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Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

Faced with some lawn repair, I once joined the lawncare subreddit. It was an intense echo chamber of lawn adjacent neuroticism - stress over chemicals, mowing heights, quite a few people angry at their neighbours for foolishly trying to do them a favour by cutting some of their grass (inevitably too short or tall), and a fetishisation of the "perfect" lawn - cut short with visible stripes and no other vegetation.

I definitely like lawns - they're great for running about on, playing games, having a picnic. But other vegetation is nice too. The beauty of a slightly wild garden is the abundance of nature - insects, birds, the scent of flowers. Lawns are a monoculture with none of that.

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It would be unwise to take Reddit as illustrative about how normal people feel about anything. The platform is designed to falsify the appearance of strong consensus.

In other words, it's a collection of niche echo chambers of varying size.

More than just an an echo chamber, a pressure cooker designed to ratchet up over time. It rewards extreme opinions, normalizes them, then cyclically rewards even more extreme options that break the new norm.

Imagine what Reddit could have been if they went with tags instead of subcommunities. Posts could have different communities interacting instead of having mutually exclusive circlejerks.

The downside there is spamming tags to every post.

Which is exactly what most people want. They want to find people with similar interests and share ideas. Don't go to the anime subreddit expecting to find anyone who's interested in a negative critique about anime.

That problem with Reddit also applies to HN and every other "moderated with a light hand" discussion forums today. Don't go to Hacker News to speak positively about 'System Integrity Protection' or 'Sealed System Volume' on Apple computers, or to consider how the GPL might be harming open source, for example. The comments will be a tire fire of people repeating the same handful of hostile viewpoints as top-level threads (rather than upvoting that which they agree with), drowning out rational discussion and driving away anyone who doesn't agree with their viewpoint. The conversational warfare tactics are exactly the same as those used on Reddits about anime, video games, and all other topic people feel strongly enough about to create a forum for and allow participation of this nature.

Every up-vote/down-vote based system is just like this. It's all a matter of degrees after that. I miss the forums and BBSs of old.

Were they structurally different (no voting maybe?), or just had a lot fewer people?

They were like email, except to the forum's address instead of someone else's personal address. Lots of RE: RE: RE: just like in email, lots of third-party 'forum' clients that parsed QWKmail packet downloads from the BBS and displayed threaded conversations. Moderators could remove posts from the forum, unlike usenet.

Structurally different. Take a look at the many Discourse groups around today. There's none of the same pile-on tendencies that Upvote based sites like HN, Reddit, and Lobste.rs has. There's nothing to gain by piling on usually, since there's no karma-with-the-crowd.

this threaded view so much better though. maybe sort by time instead of votes would be better. once you got through a few pages message boards got unreadable

It goes further than that. A lot of product specific pages seem to be entirely astroturf.

> The platform is designed to falsify the appearance of strong consensus

The platform is designed to bring people together to discuss common interests - much like HN, and many other sites.

Any false appearance of strong consensus is a cognitive error on the observer's part

There's also a r/NoLawns subreddit worth checking out.

Just as extreme but on the other end.

Reduction ad horseshoe theory absurdum.

In the Portland metro area for the most part we just let our lawns go brown in the dry summer. It generally doesn't rain much from mid-June through mid-September and now the lawns look tawny like lion fur - I kind of like it, actually.

My sister & BiL visted from out of state last week and they were like "why does everyone let their lawns die here?" and I actually hadn't even thought about it much before - the fish doesn't see the water, I guess. I think it's because it's going to cost a lot if you want to keep your lawn green through the summer - mostly sewer costs as they're based on water usage. That and we don't have to worry about mowing in July, August and September which is nice. And we know it won't take much for the lawns to green back up when the rains start in October.

+1 from Seattle. Coming from the Midwest, the brown PNW lawns annoyed me. They still do (it's a dust bowl here for months), but 90% of lawns are dormant like mine. No watering, no mowing, no big deal.

When the rain comes back (very soon!), we'll green up and all will be right again.

It's also not that common to have a sprinkler system here, and watering the lawn is kind of a PITA, especially if you want to avoid dirty looks for watering the sidewalk.

Does Portland allow dual water meters? Here it’s semi-common to have a meter for outside water, upon which sewer rates are not charged.

I've never seen this here.

To be fair, that's every single subreddit that is about a relatively mundane topics. There is only so much to talk about and eventually leads to intense optimization, especially considering the population is going to be full of people who willing look to join a lawn care community. And it should be noted that the name of a subreddit does not necessarily best represent what it is. For the same reason that there are at least 6 different personal finance subreddits I am aware of.

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