Even in specialty subreddits, folks take upvotes for legitimacy. When questions are repeated over time, answers are regurgitated paraphrasing of what has upvoted in the past. You end up with this vicious cycle of hivemind thinking that is difficult to introduce new or alternative viewpoints to - because people don't upvote what they don't already believe to be true.
You don't get upvotes for asking interesting questions, or providing a niche/novel viewpoint. You get upvotes for answering leading questions with utter conviction, (whether you are correct or not) and generating emotional responses, usually outrage (whether deserved or not).
I am very disillusioned with Reddit at this stage.
Also I think dang (and whoever else) is a good mod, which makes a lot of difference.
There's also a recency bias, I've been on Reddit for 8 years and HN for ~3. Maybe my disillusionment has yet to come.
Now I'm not trying to disavow HN, it's a really cool place and there are a lot of knowledgable people here with lifetimes of experience in complex subjects but there are also a lot of technical topics where the discourse is clearly inferior to reddit, twitter or even discord.
people don't understand how much of what they read on reddit is actively managed by people who want the message controlled. This is the same for any popular social media site with twitter being the top of the heap
just be glad that HN isn't that important to where the issue becomes observable (we get enough indirect political tripe as it is with submissions)
Even if HN were bigger, it wouldn't be worth the attention of PACs and other activists IMO, the HN crowd is not their voter base. For Republicans the tech crowd is too diverse and immigration-friendly, for Democrats... I'd bet a case of beer that many/most of the US people here vote Democrat anyway since the actions of most Republicans run completely against the needs of tech people.
I'd argue upvote systems in general dominate the world of tech discussion to the degree that some of these reddit mechanisms end up driving aspects of the industry.
Your point about people who "know how to post" is very interesting, as on Reddit I've noticed there's a certain style, or phrasing, of comment that tends to get upvoted more, which leads to a lot of comments having similar style and rhetoric in my experience.
>I'd argue upvote systems in general dominate the world of tech discussion to the degree that some of these reddit mechanisms end up driving aspects of the industry.
Oh yeah definitely, at this point there's no social media giant without an upvote system. Would a strictly chronological forum, like the forums of old, be better though? I don't know.
I think a reputation-based system (in the sense of real reputations, not virtual points) could work. I think it's happening in some places. People like Jon Blow, George Hotz & Handmade Hero smoke the competition when they stream on Twitch, and their currency is respect.
The best part of respect-based attention is people who know their shit are able to speak against the zeitgeist, without putting in much effort. That's the biiiig problem I have with upvote systems. It's not so much that they encourage groupthink, it's that they don't present reputation. Every post has to stand on its own merits, which is nice in theory, but in practice it means very experienced (and thus busy) people can't just state their opinion, they have to make an argument, so they end up not interacting full stop.
Agreed. I've been experimenting lately with ordering all threads by "old" by default and using CSS rules to hide comment points. It can make things much more interesting, as all you see are people talking in chronological order, and screw the fake point popularity contest. My next step might be hiding the age of each comment (or obfuscating it when <1 day), so I stop overfocusing on recent comments and stop thinking "I would like to reply to this, but the comment is 17 hours old so nevermind..."
Some subreddits hide the vote count for X amount of minutes, which I also like. It doesn't stop the algorithm but it helps prevent dogpiling on popular comments.
Generally that means focusing on the OP. If the OP is some short burp of a statement, the OP isn't there for conversation so the entire thread is a waste of time. Then secondly you can wait a day or so for the up/down locusts to have passed on. OPs who were genuinely interested in discussion will reply a few days later.
I miss slashdot's moderation system that was more nuanced: you could classify comments into a few buckets. Unfortunately reddit is so heavily gamed by people who want karma for profit that moderation and meta-moderation would be gamed as well. Not to mention people who troll simply to troll or advance a viewpoint or political agenda. I generally stay out of the main subreddits because there's just no point in interacting with people there any more.
There is some value in niche subreddits (which I won't mention here) but once they become "too" popular it draws the wrong sort of attention and they too lose utility.
Edit: Oh yeah, if someone would like to invite me to lobste.rs, please e-mail me at my username @ yahoo.
There's plenty of clones that work perfectly fine, comments like this come across as Stockholm syndrome. If a sub made a half-assed collective decision to move it would be simple to do so. If all the mods left for greener pastures it would become a wasteland within weeks.
Lobsters, Tildes, Ruqqus, etc.