Comment by klabb3
3 years ago
I love that HN is content-oriented. It's not the only criteria, Reddit is also content oriented, and it certainly has its flaws, but given its size and spread, I think it's still doing remarkably well.
However, people-oriented media are unbearable for me. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.. All are full of people who want to build a reputation, and even though everything about them are different superficially, they all feel very similar.
I agree, relatedly it's also nice to have a place where physical attractiveness doesn't get outsized attention. You'd think it'd be a commodity online at this point, but it's interesting to me it seems to never lose value.
On one extreme there's Instagram where that's the main currency, but even on Twitter (which is supposedly about what you write), where you just have the one profile photo/maybe occasional other pictures, you can see it draw disproportionate attention and skew content. Naturally Twitter then inserts these accounts that draw lots of engagement into the feeds of everyone else so they're not possible to easily avoid.
My experience with Facebook and Twitter, at least, is radically different. But then I don't follow many 'influencer' types on either.