Comment by OJFord

5 years ago

> Hacker News and r/Programming is only good to get general ideas and keep up-to-date, the comments are almost worthless

That's a weird one. I don't know anything about that subreddit, but HN comments are frequently great. I submit stuff because I want there to be HN comments on it for me to read. I typically read the comments first and only bother opening the link if they were interesting.

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OJFord

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bombcar  5 years ago

See: https://danluu.com/hn-comments/

>HN comments are terrible. On any topic I’m informed about, the vast majority of comments are pretty clearly wrong. ...

>And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical commentary. On topics I'm familiar with, while it's rare that a thread will have even a single comment that's well-informed, when those comments appear, they usually float to the top. On other forums, well-informed comments are either non-existent or get buried by reasonable sounding but totally wrong comments when they appear, and they appear even more rarely than on HN.

  • ksec  5 years ago

    Pretty much this. HN is still gazillion times better than everything else on the internet. And that is excluding the absolute gold comment from members that were part of those battle stories.

    It is also a reason why I dont want to mention or see HN links in mainstream media. Although I think most reporters sort of know this as well and tend to not mention or link to HN as source.

    • MillenialMan  5 years ago

      My experience of Hacker News comments is not positive. They tend to be very convincing but actually kinda bullshit (or just vacuous), which is arguably a lot worse than communities that are transparent.

      4 replies →

seoaeu  5 years ago

Obviously HN commenters like us are going to think that. Honestly, I bet even YouTube commenters would say the same about their own community.

  • runeks  5 years ago

    That’s not obvious to me at all. I comment on both YouTube and HN, and I don’t feel I’m part of any “community”. I just think the quality of the average, highly upvoted HN comment is about 100 times greater than the equivalent YouTube comment.

whateveracct  5 years ago

I frequently bookmark both an article + its HN thread when the comments are full of related opinions, info, and links.