Comment by ddoolin

This sites commenters attempt to apply technical solutions to social problems, then pats itself on the back despite their comments being entirely inappropriate to the problem space.

There's also no actual constructive discussion when it comes to future looking tech. The Cybertruck, Vision Pro, LLMs are some of the most recent items that were absolutely inaccurately called by the most popular comments. And their reasoning for their prediction had no actual substance in their comments.

HackerNews isn't not exactly like reddit, sure, but it's not much better. People are much better behaved, but still spread a great deal of misinformation.

One way to gauge this property of a community is whether people who are known experts in a respective field participate in it, and unfortunately there are very few of them on HackerNews (this was not always the case). I've had some opportunities to meet with people who are experts, usually at conferences/industry events, and while many of them tend to be active on Twitter... they all say the same things about this site, namely that it's simply full of bad information and the amount of effort needed to dispel that information is significantly higher than the amount of effort needed to spread it.

Next time someone posts an article about a topic you are intimately familiar with, like top 1% subject matter expert in... review the comment section for it and you'll find just heaps of misconceptions, superficial knowledge, and my favorite are the contrarians who take these very strong opinions on a subject they have some passing knowledge about but talk about their contrarian opinion with such a high degree of confidence.

One issue is you may not actually be a subject matter expert on a topic that comes up a lot on HackerNews, so you won't recognize that this happens... but while people here are a lot more polite and the moderation policies do encourage good behavior... moderation policies don't do a lot to stop the spread of bad information from poorly informed people.

Do you have any sources to back up those claims?

Frankly, no. As an obvious example that can be stated nowadays: musk has always been an over-promising liar.

Eg just look at the 2012+ videos of thunderf00t.

Yet people were literally banned here just for pointing out that he hasn't actually delivered on anything in the capacity he promised until he did the salute.

It's pointless to list other examples, as this page is- as dingnuts pointed out - exactly the same and most people aren't actually willing to change their opinion based on arguments. They're set in their opinions and think everyone else is dumb.

While the tone on HN is much more civil than on Reddit. It's still quite the echo chamber.

I disagree. Reddit users are out to impress nobody but themselves, but the other day I saw someone submit a "Show HN" with AI-generated testimonials.

HN has an active grifter culture reinforced by the VC funding cycles. Reddit can only dream about lying as well as HN does.

its actually the reverse, dunning kruger is off the charts on hacker news