undefined | Better HN

0 pointskrapp7mo ago0 comments

The pretense is that the discourse on HN has always been held to a much higher standard than Reddit, primarily by comparing the worst of Reddit with the best of HN, which is specious. If you compare the average comment of HN to the average comment of any programming subreddit, the only real difference is that humor tends to be verboten on HN. But that comes at a cost of increased performative cynicism and rancor.

0 comments

IAmGraydon7mo ago

You've been here since 2012 and are an active contributor. You really believe that the quality of discourse is the same as Reddit on average? Maybe you don't spend enough time on Reddit. It is literally a cesspool of humanity. Hacker News has little in common with it.

krappOP7mo ago

Hacker News has more in common with Reddit than you'd think. Plenty of people who post here also post there. A lot of the content that gets posts here gets posted on Reddit first. You won't believe it but there's an intersection between HN and 4chan as well. I've never seen people gas up 4chan anywhere as much as I've seen them do here.

Yes any technical subreddit averages out to the average HN thread. In some specialized subreddits like /r/AskHistorians the quality far exceeds HN because you're required to know what you're talking about to even state an opinion.

Here's an illustrative example: the thread for "LLMs aren't world models (https://yosefk.com/blog/llms-arent-world-models.html)"

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854518

/r/programming: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1mnc9qf/llms_a...

I don't see a qualitative distinction between HN and "literally a cesspool of humanity" here.

I won't belabor the point because I know it's futile and diverging far from the topic.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse