HN is great because of the strict moderation. If there are any good subreddits left, it's because they're well moderated. Some of it is cultural and demographic, but I think moderation is really the key missing piece in all of these conversations about "why does the internet suck now?"
Want to build a better Twitter alternative? Train the moderation AI: No memes, no reposts, no shitposts.
Honest question: which people? HN is too US/California/Bay Area centric for my tastes (most people here are probably from there), it talks a bit too much about money and jobs, but it's still a decent resource.
I was wrong about the name. It's "the angry orange website". https://twitter.com/search?q="angry%20orange%20website" - that's just a sample of HN's 'haters'. HN has its share of people who are awful and post horrible opinions (see the discussion about any article on JavaScript, health care, wealth, etc). I believe HN has some value left which is why I still post here, but I can absolutely see why people have abandoned it, and I certainly don't talk about HN with people in real life.
It's a popular sport in a few Twitter circles to highlight the worst things that appear on HN. The best fish are the ones you pull out of the (orange) water when they are freshly posted—i.e. when there hasn't been enough time yet for the community to downvote or flag them, or for moderators to intervene. The worst comments end up flagged and moderated (which is why the Twitterers tend to post screenshots without links, since by the time most readers click on a link, it will take them to something that says [flagged], or has a moderator reply saying we ban people who post like this—not much sport in that). The rest mostly end up with highly-upvoted refutations. So these things aren't representative of the community, but they do show up.
These are all consequences of HN's fundamental structure. It's a public, optionally-anonymous forum, so we can't control what gets posted. All we or the community can do is react after it has been posted. That takes time. Even if we ban someone, they can just create a new account in 30 seconds, and plenty do.
Most importantly, HN doesn't have silos, where users follow what they like and block what they dislike. Rather, everybody sees the same material. That means every one of us is more likely to notice stuff that we dislike. This leads to negative impressions, often painfully strong ones. The odd thing is, fundamentally, a non-siloed site is arguably objectively healthier: at least we are all in the same room. But it doesn't feel that way. It can be extremely painful to be in the same room with people saying horrible things one doesn't normally come near. In fact, I wonder whether for some users there may actually be no place other than HN where that regularly happens. Inevitably, the negative impressions get attached to HN itself, since none of these dynamics are at all obvious. That explains why people have such contradictory views of HN—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927454 in this very thread. They are drawing conclusions from different sets of painful impressions.
I'd love to find new ways to mitigate these downsides. We've worked on that for years already, yet I feel like the most we've managed to do is scratch a couple of crude gouges into a boulder. But let's remember that HN's structure has upside consequences too. There's no barrier to entry, so literally anyone can jump in. Wonderful things come from that. The absence of silos means people are talking and relating to people they would not otherwise come into contact with. These are precious things which are easy to forget amid the pressure we all feel. The upsides and downsides come from the same root: deep tradeoffs in the original choices of how to set up a place like this. As it grows and as the energy becomes more intense, the tradeoffs show up in ways that are increasingly difficult to bridge.
HN has a pretty cynical viewpoint on everything. A comment doesn't really feel like a contribution when you're writing it unless you disagree with the parent (like so).
People will find all sorts of reasons to think the article is wrong based on "mid-brow dismissal" or will say any public figure or company is lying about any statement they make.
HN moderators discourage humour. Contrast with Slashdot that encouraged it via the moderation system. If everyone has to sound serious all the time, you get a lot of angry sounding posts.
The low quality of Reddit-think slips into the workplace all the time. If it isn't a debate about semantics (the lowest form of argument, "well this word also means..." Etc) it's a debate about the second lowest form (the form/framing of an argument, "that's a reductionist argument..." Etc), and when I challenge said co-workers on this ("what kind of reductionism? So what if it's reductionist? Don't assume I believe in Kant's first formulation of the categorical imperative which you use" etc) I get silence as a response because this kind of archetype persona also cannot admit when they are wrong, or want to keep using these techniques as a self-defense mechanism and substitute for their own thought. And they'd rather not continue to have a good faith argument with me at a higher level, because I can get rough around the edges when people pull this nonsense on me.
I find it incredibly frustrating. It's a lot of energy spent on my part and I get no actual debate. No matter how civil I try to be about the whole thing.
It's actually quite simple: do you take something I said and try to extend it to an absurd use case, to show how such a viewpoint cannot be true? This is that universality formulation in action.
Quick example: I said not vaccinating is risking death, and someone else said I shouldn't drive because that risk of death is higher. That's all it takes!
