Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit's Discussion about HN

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 25 posts

Re: Reddit's Discussion about HN

#5

Post by unalone »

anthonyrubin wrote: post #2

I don't see any reason to discuss Jeff's ignorant article yet again. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948

Agreed. All reddit's doing is calling us sterile, and circlejerking around a few of the people defending Hacker News. There's nothing meaningful in this conversation.

Re: Reddit's Discussion about HN

#6

Post by whacked_new »

jacoblyles wrote: post #3

While I certainly think this is interesting, I also think it is dangerous to draw their attention. When you see a mob of unruly teenagers, you should pretend not to notice them and walk on.

There is something tangential that I have always found interesting.

Whenever this kind of discussion (about this-better-site users vs. that-worse-site users, subjective judgments galore, obviously) happens, there are always posts about the "strategically correct" behavior to ensure the desired outcome. The prototypical case would be: "Don't feed the trolls."

But, in posting this publicly, on a social site where, in many cases, the troll is targeting said social site, you are feeding the troll. In fact, the troll's goal might simply be to elicit as many "don't feed the troll" posts as possible.

Stated otherwise, reiterating the rule to ignore somebody is effectively un-ignoring them. But at the same time, you want to reinforce these rules into the community, and educate people to follow them. So you have a problem: in order for the rule to be efficient, it needs to be tacit; but it also needs to be widely known, and the efficient way to achieve this is by reiterating it publicly.

Now, there is clearly a puzzle here. Has anyone else thought about this, and came to an elegant attack? I think the most obvious case is to use private messages, although I have no knowledge how well those work (this is a general case and is independent of whether HN has PMs or not).

Re: Reddit's Discussion about HN

#7

Post by tdavis »

To be fair to them, this place is really boring, can't take a joke to save its life, and is often filled with the same sort of stories... but the major alternatives are so much worse by comparison that it's all worth it.

To quote myself from #startups, "HN basically has one type of person... a much better one type of person [than] youtube has, but still."

Re: Reddit's Discussion about HN

#9

Post by trickjarrett »

tdavis wrote: post #7

To be fair to them, this place is really boring, can't take a joke to save its life, and is often filled with the same sort of stories... but the major alternatives are so much worse by comparison that it's all worth it. To quote myself from #startups, "HN basically has one type of person... a much better one type of person [than] youtube has, but still."

I will disagree.

We can't 'take a joke' because the purpose of this site does not include humor. We have plenty of other places to go to look for something funny.

As for being boring, then this means to me that the content is not your cup of tea. Plenty of us spend a great deal of time on here reading and contributing.

And lastly, we're far from the same person. We have a niche we reach to so people come from similar places in terms of goals and projects, we're fairly heavy on the programming entrepreneur, but it's still not the 'same person.' We're much closer to the same person than the much broader Reddit, sure.

But the amount of discourse and discussion on this site is quite evident as proof that we have varying opinions.

Post reply on HN