I think besides dang and other moderators who keep the site somewhat cleaned up through brute force, the fact that HN discourages flashy features and headache-inducing levels of information density and imagery helps to keep a core audience present, unlike most other platforms that start out simple then quickly pile on feature after feature that make the original audience depart.
I think we've seen this before.<p>Comments, everywhere are terrible. Heck, this one probably is.<p>But I like HN more than anywhere else (so far). Maybe rot will set in, and the sun will set on our relationship, but not yet.<p>I find many comments to be quite correct. Not all, of course, but many.<p>The ones that I like, are the ones that make me think "orthogonally."
One thing I like about HN, is I can see many comments that I think are totally outrageously wrong and still get into a civil discussion with someone on why they think that way.<p>This would never go down on Twitter, Reddit etc. I think by virtue of being here, there's at least a semblance of something that unites us.<p>That being said, I've definitely seen a few situations where "logical fallacies" have been wheeled out to try and autowin an argument. However, this is usually the exception and when things get really bad the moderation is usually on point.
I don’t think the informed technical opinions are nearly as rare as danluu characterizes them to be, to wit: “it’s rare that a thread will have even a single comment that's well-informed”.<p>I do agree that the farther you get from computer tech, the more frequently you’ll see patently wrong comments (aviation is my eye-roll inducing topic here), but on computer tech topics, I’d say more than 50% of substantive comments have positive correlation with correctness and more than 30% are actively good.
HN comments, by and large, are extremely polite, and people are open to discussion, criticism, etc without resorting to insults, in my experience. I don't really see the sort of complaints brought up in the post here, well, ever, outside of the rare ghostly, semi-transparent comments that have already been flagged or filtered.<p>You don't have to spend long on Reddit, Youtube or Facebook to really appreciate just how nice and non-combative it is here. Maybe it is just the relative difference from those sites' comment sections that blind me to how many assholes are regularly posting on HN, but I really don't see them.<p>Admittedly, as another comment pointed out, the further it gets away from tech, the less informed the comments tend to be (the recent thread about mystical experiences and psychedelics had the level of rhetoric and nuance I'd expect from a teenage Reddit capital-A Atheist on the subject, for example). But that's fine, it's not where I come here for.
He missed a couple of the things that bother me about HN:<p>* People fishing for upvotes by complaining about how X news site uses Javascript or has a paywall. We get it. I know. I agree. Stop posting it.<p>* Top comments being tangential responses to the title, not discussions of the linked content. I usually enjoy the tangential responses, but I want to see the more-relevant discussion voted higher. I can only imagine that these posts are being upvoted by people who also didn't read the article.<p>> On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong.<p>I'd be curious to see some examples, because this isn't really my experience. Once in a while, yes. But not that often and not the vast majority, and it mostly pops up in political-flavored threads. But I should defer to Luu, who is a lot more informed than I am on a lot of topics.
Ranking 'quality' is tough because it has multiple dimensions and aggregating multiple kinds of utility is problematic, see<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...</a><p>developing a good ranking function for bag-of-words full text search is about carefully balancing the attraction of larger vs smaller documents in the collection. If you try to aggregate several bad search engines you get a bad search engine, if you try to add more factors you get a bad search engine, instead you have to walk the path of BM25 or one of the more modern 'information theoretic' ranking functions. (e.g. precious knowledge I got from years of reading conference proceedings and still having no idea how to make a good ranking function then finally reading the right review paper that pointed out the two discoveries the conference made in the first 10 years!)
OT: I hope Dan Luu write his blog more often. There is no post this year and he seems to be consumed by Twitter. His tweets are witty and I like it, but I miss his long form, super deep dive kind of writings. These are marvels. I also like the witty ones like this, and I would love to have it as blog rather than as tweets.<p>Totally off-topic: One of my favorite from his writing is "Sampling v. tracing" [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://danluu.com/perf-tracing/" rel="nofollow">https://danluu.com/perf-tracing/</a>
Like anything, great things die with popularity, or at least become just good.<p>When I started reading HN ten years ago it was a vastly different culture among users. Or maybe I just didn't recognize the underhanded asshole tones.<p>Either way, HN is still good enough compared to any alternatives I know about. I guess that's just life though.
> but maybe consider, at the margin, blogging more and commenting on HN less?<p>Have considered this seriously (and still am), but a blog post needs more meta context and exposition than an HN comment. The person browsing a blog post vs. playing the HN slot machine (time bandit?) is in a more passive mode than the give and take of HN comments.<p>The difference to me is that a blog post is a topic of conversation, where HN <i>is</i> a conversation. It's discourse, facilitated by candid pseudonymity, and not just a foil for someone to pose with. (whereas twitter is just the instagram of ideas.)<p>I have written at the pro level where it really is like a sport, and a lot of my job involves articulating complex things with clarity and pith, and to me, as a form, the blog post is too passive. However, if I get good enough at that form my opinion may change.
I, for one, am really impressed by the comments. The quantity is amazing for the quality, and the quality is amazing for the quantity. The top 1 comment isn't always great, but one of the top 3 usually is.<p>Or so I thought... till I read this Good Parts post and now I am left with this vague feeling I've been wrong all along. I wish he had said why some comments are so bad.<p>I now don't want to end up as the top comment because its always bad?
I sometimes wonder how HN’s audience is shaped by the site’s deliberate inaccessibility to visually impaired people. I suspect it is one part of the site’s tilt toward the younger crowd
> The ranking scheme seems to penalize posts that have a lot of comments on the theory that flamebait topics will draw a lot of comments. That sometimes prematurely buries stories with good discussion, but much more often, it buries stories that draw pointless flamewars.<p>If you like stories that generate robust discussion, use: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/active" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/active</a><p>This 'hidden' view of HN tends to allow high-discussion topics to stay at the top, and not get insta-buried because they're controversial. I use it as my default now. In my opinion, it's much better than the main sorting algorithm.
I like the idea of preserving the best comments as some form of blog. TheBestOfHN.com might be worth starting up by just compiling all comments with > 200 karma?
> (I remember posting a huge thing on slashdot when this article was originally posted)<p>Appropriate that _this_ comment is buried who-knows-where in slashdot's archives.
On a lighter note and for humor read webshit weekly at <a href="http://n-gate.com/" rel="nofollow">http://n-gate.com/</a>
"HN comments are horrible."<p>Proceeds to list pages of awesome comments.<p>Claims topics he's informed about have mostly wrong comments.<p>Doesn't give any examples.<p>HN comments are a conversation/discussion not a contest of who is right/wrong, and it's great to have differing viewpoints as long as those views don't degrade into logical fallacies like ad hominem, ,anecdotal, or others.<p>There are way less logical fallacies on HN than other sites which is what I love about it.<p>I think some people just want an echo chamber.
It’s a sign of elitism to have this much contempt for internet comments. The internet is not academia or your fancy hierarchical tech job, it’s a place where anybody of any ilk can have a say. Yes there will be wrong comments or mean comments but that’s just because you’re amongst the people and the people are imperfect. Yet it’s the masses of people who form the audience of this site that make this site so valuable.<p>If one cannot get over their contempt of bad internet comments then it might be better for their stress levels to stick to reading academic journals or other elite publications. Much higher ratios of nice/correct opinions there.