[lordnacho]

The main thing that he's right about is that it's a mess. There's so much noice and little authority.

When I was a kid in the 90s news and information was curated. If you read an opinion in the paper it was some guy who'd been writing for a long time, who'd done the background reading, and who normally presented things in a balanced way, whatever his leaning was. Nowadays you can find just about any extreme view, badly written in an aggressive or sarcastic tone, and ignorant of the history of the topic. It's not necessarily good to always have the sober and historically informed opinion, but it sure would be good to have it most of the time.

Not sure if he mentioned this, but it's also gotten a lot easier to find like minded uninformed people. I'm still undecided about whether flat earthers are all kidding, but if they aren't you can see how hard it's going to be to climb out of that intellectual hole. There's now conferences and loads of websites about the Bedford Level experiment, and all sorts of other flat earth tropes.

[mercer]

This has been on my mind quite often when I use reddit. I grew up on phpBB style forums where every user was immediately identifiable, through avatar, signature etc. And to a lesser degree I find myself developing a kind of 'image' of various HN posters.

On reddit this somehow doesn't happen. Every comment stands on its own and half the time what looks like a threaded conversation is various different users replying to each other.

I think something very important is lost there. Much as I'd like to believe so, I think the way my brain works is that no comment stands on its own and communication is heavily mediated by the knowledge and reputation of the other in relation to myself. Without that, so much that is valuable in the exchange of information, whether facts or opionion, or nuance, is lost.

[ianai]

You’re totally right. If it’s an argument then maybe one of the replies convinced the original poster. But some other person may reply to the most authoritative reply and claim superiority and falsehood of that posts authority. And there’s no way to correct it automatically. So all the smart comments wind up fighting the incorrect and an honest third party will likely have gained nothing.