zlacker

I think it's all our own fault if we ever expected expert political philosophy or scientific debate from a group of people who mostly just, at the end of the day, program websites and phone apps.

A high percentage of IT, software engineering, and professional advice on HN is very valuable, but the percentage of other kinds of commentary that's valuable is much lower. I occasionally also get sucked into the sorts of debates that I just shat on, but most of the time I find myself having to scroll past huge chunks of comment sections because half the sub-threads are pedantic political debates over some term or whatever, nested 10+ levels deep.

>>meowfa+(OP)
To save you some scrolling: if you click the little [-] the thread will collapse. I've campaigned to make the default an all-collapsed page but it did not get much support.

>>meowfa+(OP)
You can have a good discussion with it being an expert discussion. Hacker News largely has neither. It really appeals to people who like, or at least can stand, the noise. As the articles says it is its own thing, but it isn't unique as phenomenon. There are many parallels to other forms of consumption, like that of sports or reality television where people create their own reality.

>>jacque+D1
Arguably, by putting the comments on a separate page they already are collapsed by default. Going to the comments page signifies that one wants to view the comments. Why do you think a further level of collapsing would be beneficial? Would you expand things once they are upvoted, or always require an additional click to view the deeper levels?

>>jacque+D1
Just tried:

[].slice.call( document.querySelectorAll( '.togg' ) ).forEach( x => x.click() )

It's really slow. Takes 5-10 seconds for 100 comments. Maybe I just need one of these new AMD processors.

>>nkurz+A4
I wouldn’t mind seeing sub threads collapsed by default. (Of course I could always do that myself.) It would make for a cleaner page. I could scan the top level comments for interest subtopics/responses, and it would discourage thread-jacking.

>>meowfa+(OP)
> It's all our own fault if we ever expected expert political philosophy or scientific debate from a group of people who mostly just program websites and phone apps.

To be fair, we can expect some diversity among several millions of readers from many different countries, points of view and experience in different fields.

>>pvalde+8b
Yes, but the actual experts usually get drowned out pretty quickly.

If HN had some concept of subreddits, even if it were just a few them, the situation might be different. There are quite a few high-quality subreddits out there with a lot of experts. (I don't know if creating "sub-HNs" is a good idea in general; probably not.)