Hacker News Reader

Comment by rfnslyr | Hacker News Reader

That's not the point.

> Why not? I get a ton of useful content from reddit, and find that the discussions in the comments are often enlightening.

How are you going to determine whether a comment is bullshit or not, especially on something super niche like some very specific question in r/Askhistorians?

You can't for the most part. I do agree you can find good content, but by design Reddit is flawed. The upvote system combined with anonymity is enough reason to be skeptical about everything you read.

How could I possibly be in a position to judge the truth of a post on a topic that I know nothing about? That's the problem.

View on HN

What's not the point? I think you seriously underestimate the quality of participants on reddit. As an example, across just two subreddits I can bump up against Andrei Alexandrescu, Martin Odersky, Walter Bright, the STL maintainer at Microsoft, and many other great programmers who are working on the languages and libraries that I might use. Also, often videos from a conference talk will be posted by the author, who will then respond to questions in the comments. Where else do I get this sort of interaction? If there is somewhere else, I'm certainly missing out on it.

Just the other day, a pointer to Knuth's Annual Christmas Tree Lecture [0] was shared. I wouldn't have found it as soon otherwise.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW3vgJYYIok

Nobody is going to pop into r/programming thinking they're a know it all and then somehow getting to the top by just making bullshit up about very complicated and technical topics. They will get shut down very quickly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6938377

> How are you going to determine whether a comment is bullshit or not, especially on something super niche like some very specific question in r/Askhistorians?

Boy, that sounds awfully familiar... like a very recent Bestof comment, originally posted in AskHistorians, about why reddit comments aren't useful sources for anything. Sounds like you're still reading the comments, despite your low opinion.

I don't follow r/Askhistorians but is it really the case that factually incorrect comments are heavily upvoted with no dissenting one in sight ? I am not suggesting it's rare but I would like to see some examples as in subreddits I follow it's rarely the case (at least on things I am able judge myself).

I don't know about /r/Askhistorians, but I saw it happen all the time in other subreddits, when I still visited reddit.

The best is pointing out that something is wrong and getting voted down for it.

All the time, especially on any topic that is technical or requires actual knowledge.

It's either the comment is misinformed, upvoted by other people who are also misinformed, or it is just scraping the bottom of the barrel for that topic.

Askhistorians have the policy that you have to be able to provide sources if requested.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com