Totally agree that HN checks a lot of the same boxes, but there are some significant differences.
1. Advertising. (Or lack thereof)
2. Moderation. Downvotes here literally slowly erase content that the community doesn’t like; I think this compliments the swift hand of dang in a great way.
3. Participation. This is just a WAG, but i think more HN users post comments or submit
stories than Twitter users tweet. There is a very low percentage of users posting the vast majority of tweets. I like HN because I can actually interact, not just follow.
We really had realized most of the promise of online socializing with forums 20 years ago, IMO. Twitter is exhausting.
> Downvotes here literally slowly erase content that the community doesn’t like;
Most of the time downvotes are used to erase abusive content, but it's shocking how quickly some of the well-formed opinions in the content sections go gray if they don't agree with the popular opinion on HN.
At this point, I almost don't bother replying to HN comments if I know they'll just be met with waves of lazy downvotes.
The invisible hand of HN creates an echo chamber by teaching us not to post "content that the community doesn't like", which is often just comments that disagree with popular sentiment.
In fact it has the opposite algorithm, someone more knowledgeable might know how it works, has something to do with the ratio of downvotes to comments if I remember correctly.
1. Advertising. (Or lack thereof)
2. Moderation. Downvotes here literally slowly erase content that the community doesn’t like; I think this compliments the swift hand of dang in a great way.
3. Participation. This is just a WAG, but i think more HN users post comments or submit stories than Twitter users tweet. There is a very low percentage of users posting the vast majority of tweets. I like HN because I can actually interact, not just follow.
We really had realized most of the promise of online socializing with forums 20 years ago, IMO. Twitter is exhausting.