91–100 of 135 posts
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For the N-hundredth time, "aspergers" is not the same as being a nerd. It's an autism-spectrum condition that carries with it a substantial sensory integration disorder (among other things), which you'll notice most nerds don't posses.
Exactly where in what you commented does he equal aspberger with being a nerd? He equates it with being myopic, not geeky.
I actually find reddit to be somewhat nauseating. Call me cynical, but I can't help but think the Reddit community performs every kind act with an air of smug, self-centerdness you often find in creepy church youth groups or after school specials. I started visiting reddit because digg's links started sucking, and now I visit HN primarily because reddit is no longer about good links either. It's a maassive geek circl…
creepy church youth groups or after school specials Yes, yes! Exactly! I used to read programming reddit, and made a lot of comments there. Then I started to notice a pattern -- people were so happy that they wrote a blog post that it was suddenly forbidden to comment on it. One post I remember reading was something like, "hey guys, I made a PHP app! it's open source so please comment". The app was doing something li…
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> Have you been there recently? Have you been anywhere else recently? Can you give an example of a community, of comparable magnitude, that is more open minded? I am easy to criticize reddit, popular as it is on HN, but it is a surprising community for its large population, and as you say the smaller parts of it can be very good. One can find all the flaws with a thing that one wishes to but, in the end, if none are…
Even HN isn't that much different imo, especially outside its core competence of technical discussion (which is quite good). Discussions about economics, government, education, etc., on reddit and HN are about equally annoying to me (though I occasionally seem to fail to abstain from them at both places), with a lot of mob-mentality, up/down-voting based on agreement/disagreement, and not very well thought out knee-j…
Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant? It really is heart-warming to hear of all the good that those on Reddit have done. But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place — discussions got extremely polarised very quickly and there seemed to be very little room for reasoned dialogue. The article makes it sound like a good thi…
The mob rule is extremely distasteful to watch IMHO, and it's certainly a very specific community now - liberal, pro-drugs, anti-consumerism etc etc. There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions and short-termism - outraged one day, forgotten the next. They can get their users to 'do good' in the world, but can they make any money yet?
Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant? It really is heart-warming to hear of all the good that those on Reddit have done. But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place — discussions got extremely polarised very quickly and there seemed to be very little room for reasoned dialogue. The article makes it sound like a good thi…
However, I'll tell you a secret: the subreddit called TrueReddit does not suffer from this. It's really pleasant.
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I said I have no problem with people helping others - I'm not a sociopath. It's the whole "look, everyone, at how awesome we are" circle jerk that I find nauseating. Besides, I think reddit has performed an equal number of acts of vengeance as they have acts of altruism and have nailed the wrong person in more than one instance - perhaps that's worthy of a blog post. At least 4chan admits what it is. Again, my issue…
Go find me a significant number of highly voted posts, or ANY, that gloat about how much they've raised. I remember those posts where they were driving. The closest thing imaginable to what you're describing was "we're almost to $xxx,xxx dollars everyone" posts. I've seen OTHER websites talk about it. I've seen Colbert talk about it, but NEVER have I seen a submission, let alone a post, that even remotely read "We're…
I actually find reddit to be somewhat nauseating. Call me cynical, but I can't help but think the Reddit community performs every kind act with an air of smug, self-centerdness you often find in creepy church youth groups or after school specials. I started visiting reddit because digg's links started sucking, and now I visit HN primarily because reddit is no longer about good links either. It's a maassive geek circl…
People get confused about what reddit is; it isn't like digg or HN in that it is one link aggregator, it's a web service that allows you you to group similar webpages together.
It just so happens that the most popular groupings happen to be the least interesting to outliers, which should be obvious...this is why they're outliers.
check out: http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit> http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience> http://reddit.com/r/longreads>
Think about reddit like usenet, the grouping syntax is just different.
reddit.com/r/$group
instead of
$group.$subgroup.$subgroup.$subgroup
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Even HN isn't that much different imo, especially outside its core competence of technical discussion (which is quite good). Discussions about economics, government, education, etc., on reddit and HN are about equally annoying to me (though I occasionally seem to fail to abstain from them at both places), with a lot of mob-mentality, up/down-voting based on agreement/disagreement, and not very well thought out knee-j…
The technical discussion on HN is not better than on Reddit. There is more noise on Reddit, but the level of expertise in the top is often higher. The people on Reddit in technical discussions are often more knowledgeable and more open minded (the tone of the discussion is less serious). HN has more groupthink and hero-envy.
The level of technical competence on HN is very high, and there's way less noise, so if you're a technically competent person with a business side (or if you're just interested in the business side), HN has a plethora of good for you.
As you note, the level of technical competence in the subreddits and threads that pertain to technical matters is higher on Reddit. Articles and discussions about just about any facet of any field that requires long-studied domain knowledge will have at least one commenter that really knows their stuff and wants to help people understand it.
This does come with the problem that someone who is just crafty with words can create detailed troll paragraphs that laymen can't easily distinguish from legitimate information (and this does happen, and is arguable inevitable once a discussion community grows to contain some ill-defined number of members), but that is a problem endemic to language itself, and it seems like at some level you have to assume that people know how to critically analyze what is told to them and be able to make a fair guess at legitimacy, and know to defer to well-sourced data (in addition to being able to identify good sources....)
The problem with groupthink and immaturity on Reddit is something that occurs in almost every large(r) online community I can think of (/. anyone?), and has many causes, not the least of which is that it's comprised primarily of young, idealistic, nerdy people -- and we all know that it's much easier to be loud and passionate and blunt-to-a-fault when you haven't gotten past whatever developmental phase it is where you get over yourself a bit and stop being so reactionary. In addition, you have group psychology and a large percentage of users that aren't the most socially well-off folk. In addition, a bunch of other stuff.
In short, it seems to me that Reddit is more a force for "good" than not. There are "bad" things, and the community can be swayed and manipulated like any other -- but they're largely more aware of that than other groups, and seem to be more willing to actually listen to well-reasoned arguments than others.
They also have the benefit of becoming a very popular site at a point in time where the internet seems to be becoming a major player in social and political action, but that's a different can of worms.
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Even HN isn't that much different imo, especially outside its core competence of technical discussion (which is quite good). Discussions about economics, government, education, etc., on reddit and HN are about equally annoying to me (though I occasionally seem to fail to abstain from them at both places), with a lot of mob-mentality, up/down-voting based on agreement/disagreement, and not very well thought out knee-j…
The difference between Reddit and HN though is that a well-reasoned "corporations suck" comment will not get downvoted, while on Reddit a well-reasoned "unions suck" comment will get downvoted. Reddit has bouts of reasonableness, but I've never found a subreddit that is free of the mob. Except /r/dwarffortress.
I'd imagine that would depend on what subreddit the thread was in. Frontpage? Yeah, probably. Then again, if it is well reasoned, there will also be people pointing out that the downvotes are frivolous, and agreeing with points and debating.