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Comment by geraneum | Hacker News Reader

It's naive to think that HN is necessarily better than an arbitrary Subreddit in terms of quality of conversations and depth of discussions, especially on non-tech related material. I don't know why one might think it's better/worse than a Twitter thread or Facebook post when it comes to controversial topics. You can find smart and dumb people here. Also, going against the narrative of the comment section may have negative consequences even here.

My personal preference is to treat HN as any other popular social media and be vigilant about what I read here.

P.S. I am not talking about this particular post. Just an opinion about the discussions on HN since you mentioned.

Edit: typo fix

View on HN

I think the strict moderation helps a lot here. Just as it does on some of the better subreddits and forums.

As for non-expertise; I have tried to explain several basic biostatistics concepts on here in relation to COVID threads. Generally this was because of an understandable fallacy or mistake being made. When the mistake was genuine the response to my comments is usually good. When there is an agenda the response is usual hostile or asinine. Anyway, it’s much nicer to argue with a bunch of people who value argument on HN than it is to try the same thing on r/news.

> It's naive to think that HN is necessarily better than an arbitrary Subreddit in terms of quality of conversations and depth of discussions, especially on non-tech related material.

HN is much better than an arbitrary subreddit in terms of quality of conversations. Dissenting opinions are very rarely censored on HN, but dissent on subreddits is typically quelled. Subreddits are mostly echo chambers for people who want to loudly agree with each other while arguing against strawmen.

Maybe it depends on the topic.

In the 3 years I've been reading HN I've observed a pretty steady increase in similarity to tech focused subreddits. Sometimes things are effectively "cross posted" on either site.

There's nothing stopping anyone on reddit from posting on HN and vice versa. I am a random example of someone who discovered reddit before HN, but was drawn to HN for what I also perceived to be better "quality of conversations".

> There's nothing stopping anyone on reddit from posting on HN and vice versa.

Yes there is. About 1/3 of my comments on Reddit have been censored for being against the "official truth" of the subreddit.

There was a point in time (10 to 15 years ago) in which HN was actually a good forum to check out, you could learn a lot from the discussions here.

But then it grew massively. Nowadays, it is no better than classic Facebook comments or r/technology on Reddit.

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