Also, interesting comment I found on HackerNews (HN):
This post was definitely demoted by HN. It stayed in the first position for less than 5 minutes and, as it quickly gathered upvotes, it jumped straight into 24th and quickly fell off the first page as it got 200 or so more points in less than an hour.
I’m 80% confident HN tried to hide this link. It’s the fastest downhill I’ve noticed on here, and I’ve been lurking and commenting for longer than 10 years.
It’s incredibly selective about which topics it’s good for. Want insight into advanced mathematics or new programming languages and people there have amazing insight. But they bring the same level of confidence to the discussion when talking about topics they’ve no idea about.
That just sounds like the Internet in a nutshell for various topics.
Generally, I’ve found the discussion quality across these sites to be something like this:
HN > Lemmy > Reddit > 4chan
But yes, I have seen examples of incorrect confidence and bad-faith arguments on all of them. I don’t think it can be escaped in a public forum of humans. :)
It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.
(I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)
It’s never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today’s problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.
At least someone else gets it.
A very interesting description. I only occasionally read HN via links from other sources, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a lot of truth to your characterization.
I’d suggest they’re just as wrong about programming languages and maths as any other topic.