Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

When a very talented & experienced person says, "that's a bad approach" with no explanation, you should pay close attention, but that type of comment gets downvoted into oblivion and on HN is explicitly against the rules. It's very artificial, that doesn't happen in real life. People who's reputation precedes them don't have to justify themselves. Guido Van Rossum is not going spend time laboriously correcting the things he disagrees with on open forums like this - he probably isn't browsing the forum in the first place. You have to adapt to that.

That becomes a cycle, and gradually the average quality declines as each successive tier of experience gets sick of it (and of being ignored when they try to articulate the problem) and leave.

Hacker News is not as vulnerable to this as other communities, and I'm not sure why, but it's still a problem.

The core issue is that external reputation is both hard to decipher on Reddit-style forums, and not rewarded when it exists. Every post is judged on its local merits, who posted it is usually irrelevant. Sounds good, but it just leads to people BSing. So HN is full of overwritten pedantry and BS, interspersed by the odd person with actual, hardcore experience getting sick of it and writing a lone, high-effort rebuttal. Which will tend to do well, but... It's not the typical post. Most posts are high-effort bullshit and resultant arguments.

I would like to take a stab at explaining why an argument being "boring semantics" or "interesting philosophy" is somewhat dependent on perspective.

To be explicit about definitions I take "semantics" to mean "mapping from words/sentences to a concrete meaning" and "arguing semantics" to mean "Arguing what mapping is correct or agreeing on a shared mapping".

To give a concrete example of an argument (from the article):

> Abortion is the canonical example of this type of argument: once you have decided what “life” is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one.

Deciding what "life" is by my definitions a purely semantic argument. As you try to define "life", you will want to keep almost universally agreed upon statements such as "Human life has inherent value" coherent. Some of the simplest definitions will raise issues if you start considering future and past humans. There are some interesting questions that you can try to answer by defining "life" and following the logical consequences. However, if you are only interested in abortion, most of the subtly of a definition of "life" is not relevant.

So if you are interested in only the first question you ask, arguing semantics can be a deep rabbit hole, but if you are willing to entertain new questions as you primary question, it can be interesting as its own study.

For example r/AskHistorians have amazing quality content due to very strict moderation.

I try to take down voted comments on the chin (and one of mine at -4 was absolutely warranted) but at other times it can be dis-heartening to see a comment being down-voted for no apparent reason.

I guess the answer is to not be too vain / overlly bothered about my Karma points but just as a highly upvoted comment feed the reward centres so do down votes in a whole different way.

Oh, and responsible and thoughtful use of down-voting rights please.