| 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. |
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.