[kls]

It's also a great deal friendlier place than this one

My experience has been the the opposite, I stopped contributing to user forum based sites after I left /. and did not do so for a long time. I read HN for a while before deciding that it was home, and it was, because in my perception, there was a lot less "I'm the smartest guy in the room" conversations. Take that with a grain of salt though, because it has been a long long time since I have been over there. Things almost assuredly have changed since then. Has anyone else had the same positive impression of the exchanges over there? Most the posts I see on the subject tend to complain that there is still a lot of it going on.

[vidarh]

Hackernews is a lot less tolerant of digressions, jokes etc. It ends up being a much more "serious" place, for both good and bad.

[Kuiper]

HN seems to have a different set of values. While there's less tolerance for jokes and culture references for the sake of culture references, HN tends to house a lot of intellectually frank discussion that a lot of other sites discourage.

A good example is this post from several weeks ago on the subject of denying blood donations from donors with a history of male-to-male sexual contact: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3237895 It's very fact-centric, to the exclusion of any sort of pandering or apology. When I read this post several weeks ago, I immediately thought, "this would never fly on reddit; people would quickly downvote it for being 'insensitive' or similar."

This also reminded me of PG's essay "Persuade xor Discover." http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html HN users seem to care less about "persuasion," which can lead to perceptions of "unfriendliness" because things aren't written to please people. However, it does lead to a lot of interesting discussion that couldn't take place on a site more concerned with being "nice."

[mixmastamyk]

There's probably more bravado but I tend not to notice it, in the sense that the brain tunes out noise. However, I find that different from the active downvoting of (what in real-life would be considered) the niceties of conversation.

E.g. I don't think I've ever been downvoted on slashdot but if I did it would be for spam or hate, not a "thanks."

[kls]

OK I get you, I guess it is all in personal comforts, I personally don't suffer tech bravado well, I have run across that arch-type in real life too may times and it has always made (for me) getting good ideas done difficult to impossible. To the extent that when confronted with it, too many times, I will disengage, whether it be a site or a project/job/activity. I have come to understand that it is born out of stubborn ignorance and that it cannot be, or I do not have the capacity to, navigate around it, I therefore choose to not engage it.

On the flip side I can see where legitimate comments getting down-voted could be taken as rude, the ones I hate to see are new people asking legitimate questions and then getting dog-pilled into oblivion, but it is the nature of the site. I do wish there where less of the i don't agree, or my comfort does not like what you say down-votes but for me it is preferable to the "i'm always right" personality. I never really thought about viewing down-votes as rude, save for the occasions where it is evident that it is a group think dog-pile.

[corford]

I still spend time on there (especially when I've overdosed on HN startup scene stories) and have had an account since 2000ish. Providing you filter no lower than level 4, I find it's still as good as it has ever been.