[freddie_mercury]

HN is as much of an echo chamber as any other internet forum. 90% of the time you can predict in advance what the top-voted comment is going to be. Most of the time it will be some pointless quibbling about how the subject line technically isn't correct somehow. The rest of the time it'll be about one of the three or four hobby horses of HN. "I don't use social media", "WFH has no flaws", "whiteboard interviews are worse than waterboarding", etc.

[waihtis]

Any community will have an echo chamber, that's part of the basic human fabric. It's still a great forum (and you probably think so also.)

[Erlich_Bachman]

Exactly, while it is also an echo chamber, I would argue it is one of the better ones. It selects information to echo in a much more effective and useful way than many other platforms. This is why we are here. Not because we assume that it would be somehow 100% objective place where everything is true. Is that even possible? If you have to select, from the tons of info out there, a list of something that can be parsed by a human in reasonable time, you will automatically filter out, and thus create a subjective view of reality.

[blaser-waffle]

Aye. Generally speaking, the filtering here is better, and the groupthink is operating at a different level than the broader population. It's groupthink nonetheless, but if you anticipate that you can usually find good info.

Plus the tone & tenor of the discussions is usually better, e.g. full sentences, (mostly) coherent posts, etc. Not like on Reddit where the top post on something that makes the front page is literally just "bruh".

[freddie_mercury]

> It's still a great forum (and you probably think so also.)

I think is generally good. I wouldn't call it "great". I can only assume that people who think it is great only ever care about tech (where HN is a good tech site) and politics (where every politics discussion on the internet is terrible). Every other interest I have has a forum that is better than HN. HN suffers somewhat from its demographic monoculture and seems to have way more opinionated arm-chair quarterbacks than other forums I'm in. I assume that many other "career-related" forums have similar issues, though. I can imagine lawyer forum probably has lots of lawyers who have never practiced Constitutional law but giving strong opinions on it on a daily basis.