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
Thats an interesting observation. Username based forums value the content, while Twitter (where your identity is public) values the individual and his/her expertise.

The issue with the former is that it relies on upvotes of people from the community. This leads to the problem of people upvoting comments on topics in which they lack expertise (ie developers upvoting comments about astronomy that "sound right")

This results in a trend (on HN and reddit) where the most upvoted comments are comments that "sound correct", but would not hold up against scrutiny of people who have expertise in that area. I like that HN censors the upvote count, so we are forced to judge the comment on its own merit.

>>pratik+mL2
I think the ideal system would be HN-style with ML informed analysis and user weighting.

E.g. if someone versed in cryptography upvotes or downvotes a cryptography story/comment, that counts for more than someone random

And I only care because the expertise gap is really the only flaw in HN/Reddit style ranking. In all other ways, it seems superior.