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by mheathr 4687 days ago
Yeah, aside from when /r/haskell gets relatively flooded by people who do not normally frequent the subreddit it is of exceptional quality and an example of a well-run community with one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the Internet.

Haskell having a high barrier to entry likely helps that along a great deal though.

Compare the quality in commentary on nontrivial subjects between /r/programming and /r/haskell for instance.

There will be an enormous amount of disinformation in the former, a state that is incredibly confusing for someone that lacks familiarity in the specific domain as discerning noise will not be easy.

On the other hand, /r/haskell largely in part does not comment as though they were an authority when they are not sufficiently competent to comment on a subject, so the signal remains high.

The subbreddit is fairly active given the niche current user base, and it is big enough that there are a decent amount of domain experts that comment.

The subreddit is also very polite.

I do not recall ever seeing a flame war break out there, which is notable compared to how often any discussion on the topic will break down into inanity, something which even occasionally happens here (such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6190005 from a couple of days ago).

1 comments

> Haskell having a high barrier to entry likely helps that along a great deal though.

> The subreddit is also very polite.

Yes, it is very refreshing: it is a complex language, but the community has not become elitist, and is instead polite, considerate and mature.

Haskell devs need to be polite and considerate, otherwise GHC slaps them during the next 'cabal build' run with some hairy type errors. You really don't want that to happen twice.

(Just kidding, I love GHC and its precise & helpful error messages. No sarcasm implied.)