[greggraham]

So all that has happened is that the Internet has allowed schoolgirl gossip and yelling in bars to be broadcast on an international scope and compete with professional journalism and scientific discourse. I suppose that cannot be helped with the democratization of the media. Still, if the common man is going to have that kind of power, should we not urge everyone to use it responsibly, and to try to raise the level of discussion, especially in what is supposed to be a professional context such as software development. Of course, that is what Hacker News is attempting to do; I'm hoping it will work.

[kragen]

The way I see it is that the internet has allowed professional journalism and scientific discourse to compete with schoolgirl gossip and yelling in bars.

One problem, though, is that the needs of these forms of communication aren't really the same. In a low-latency medium, for example, it's difficult to avoid strong structural biases toward both recency and immediate responses; these are both corrosive to the quality of the discourse. (I think these structural biases mostly account for the very low quality of professional journalism, but they are even stronger on e.g. reddit or HN.

pg and I have written some things about this:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January... http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html (under "Fluff Principle" and "Comments")