[debaserab2]

I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again.

I've witnessed this pattern in an array of subreddits spanning from hobbies to coding to gaming. Ultimately they become discussion forums for the lowest common denominator of skillsets.

[teach]

My wife gets this a lot with nutrition. She has a freaking PhD in Nutrition Science and also is a registered dietitian but god forbid she suggest that maybe bacon isn't the mostly healthy of foods in most subreddits.

[Muuuchem]

Well nutrition isn't exactly a settled science. There are many problems with studies and as a result we have a wide variety of sometimes contradictory conclusions from them. New conclusions and findings come out but the nutrition community is unable to achieve a consensus understanding on these types of aspects of a diet. There are too many confounding factors involved in studies and it is nearly impossible to design a study that will show the exact effects of eating bacon on the diet without other dietary considerations tainting the results. Like for instance lots of new studies are coming out recently claiming that our disdain for saturated fats is highly misguided. However, nutritionists cannot come to a consensus because old school people stick to what they learn in school without keeping up with studies, people distrust the new studies or argue in favor of the many contradictory studies, etc...

[teach]

Way to make my point for me.

The science is settled, but like everything else, untrained people can't tell the difference between a good study and a bad study, and the media reports on them all.

Check out the book _How Not to Diet_, which is the most recent masterwork on evidence-based nutrition.

[aggie]

> The science is settled

It doesn't take a domain expert to know this claim is fundamentally wrong. Science is never settled. There are conclusions that stand the test of time and accumulated evidence, but nutrition is a field with precious few of those.

[wolfv]

There is now enough evidence that there is a good amount of consensus among nutrition researchers:

https://wfpb-wolf.netlify.com/consensus.html

https://wfpb-wolf.netlify.com/scientific_studies.html

[basch]

I would not agree with those government diets, without some nuance sprinkled in. Calling all the government bodies published guidelines "scientific consensus" isnt the same thing as scientific consensus.

Vegetables - way too broad a category. Should be split into leaves, stalks, roots, starches, seeds, alliums, brassicaceae, legumes etc. Calling it all "vegetables" makes it hard for people to rank, prioritize, and proportion which are a better use of time, money, and energy to consume. There might be consensus on eating "vegetables" but not necessarily every group of them. Nutritional density is more complicated than "vegetables."

Whole grains - Antithesis to previous point, grains are not categorized as vegetables. Why are whole grains their own recommended category everywhere as a staple part of diets? Is it cost? Industry lobbying? Diet recommendation should focus on leaves and seeds, with cereals as a filler. Cereal portion should be the one controlled to control weight gain, moreso than plant fat from seeds/nuts. We've gotten too comfortable with a huge serving of rice or potatoes with something thrown on top.

Red meat - carcinogens appear to come from preparation methods (browning, curing) and can be mitigated by vegetable intake. https://examine.com/nutrition/does-red-meat-cause-cancer/

Fruit - mostly as not necessary to a healthy diet as this makes it look like. Can be avoided the same way meat is.

Fish (salmon & sardines) and Seafood (mussels) belongs in the consensus part over fruit.

Doesn't touch on fermented food.

The jury is more out on saturated fat and dietary cholesterol than these government bodies want to admit.

Its hard to reverse course quickly and say "everything we said for the last 30 years is wrong."

Almost none of the diet suggestions focus on digestion, absorption.

I just dont see consensus on what percent of a diet should be grain vs vegetable, starches, legumes, fats, meats. Maybe it doesnt matter. "WFPB is the healthiest diet" is very different from "WFPB is one of the healthiest diets."

[wolfv]

I should have said, "The consensus is that healthy diets contain mostly whole foods from plants."

[basch]

I get the gist of it, I just think whole grains and organ meat / ocean meat might be in the wrong categories.

Mostly plants is one of multiple ways to an optimal diet.

[ethbro]

> settled science

That seems like an odd turn of phrase.

[cookiengineer]

> I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again.

/r/programming in a nutshell.

[sli]

/r/programming is not an anomaly. My experience is that programming-related discussion boards everywhere are like this, almost from day one. The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong, to the point where even typos can cause a relentless dogpile and accusations that said person "has clearly never written real software in their life." You simply cannot make even one mistake, no matter how minor.

Consequently, I haven't discussed programming on an open forum in over a decade, because I've never found a single programming forum that wasn't openly toxic in this way.

[na85]

>The rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong

Frankly, that's my perception of HN, too. Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy, for example, and then prepare to fend off the throngs of people clamoring to be the first to tell you that email is hard (tm), and only fastmail can save us from Google's dragnet, oh also email is deprecated and we should just use signal or some other proprietary walled garden.

[shadowprofile77]

And the irony that your comment gets downvoted for pointing out that HN too suffers from a tribalist mentality about certain things (it does)... All these sharp minds don't like to be reminded of their own strange little obsessions and failings as human beings.

[cookiengineer]

> Try telling someone here that running your own email server is easy

Well, I guess there are different levels of expectations on what easy means. letsencrypt with dovecot and postfix is the definition of complex legacy, but in times where everything is spam that didn't come from domains with dmarc et all... there might be people that think of "what email server is" differently than you.

[noizejoy]

> rampant tribalism and insistence one groupthink is incredibly strong

Could that be, because so much of programming is a group activity (understanding, maintaining, and evolving other people’s code), and thus actually benefits (in an evolutionary sense) from simplistic group think more than from innovation and perfection?

[ethbro]

I'd chalk this one up to folks with enough time to endlessly post on Reddit not spending those hours building and maintaining software.

Professionals have time for the internet as a hobby. Hobbyists have time for the internet as a job.

[tomlu]

I have experienced this first hand. I wrote a novel multiplayer algorithm for a game that shipped on the consoles at the ,time and weighed into a conversation about lag on Battlefield. Downvotes everywhere...

[GFischer]

Maybe some subreddits, but on other subreddits you get actual top people - I´m in a couple of card game ones and I sometimes get answers from a top 50 player. You also get advice from not so good players too of course.

[marblar]

That seems like an unusual case because you have an external way to verify the expertise of a top 50 player. You don't have the same for a finance subreddit.

[NicoJuicy]

Yes they do. They require proof of payment

[code_duck]

I’ve seen this on medical subs. Doctors get downvoted and their posts disputed. This is often because members have had poor experiences with doctors and the doctors underestimate the level of sophistication of the patient members, and their own level of knowledge is not always what one would expect.

[travmatt]

I’d describe the drift towards anti-expertise in terms of size rather than time - I’ve found that the best subreddits are fairly small or have heavy moderation if they are large.

/r/askhistorians has kept up their quality through removing top line answers that are not properly cited, sometimes entire posts have nothing other than [deleted].

I think most smaller communities are still pretty valuable, maybe because they are too small or infrequently used to have their users coalesce around a single set of ideas. I think/r/asknetsec is still a pretty good resource even though it’s in the bigger end of small, I’m not sure how it’s kept it’s quality though.

[noizejoy]

> I’ve found that the best subreddits are fairly small or have heavy moderation if they are large.

Maybe that’s just reflecting how our species seems to work. The larger the group, the more it turns into a mob unless increasingly tightly structured.

[palebluedot]

My favorite example of this is that Popehat (Ken White) was banned from /r/legaladvice.

[lonelappde]

Just the opposite.

/r/legaladvice is heavily moderated to keep it clean and high quality.

Ken White was banned for deliberate persistent rule breaking and hijacking the sub to make it popehatLegalAdvice.

https://amp.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7xpggl/what_i...

[palebluedot]

I don't really see how that fails to fit the pattern of "I have found that subreddits almost become an anti-expertise forum over time - when actual experts show up to give advice, they are often downvoted if their advice goes against whatever that subreddit is cargo culting (which, as you mentioned, is often not great advice in the first place). Then the expert is discouraged from participating ever again."

While /r/legaladvice is heavily moderated, it is not particularly high quality.

[76543210]

I have a data heavy website, and posting links on most subreddits isn't okay.

So I could format my data for Reddit, or post a simple summary (which looks as authentic as any random poster), or I don't post at all.

I have the highest quality, low cost food Data, but can't post it. But hey Aldi astroturfs and gets away with it.