Although Drew's points don't seem actually wrong to me, I would say that a far bigger problem for HN is the way in which the discourse is dominated by excessively confident and passively authoritative comments that are actually somewhere between "not really correct" and "not even wrong".
Reading HN comment threads about things I know little about always feels like a delight: all these smart people who know so much about this topic, contributing their thoughts.
Reading HN comment threads about things I know a lot about nearly always feels horrific, straight torrents of incorrect information and ignorant speculation. Occasionally not, but not typically or even often.
Yes—but a confounding factor is that someone who knows a lot about X usually also has strong feelings about X. This makes it hard to tell what part of one's reaction is to wrongness/ignorance vs. having one's feelings offended.
To mention some (hopefully safe) examples, I know things about certain programming languages, and smoke comes out my ears when someone who appears ignorant to me comments about how APL or K programs are "unreadable", or that Lisp macros lead to code no one else can understand.
The level of outrage in my inner self isn't a measure of anything particularly interesting, though.
Reading incorrect comments might (or might not) make smoke come out of my ears, but the salient point is that they are (likely) incorrect.
When I read about things I know little about, my tendency, given the passive authoritativeness of a lot of HN commenters (myself included), is to believe that the comments are correct.
Logic would suggest that this is a mistake, but I find myself unable to switch to a mode of default disbelief.
PaulDavisThe1st · · focus · HN ↗
Reading HN comment threads about things I know little about always feels like a delight: all these smart people who know so much about this topic, contributing their thoughts.
Reading HN comment threads about things I know a lot about nearly always feels horrific, straight torrents of incorrect information and ignorant speculation. Occasionally not, but not typically or even often.
dang · · focus · HN ↗
To mention some (hopefully safe) examples, I know things about certain programming languages, and smoke comes out my ears when someone who appears ignorant to me comments about how APL or K programs are "unreadable", or that Lisp macros lead to code no one else can understand.
PaulDavisThe1st · · focus · HN ↗
Reading incorrect comments might (or might not) make smoke come out of my ears, but the salient point is that they are (likely) incorrect.
When I read about things I know little about, my tendency, given the passive authoritativeness of a lot of HN commenters (myself included), is to believe that the comments are correct.
Logic would suggest that this is a mistake, but I find myself unable to switch to a mode of default disbelief.