zlacker

>>bluu00+(OP)
This place is amazing, and I learned so much about a variety of topics. Most of my MD colleagues use Twitter or Facebook, where the signal-to-noise is much, much lower. I assume there have been plenty of spin-offs from HN (I would LOVE to have a similar forum for discussing medical issues; Can I fork the codebase somehow?), but I do think the secret sauce is moderation.

Also, politically, I'm "an enlightened centrist" lol and nearly all of the political spectrum here is represented well IMO, and even personal attacks/strawman arguments are not immediately banned but first discouraged.

Thanks dang!

>>throwa+rz
Twitter can have a very high signal-to-noise ratio if you follow the right people.

>>saagar+pF
I followed a lot of economists (ie Robert Reich, Krugman, etc) thinking they would post interesting economics related content. They do, but it turns out that they are ordinary humans who like posting the same tweets (and rants) that I would post.

I don't think Twitter can have the same signal to noise ratio as a well moderated forum like HN, even if you follow the "right" people, because the format of the site incentivizes a different style of discussion.

>>pratik+Vf1
HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person)

Twitter seems to value the individual, but devalue the content. (E.g. low quality posts by a famous person)

The former is more meritorious, inasmuch as the vote base can accurately judge a comment. The latter is more consistent, in that popular people stay popular (and admittedly, are popular for a reason).

Personally, I prefer the HN-style model, but I also believe it only works as long as the ratio of HN-encultured users to bad / average actors stays above a certain threshold. From a technical and vote system perspective, HN isn't that different than Reddit: what makes it HN is the culture and community.

>>ethbr0+7m1
> HN tends to devalue the individual, and value the content. (E.g. high quality comment by a not famous person)

And yet its measure of quality is karma scores for the individual, not the content.

>>krapp+au1
Karma scores are not front-and-center, though. Years ago, they switched to hide the score of an individual piece of content (such that an unvoted content is visually the same as one that has 100 upvotes [it might be sorted differently, but otherwise is indistinguishable]). To my mind, that was one of the better changes to the quality of community moderation.

>>sokolo+SC1
Agreed. And HN has something I associate with it specifically: the back-and-forth argument, maintaining consistency in positions and reasoning, looking like two people taking. But, upon inspection, many people are involved. That, I think, is an example of the de-emphasis on identity.