I agree that HN has such a large userbase whilst not splintering it off in a way that division forms in sites like Reddit / Twitter is really unique.
And it's a site where excellent discourse can be had because there's an expectation of spending time to explain your point of view or back it up.
How things like dumb joke replies get downvoted is a testament to how the community wants to keep the quality up.
Personally, it's because the site is so good, that when discussion quality drops it's more noticeable.
Like in this case, I was remarking on how knee jerk the comments were that they are like predicable cliches.
But also a lot of the ideas expressed with vitriol are the majority opinion.
In the same vein. Anything that Lennart Poettering has developed seems to get the same treatment where people often respond with snark/vitriol by default no matter the reason systemd/pulseaudio or something else has hit the news.
Also a few weeks ago there was a post something to do with online game services. And a developer at a large publisher commented about how the cost of hosting servers is done on a per user basis. And they ended up replying to someone with "I've been in the industry for 6 years, I know you hate me" at the top of their response.
That kind of thing seems par for the course on Reddit / Twitter, but I guess because of the high quality of the forum, I feel sometimes that for other topics the discourse can be better.
I agree that HN has such a large userbase whilst not splintering it off in a way that division forms in sites like Reddit / Twitter is really unique.
And it's a site where excellent discourse can be had because there's an expectation of spending time to explain your point of view or back it up.
How things like dumb joke replies get downvoted is a testament to how the community wants to keep the quality up.
Personally, it's because the site is so good, that when discussion quality drops it's more noticeable.
Like in this case, I was remarking on how knee jerk the comments were that they are like predicable cliches.
But also a lot of the ideas expressed with vitriol are the majority opinion.
In the same vein. Anything that Lennart Poettering has developed seems to get the same treatment where people often respond with snark/vitriol by default no matter the reason systemd/pulseaudio or something else has hit the news.
Also a few weeks ago there was a post something to do with online game services. And a developer at a large publisher commented about how the cost of hosting servers is done on a per user basis. And they ended up replying to someone with "I've been in the industry for 6 years, I know you hate me" at the top of their response.
That kind of thing seems par for the course on Reddit / Twitter, but I guess because of the high quality of the forum, I feel sometimes that for other topics the discourse can be better.