HN: The Good Parts (2016)

HN is the least worst internet forum

Yes but the comments that I make ...

:-)

Edit: I watched a documentary on the making of QI - a British TV quiz where the questions or answers are supposed to be "Quite Interesting". And the commentator pointed out that they have changed the sort of facts they bring into the show - in the early years it was all "you might think X but really it's Y". But there are a limited number of "common misapprehensions", and the show has / will exhaust them. So now they focus on Quite Interesting things that you did not know before.

I tend to think of HN as the process the QI team goes through - lots of discussion, a few interesting things I did not know before and very rarely something that will chnage my view on a subject. It's just that can only happen so often.

So yeah, most internet comments are bad. And even on HN which has a high signal to noise ratio, the overall noise is still pretty loud. But so far it's helping me.

As the film says, it'll do till it dies or I find something better.

This comment is underrated.

If the Hacker News API actually returned comment scores it would be relatively easy to build an app that surfaces good comments, ahem.

Oscar Wilde and Groucho Marx had phrases for the likely coming decline in HN comment quality.