You can find any number of comments on Reddit but also on Slashdot (at least up to 2015 or so) whose quality is higher than many comments here.
They are drowned in the noise, but on Reddit it is very easy to read past the noise.
Here the noise is usually someone trying to sell you something while pretending to be innocent or defending his employer while pretending to be innocent.
Much harder to read past that, also since the moderation claims it never happens.
If you look at some of the other comments on this thread, plus some reddit links, it seems like it's less about being a customer and more about wild inconsistency and unfairness:
Oh my, are the comments terrible. It's like folks are posting nonsense, just to prove John Gruber right. :P
There's some weird synergies between this and the conversations about comment quality kicked up by Engadget temporary shutting down their comment system.
large foreign readership , so English is not a primary language. probably also a lot of spam comments that get through.
Those other sides also tend to have a fair share of low quality comments as well. A lot of troll bait or off topic stuff. I just don't read the comments, often I find that I am not missing out on much by not doing so.
The quality of Reddit comments has never been particularly high. Sure there are quality posts, but like other social media most posts are essentially spam and those that aren’t inaccurate/hyperbolic or just memes.
You’re definitely on to something here. The comments are half the value. There’s usually someone wanting to know why a given option was excluded or why a conclusion was reached by Wirecutter staff.
From my perspective the conversation here is generally awful. It’s the same tired faux genius rhetoric over and over again. How many times will I read “these companies are just way too bloated” as the top comment on a layoff post? It’s always written with perfect confidence as if the commenter understands the chaos of the tech industry better than anybody else. People upvote it because it sounds good without ever thinking critically about what they just read. Well written, confident, and reassuring to me (as one of the few competent tech employees)? Upvote!
How many times will people reply to the top comments with some vaguely related point they desperately want to make and that they feel is worth hijacking your attention for? Every single time.
How many times will a top comment ask questions that are clearly answered in the link? We’re not even allowed to tell them to RTFA because that’s against HN rules. Posting the comment isn’t though.
I stick around for those rare diamonds in the rough. The moments where an actual, proven genius logs in to post their yearly comment. Usually because somebody posted a link to their work and the top comment has hopelessly misunderstood it.
I am constantly amazed at what gets written in the comments section of a site ostensibly focussed on startup companies and the tech industry. Quite frankly it can often be scary to see what people come up with in their outrageous outrage.
The comment thread under that looks super fishy as well. All positive comments, on the internet? Yeah right. And most of them are well written? Maybe my bs detector is set too high, but I smell shenanigans.
Are we trying to suppress any critical sub-comments? I've never heard these complaints, and it doesn't look as though it's the only thing the user is posting. Seems interesting to me.
The worst part is that, though some comments are useful (and point out holes and inconsistencies in the "real" documentation above), a lot of the time a large chunk of the comments are misleading or flat out /wrong/.
They probably are, but I think an underreported phenomenon here is that tendentious and annoying comments are disproportionately driven by a few outlier commenters, and when you ask for $1/mo, they'll pay just to have an entitlement to continue the behavior.
No, for the most part I don’t think the comments here are particularly good.
Plenty of people who think because they’re paid a lot of money to be computer programmers that they can instantly have genius insights into completely unrelated fields. A good amount of “well actually” when any social issue is discussed. Surprising volume of apologizing for discrimination/racism/sexism/etc. under the guise of “free speech”.
My gut feeling is that most of the comments on Reddit are written by teenagers. In the real world there are plenty of context clues that I use to determine if someone is worth listening to or not. On the internet, you have to assume in good faith that a given comment was written by someone who has enough life experience to be taken seriously.
They are drowned in the noise, but on Reddit it is very easy to read past the noise.
Here the noise is usually someone trying to sell you something while pretending to be innocent or defending his employer while pretending to be innocent.
Much harder to read past that, also since the moderation claims it never happens.
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