amount of noise to conversations here, but if I wanted pure signal I'd probably spend a lot more time on places like LtU. The value of this place is the conversations, far more than the links (in my opinion).

Good call on the singularityhub....

That one has been reported for a long time but nobody cares much about it.

I used to flag them consistently but I just gave up, so kkleiner wins that round and gets to spam as much as he wants.

Flagging to keep out the spam is a way of doing community service, if the feeling is that it is for nothing or possibly even ignored (PG hinted that people that flag a lot have their flaggings discarded) makes me much less inclined to do that work.

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