[nickthemagicman]

"HN comments are horrible."

Proceeds to list pages of awesome comments.

Claims topics he's informed about have mostly wrong comments.

Doesn't give any examples.

HN comments are a conversation/discussion not a contest of who is right/wrong, and it's great to have differing viewpoints as long as those views don't degrade into logical fallacies like ad hominem, ,anecdotal, or others.

There are way less logical fallacies on HN than other sites which is what I love about it.

I think some people just want an echo chamber.

[beej71]

I think there's a blend of good and bad.

If you ever see a HN front page story where you have inside information about some event, you can rest assured there will be maddening amounts of completely wrong speculation written as if it were gospel by people with no connection to that event. And then people attack the strawmen with abandon.

And for professional reasons, you grit your teeth, keep your mouth shut, and let it all slide. I'm not in PR.

"Someone is wrong on the Internet": https://xkcd.com/386/

I agree that HN is better than a _lot_ of places. But it's not all wine and roses.

[nickthemagicman]

I guess I've never had inside information to see this firsthand.

Or maybe my internet spidey sense is so attuned that I've learned to subconsciously tune out B.S.

So I've never really seen that type of thing happening.

Does anyone really believe unverified information people post on the internet ?

[the_af]

I don't think that is a fair reading of danluu's post. It is titled "the good parts", after all. And did you read the closing paragraphs?

> "[...] Having flamebait drop off the front page quickly is significant, but it doesn’t seem sufficient to explain why there are so many more well-informed comments on HN than on other forums with roughly similar traffic."

> "Maybe the answer is that people come to HN for the same reason people come to Silicon Valley -- despite all the downsides, there’s a relatively large concentration of experts there across a wide variety of CS-related disciplines. If that’s true, and it’s a combination of path dependence on network effects, that’s pretty depressing since that’s not replicable."

So he does consider HN successful, he is merely pointing out that the gems are infrequent (though more frequent than on, say, Reddit), and that most comments are uninformed or wrong.

If you read anything from danluu's site, you'll see he is not really an "echo chamber" kind of guy.

PS: I've seen plenty of illogical, flat-out wrong and anecdotical comments on HN to know they are the norm rather than the exception. This doesn't preclude the existence of real gems, like danluu points out.

[nickthemagicman]

It's a sensational opening that he spends the entire rest of the article contradicting.

HN comments are horrible...except here's a thousand line blog about why they're not horrible.

Judging by the content of the entire rest of the post...a better opener should have been "Hacker news comments are mostly awesome and here's a thousand line blog post about it.... but they're not all perfect".

What a bizzare article.