That thread isn't particularly dumb. It's a completely normal level of dumbness for a reddit thread. You just happened to be able to smell the bullshit because you approached the topic in question with a critical eye.
They’re just nitpicking the unimportant bits while unwittingly(?) agreeing with the important bits (and adding some silliness of his own). But somehow that sort of smug contrarianism attracts this sort of self-congratulatory back rub about how “we” on hackernews are so much more enlightened than the blue forum’s masses…thus fulfilling the “normal level of dumbness” for an Orange Subreddit thread.
I never said it's any better here. All these "cram a bunch of disparate interest in one place" platforms are crap when it comes to discussion quality as far as I'm concerned. You want good discussion on a topic you gotta go where only the people who do that topic are and everyone else isn't.
I'm not nitpicking the unimportant bits. Half the thread is telling people why they're fucked (No really. You are. You're fucked.), and then using incorrect statistics and a long anecdote to back up their claim.
I am not making any claims on the dumbness on either platform, though.
