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HN comments are underrated

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Re: HN comments are underrated

#131

Post by tptacek »

toxican wrote: post #122
tptacek wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are really high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment. I think you can extend the same judgement…

While I still think HN probably has the better median, the quality of what you're exposed to on reddit is mostly up to you. Ditch the defaults and Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more. Not that you're doing this with your comment, but it has always st…

So that's the obvious response, and I agree, I think --- the comparison does get trickier if you take just, say, AskHistorians versus HN (there are casual Redditisms condoned even on well-moderated subreddits that are annoying enough to keep the comparison tricky).

But if you compare the basket of subreddits relevant to HN --- programming, crypto, etc --- right now, I feel like HN is winning handily. Reddit only starts crushing HN when you broaden out into topics that aren't really in HN's bailiwick.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#132

Post by jsmthrowaway »

tptacek wrote: post #114
VodkaHaze wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is a swamp of filth wrt economics comments. Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics, /r/econpapers are awful. I'm friends with the mods of /r/economics and they have a really hard time reigning in the masses of ideologues (on all sides) ruining what should remain pure economics discussions.

Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are really high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment. I think you can extend the same judgement…

The problem with this analysis is that each Reddit subreddit is its own community. So "median Reddit {comment,thread}" is largely useless and misleading for purposes of the comparison.

I sense that you know this, though.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#133

Post by berntb »

50CNT wrote: post #80
berntb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. And sad. But re old accounts: I've recently seen a few cases where old accounts with high karma dismissed Wikipedia -- without any references of their own. That is a "quality smell", if anything is. (One particularly shameless fellow just copied the primary link Wikipedia used -- and lied about the content. :-( ) EDIT: I wrote without any references of their own -- i.e. dismissed with hand waving. Wikipedia won…

My dad likes to dismiss Wikipedia, and he used to be an admin. They may just know how the sausage is made. His rule of thumb is "If it isn't a major article there's probably errors". His favorite example is that of an article about an ancient persian poet, which says that there's only 2 of his poems known, and only 1 remains. Next to that line, there's a picture of the other poem. Eh, who knows.

I didn't argue that Wikipedia always was correct (no source is that, I'd guess), just that it smelled really bad to dismiss it with just hand waving. It do have sources and have been whetted (for reasonably popular subjects.)

Re: HN comments are underrated

#134

Post by franciscop »

My feeling is that a large enough part of Hacker News has been any time within the last 10 years actively contributing in Stack Overflow. From my own experience, I learned how to ask/answer technical questions and participate in a technical discussion there while trying not to keep it political, and I totally feel that has helped me to provide good comments in HN from time to time.

So I would challenge the sentences:

> And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary.

I have, it's StackOverflow. Even though it is not a public internet forum properly, I've found there some awesome technical commentaries there and I think it might have helped HN a lot on that side.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#135

Post by nothrabannosir »

50CNT wrote: post #80
berntb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. And sad. But re old accounts: I've recently seen a few cases where old accounts with high karma dismissed Wikipedia -- without any references of their own. That is a "quality smell", if anything is. (One particularly shameless fellow just copied the primary link Wikipedia used -- and lied about the content. :-( ) EDIT: I wrote without any references of their own -- i.e. dismissed with hand waving. Wikipedia won…

My dad likes to dismiss Wikipedia, and he used to be an admin. They may just know how the sausage is made. His rule of thumb is "If it isn't a major article there's probably errors". His favorite example is that of an article about an ancient persian poet, which says that there's only 2 of his poems known, and only 1 remains. Next to that line, there's a picture of the other poem. Eh, who knows.

You can see Wikipedia as a mixture of different "subpedias". I find articles on technical and mathematical topics to generally be extremely accurate, content rich, and surprisingly bias free (so not very, but still). Protocols, theorems, proofs, even very advanced topics (way over my head, so perhaps I can't tell...). You could do much worse than take everything Wikipedia says about mathematics at face value.*

On the other hand, everything about currently living people, or worse, companies, you can essentially dismiss out of hand.

* Please don't. I'm just making a point.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#136

Post by zyngaro »

So true. I often jump to the comments before I read the linked article. The comments a very often of better quality and more informed than the article it self. HN is unique in today's internet it's a great community and I hope it stays that way.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#137

Post by angry_octet »

blt wrote: post #47

I think the culture of rejecting joke-only comments is significant. I love a good joke, but so does everybody else. Rewarding jokes would have a major effect on the signal/noise ratio.

Regrettably it makes the comments read like the minutes from an accountancy standards institute. There is also a 'wikipedia editor' or 'stack overflow mod' effect, where because someone said jokes are bad a whole bunch of people jump on them to kill them dead. Dead!

I'm reminded of a Robin Williams gag:

German talk show host: Why do you think there is not so much comedy in Germany?

Robin Williams: Did you ever think that you killed all the funny people?

Re: HN comments are underrated

#138

Post by frik »

latch wrote: post #32

Removing the vote count was a step back. You end up with highly positioned comments that are factually wrong and no way to weigh the corrections made in replies. If you saw that a comment had 20 votes, but a reply had 500, you'd have something to go by. If nothing else, they could show the relative score of a reply to its parent.

This and the "karma" info on people's profile page - bring it back.

Please also provide a new view that lists all top 20% of highest commented and highest voted news stories per day (disregarding any downvotes/flags !!). I really hate to miss stories that received a lot of traffic but got buried on page 200+ just because a vocal minority decided to hide it.

Please let me vote on old comments. "Voting is closed on that comment, but you can add it to your favorites if you like." Why have you recently changed that?

Re: HN comments are underrated

#139

Post by jacques_chester »

amelius wrote: post #58

I wish there was more research in moderation systems. I think it is a fascinating topic, because it can make or break an online forum. And perhaps it even has applications in political decision making.

> And perhaps it even has applications in political decision making.

You might find Rules of Order useful to learn. Running an efficient meeting is a skill that is relatively simple to learn.

With an organised way of passing around the sound wave lock and a common process for deciding what to discuss, what not to discuss and how to make decisions, stuff can get done pretty quickly.

Re: HN comments are underrated

#140

Post by angry_octet »

I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups -- NNTP ones, not yahoo or google groups, or any of the pale http immitations. The best were usually moderated of course, but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise. I imagine how they might be now with rich text rendering, e.g. embedded TeX and images.

Good newsreaders (MT-Newswatcher on MacOS springs to mind, but also fast console programs like tin) really helped. There were no 'likes' or 'vote' buttons. But there was the ability to whitelist or blacklist certain authors by adding them to a user's 'killfile', leading to the wonderfully pithy permanent downvote reply:

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