Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Hacker News? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you like/dislike about Hacker News?

5 pointshnveteran8819 comments

I like discovering new random things and occasionally having more in depth discussions than reddit tier shitposterie.

I don't like that it's just as much of a time hole as any social media and 99% of the content isn't actually relevant to my life, but I might read it anyway knowing full well I'm wasting time.

Yeah as much as people complain I still haven't found any site with as high quality discussion as here

Although some of the smaller subreddits on niche topics are pretty similar in quality if you find those

Pre-2010 forums almost all universally had as high quality of discussion.

Almost everything on topic and relevant, very little tech circle you know what's about random coding projects nobody will remember in a week, all jokes and casual conversation was original and not just "Sigh, unzips" reposted, limited influence from cringe culture, bodybuilding boards, Kiwifarms, etc in most places.

Everything going mobile, then endless scrolling, then disallowing signatures and making avatars and usernames microscopic changed everything.

Like: The interesting tools you find when people "show" their tool, and then everyone mentions a bunch of other similar tools in the comments.

Dislike: Down voting. Down voting just makes for an echo chamber (as someone else already mentioned.) It's a terrible, nasty, way of punishing people who's posts don't fit the popular cliques viewpoints. It should be replaced with either a mandatory "this is why I down voted" comment, or flags that everyone can see. Like "off topic", "insulting", "spam", or things like that. At the least, it should cost karma to down vote. Oh, and if you down vote, or flag, and it gets reversed, you should lose karma.

I like the level of thoughtful discourse, The sometimes-interesting sidetracks, and that the dopamine drip of upvotes is minimal.

I don't like downvotes (in part because it makes upvoting difficult on mobile), and would prefer a flag-for-review (to further tax the mods, I assume), but if the fade-out from downvotes helps reduce spam and low-quality responses, I can live with that.

I also don't like that there's a dopamine drip of upvotes at all, and find the number near my username distracting. This is the only social media platform I use, and most of the time I'd rather be reading a book but this is so easy to browse.

Posts like this are a helpful kick in the pants to go away and read a book.

Like: the lack of joke comments, I've noticed that lazy one-line puns/quips don't get much traction here

That's one of the main things I don't like about reddit

Dislike: There will be a long in-depth article about a topic and then the discussion thread with the most comments will be about something totally irrelevant to the article, like the font/formatting of the article/website

Edit: huh apparently this has a name, TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

I don't see those petty discussion often, but they do exist. Most of the time, it is an interesting discussion on a unique perspective, or sometimes cutting through the "noise" of an article.

Way too much parroting of corporate propaganda. I miss the days when HN was more anti GAFAM/BigTech and did not help them with their propaganda but was more critical and more pro free and open technology and promoting that.

Echo chamber factor is off the charts. Sometimes it feels like I'm talking to the same person here every day.

I think that's the downside of upvote/downvotes

It filters out a lot of low quality content but then it converges to the average opinion of the users

Same on reddit

There's only about 500 "real" people on the Internet at any given time. that's why you keep running into them.

Everybody trades off, so you never know when you're one of the real ones.

I don't think it is possible to find a perfectly balanced internet discussion area, thus, echo chambers are unavoidable. With that in mind, I see more civil discourse here than ANYWHERE on the internet. Very rare.

All the finest dissenting comments are in flag-induced oblivion. Turn showdead on and get vouching. It's nuggets of gold in a river of shit though.

I have showdead turned on. I see Evon Latrail and a slew of throwaway accounts. I've never seen a nugget.

Not being able to down vote until you reach 500 karma!

Like: the mix of tech topics mentioned. I'm interested in a lot of things, computer science, foundations of math, space exploration, paleontology. Best site for a mix of tech and science.

HN loads fast and has next to no ads.

Dislikes: sometimes overwhelming pedantry, and recurrent culture war garbage masquerading as Libertarianism.

Inability to delete your account.

dislike karma: its a kids game, its not appropriate here

Want to prohibit links to sites with paywalls.

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