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Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

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Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#91

Post by prox »

college_physics wrote: post #82

This points to a more general problem with all online discussion forums: The signal to noise varies (and may on occasionally be zero) but in the end all the signal is lost / buried deep into some archive (like tears in rain if you want to be melodramatic about it). Think about those millions of people, interacting for billions of hours online over almost two decades now. What is there to show for it at the end of the…

The thing is, the curator of any topic X, also needs to be at an expert level of topic X. On HN I often gain more insights, so I add to the signal, not noise (I hope)

But it’s sometimes hard to gauge who is an expert if it’s a topic you are unfamiliar with. It helps if someone mentions (“I have been doing this for the last 5 years”) or wrote a literal book on the subject.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#92

Post by yeahbu777 »

mancerayder wrote: post #53

When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit. Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification). There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overal…

This is such a routine, generalized rant it almost becomes the problem it describes.

Short, spiteful condescension that circles back to the authors preferences (HN). No explicit language, I guess, but I learned nothing except some internet rando has a BS opinion.

If you did any research you’d see the same on HN.

Public forums are noise generators which, once reasoned around, makes it more fun. I email academics doing work I find interesting for the best signal; most reply.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#93

Post by moremetadata »

> But I wonder if others would also be interested in longer term discussions,

Bots already pretty much dominate platforms like Twitter and Reddit, although I would point out the structured nature of Reddit makes it an ideal public resource AI training dataset. Saying that, I like your idea because these new LLM's like ChatGPT v3 need to be able to debate which is something that has largely been shutdown online including here, under a variety of guises. A debatable AI some would argue is the next logical step in some area's of AI evolution.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#94

Post by miiiiiike »

I refuse to even add comments to my new projects.

I can't imagine running HN. If I had to run HN and also had to deal with 1-n week long flame wars I would delete the database, backups, and repo.

The worst part of the modern internet is how often we have to come into contact with commenters and moderators. No, I don't want to click on a monkey emoji to declare your Discord's constitution legally binding.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#95

Post by mynegation »

Tycho wrote: post #72
mancerayder wrote: post #53

When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit. Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification). There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overal…

I use the word Reddit as a pejorative. “I stopped watching after the second season. The writing had become so reddit.” “The steak itself was good but this sauce is a bit reddit.” “Rose Street is a good night out but Raeburn Place is completely reddit.”

I read each of these three examples several times and I still have no idea what you meant, outside of general displeasure. Maybe this is the point. So in a strange twist of meta your examples are way too reddit for me.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#96

Post by Idk__Throwaway »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #89
suddenclarity wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "100 times" aside, some subs actually have rules about posting facts and will bann you for it. For example antiwork will bann anyone talking slightly positive about companies, which includes correcting false information. If you're into politics (90% of /r/all nowadays), it doesn't require a lot in some subs.

One really has to wonder about the mindset of people who would enforce such a rule. Do they really think they are a force for positive change? Isn’t every other fictional story some parable about how the means don’t justify the ends? It feels weird to me that people don’t absorb that idea at some point.

I believe they feel that their ideology is the ultimate force for positive change, and they become so lost in it that they are willing to do objectively wrong things under the rationalization that they're nuetralizing a threat to the idealogy.

Again, that's just what I think makes sense and personally believe. It's certainly possible I'm incorrect.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#97

Post by ilyt »

MikeTheRocker wrote: post #87
mancerayder wrote: post #53

When I read some of the suggestions here in these comments, some of them exist already in Reddit. Now at the risk of getting downvoted, my experience is that Reddit is awful: spiteful posts, tons of short sentence replies that litter the eyes, circular meme-like self-referential wink-wink behavior (i.e. repeating the same joke with slight modification). There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) but overal…

This perfectly captures my frustration with Reddit. I can't stand it these days. It's been eye opening to read about technical subjects on Reddit that I personally know a lot about only to see heaps of confidently spewed misinformation in the comments. Makes me question the validity of everything I read where I'm not very knowledgeable. I'm very grateful HN is a lot more thoughtful and open to questioning.

What's worse the well-written bullshit gets upvoted while the actual true answer gets downvoted because "It doesn't sound right" to the average visitor. Not that it is any different for any other social network tho.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#98

Post by ilyt »

tgv wrote: post #37
lizknope wrote: post #25

I miss Usenet in the 1990's where threads would go on for months or even years. I used "slrn" to read news and it was great. It would only show me new posts. I could kill a thread to filter it so I didn't have to see it. I could just hit one button to go to the next post on the thread or to the next thread. In many ways it was superior to modern web based forums.

The group was so much smaller, and also more more homogeneous, and there we so few alternatives, it's incomparable.

Even now it happens, eevblog.com (electronic engineering things) forums have plenty.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#99

Post by mixedCase »

mancerayder wrote: post #85
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are some thoughtful subs (star something codex) I had to unsubscribe from that sub. In the past you could find some potentially interesting conversations with knowledgeable responses if you sifted through the noise. Lately, the general vibe has become uncomfortably welcoming of incel-adjacent topics or exploring weird alternative medicine ideas. The general vibe is that "normie" stuff is bad, contrarian takes…

>Everything is written in pseudo-intellectual style that makes it feel extra truthy, despite being recycled content from other domains. I think I know what you mean about that sub and some slightly oddball 'aggrieved men' sort of pile-on conversations. To your point here - that's one of the points I was making above, that I'm coming to realize (and perhaps there's a bit of looking in the mirror here) that good writin…

I do not know what kind of comment you wrote, so I in the interest of curiosity I'll ask:

Could it be that instead of stating in the comment both the relevant, precise figures and a conclusion derived from them, you merely linked out to the PDF in a way that only by reading the PDF could your point be fully seen?

By and large, on forums and social media it is heavily frowned upon to rely on outlinks and open ended reasoning. As in the line of thought: "if you will not state your point clearly for everyone to see at a glance and then back it up with sources, why should I bother?".

It may seem unreasonable or even anti-intellectual at first until you draw parallels with in-person discussion: imagine someone describing their point in detail for 10 minutes only for the other person to hand over a whole book and say "you're ignorant, go read this and learn why you're so wrong".

I will repeat again: I do not know what you actually said in that comment, but I've seen this play out a few times and my gut tells me that unless the point was extremely controversial, a deluge of downvotes is likely explained by this scenario.

Re: Ask HN: Longer Discussions in HN?

#100

Post by ilyt »

miiiiiike wrote: post #94

I refuse to even add comments to my new projects. I can't imagine running HN. If I had to run HN and also had to deal with 1-n week long flame wars I would delete the database, backups, and repo. The worst part of the modern internet is how often we have to come into contact with commenters and moderators. No, I don't want to click on a monkey emoji to declare your Discord's constitution legally binding.

...yet here you are
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