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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   4567 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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DAE get infuriated reading HackerNews comments?

The userbase is sufficiently tech literate to have passable to good discussions about tech. But boy is is jarring when they comment about anything other than tech. Blatantly wrong use of economics/politics/pop-science jargon, extremely naive shitlib or doomer takes, shitty ass model of how things work combined with shitty articulation of said model, Autism so profound most mottizens would want to give them swirlies, I can go on.

The annoying part is the discrepancy in quality post to post. I read an informative and insightful set of comments about the Golang compiler in one post and let my guard down and the comments in the next post would be undifferentiable from a mainstream reddit thread. At least Reddit is garbage through and through and I've primed myself to have 0 expectations from "the discourse".

Reading Hackernews feels like being put in a class full of "smart kids". The kids are clearly smart, but they are a bit high on their own supply. You were one of them too once, but you have grown out of the act (because in the big bad real world, you are probably just a midwit). But they will try to sneak in jargon every chance they get to let everyone know that they know the jargon, If I have to read another comment chain that includes a guy having an orgasm/circlejerk because he found out about GoodHarts Law, I am going to kill someone.

I actually think every forum, or at least every forum I actually visit, has things it's good and bad at.

HN is quite good at deep technical stuff. It's mid I guess at where tech intersects the real world. At purely real-world stuff involving geopolitics and macroeconomics, it's purely Reddit-tier. It does seem to have a noticeable sub-population of extraordinarily weird people, the type who do stuff like attempt to browse the web without Javascript, run their own email servers and use text-based email clients, continue to use IRC, etc, who seem completely unaware that they are far, far outside of the mainstream and get mad that the world doesn't cater to them. I've actually gotten to where I get severely annoyed by the crypto people who insist that all communication must be over E2E-encrypted provably-secure systems and discount all other features, concerns, failures, and attack types.

Reddit is okay for entertaining stories. Some of the smaller or more tightly moderated subs are okay for some types of information or discussion. For anything adjacent to the culture war, it's mostly trash.

But then it's not like the Motte is perfect either. We're mostly okay at reasonable discussion on tough culture war issues. The QCs showcase some of the really gold material that we manage to produce, and I'm proud to have earned a few. Sometimes it can be a bit quokka-ish though. Not a lot of room for stuff I consider fun. There's still a little sense of super weird and sheltered people sometimes, though not nearly as bad as HN.

I sometimes say only half-jokingly that it would be good to somehow require posters in a forum to prove that they can go to a bar in their local area by themselves, hang out and drink for a few hours, have a few decent conversations, and not weird out or piss off everyone around them or get kicked out or something.

I will use exactly the same justification progressives use in favor of censorship and against freedom of speech: information should be open and accessible to all, but only experts should be allowed to comment and be given a platform, lest we suffer from a misinformation contagion propagated by the undereducated.

The issue is that internet made the line between private communication and public communication even murkier than before.

I imagine the process is like this. Step 0. Information is open and accessible, but only vetted experts are allowed to opine on public platforms. Step 1. Me and my friends want to chat about the expert-verified opinions. We set up a private Discord server / Facebook group / Telegram-thing / what young people use today. Step 2. If we are very good (discussion is information-dense, or entertaining, or got some popular people involved), at some point the extrovert friend shares the invite link to his/her friends. Suddenly our group has hundreds of lurkers. Is it still a private discussion group? Step 3. Rinse and repeat. When you hit thousands of members, congratulations, it is a major newsletter.

(Steps 2-3 were accelerated in the old Web of blogs and forums.)

Initially it doesn't feel like you are setting up a major media platform. Most of them never become big. Is there a point where it makes sense to ban them?

Yeah, I feel you. The discussion is very low quality nowadays. HN seemed to have its Eternal September moment during the pandemic.

They could fix it by making people code up FizzBuzz before being allowed to post or comment.

I work with such people all day long. Nice guys and very smart but holy shit I keep the discussion limited to work/sports/kids.

If you ever try to link to JWZ to Hacker News you will be redirected to an image of a hairy testicle in an eggcup with the text. '"Hacker" News a venture capital company's fan club. Finance-obsessed man-children making the world worse'. So he is frustrated too.

I've seen HN comments that threads full of "techies" incorrecting each other and a grayed out downvoted comment with the someone who really knows. I think I've been doing software longer than some of the commentors have existed, and they are occassionally hilariously wrong about tech too. Not infuriated anymore I just don't read the comments that often.

Huge numbers of objectively smart people have very little knowledge of almost everything.

I find Reddit's economics takes so horrible that it's worse, though on most other things I agree that you often expect it to be bad, unlike hacker news.

Reddit's economics takes are amazingly bad. It's common to have comment sections where easily more than 99% of the comments are saying things that are blatantly at odds with the most basic and established economic concepts.

And I get the sense that this represents a large block of people, and politically active ones too! And not merely advocating things that could be bad, but things that would be outright disastrous, like not allowing people to go above a given net worth.

Yes. One of the crazier ones I've seen which is really popular is making it illegal to own an investment property unless it's a purpose built rental. So that's the only that renters would be allowed to live in. Another one is capping the price of food.

Right. The first leads to less building; the second leads to shortages. Neither a lack of homes nor a shortage of food are what they would want.

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