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Comment by dwa3592 | Hacker News Reader

I liked the article and I also sympathize with a lot of the concerns around this topic because I am from the group that became silent after a while. Popular social media does not have any appetite for nuance. By design it cannot have that. Community checks are alright but I would rather spend an hour on hacker news trying to understand the nuanced perspective of 40 people than looking at very diluted opinion (4 choices) of 40000 people on twitter.

Also someone once told me - "To get your voice heard in a loud room, you either need to be very tall or extremely loud." Tall in this context are rich and influential people. Basically money and influence buys you height in a loud room

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I re-realized this about a week ago when the "red button vs blue button" debate started appearing a lot on Reddit and Instagram. It's frustrating when every comment is just a shallow knee-jerk reaction from one side re-iterating their perspective or clowning on the other.

The whole debate could be summarized in a paragraph or two, but the social media environment is unfortunately curated towards diluted opinions (as you said) instead of nuanced ones.

All that to say I'm happy HN is still holding strong in terms of quality as compared to other platforms.

Hacker news is not a representative subset of humanity. So you are restricting your range of understanding. Maybe that's necessary for mental health, (it is for me) but the tradeoff isn't great either.

No reliably reachable subset is representative of humanity.

But I also want to argue against the range of understanding argument. Attention has a limit. Anyone who wants develop a deep understanding for any topic would do themselves a disfavor by trying to expand their range aimlessly.

We can't all know everything all at once, so we should just develop some common sense for the most important topics instead. Like "people generally good and against violence". We used to have that once, we can rebuild it now.

> Tall in this context are rich and influential people

This is a double edged sword. Lots of "thought leaders" on twitter have outed themselves as lacking in both thought, and leadership.

Most of them only got to that position from being loud in the first place, so I'd think you could still put them in the latter category.

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