I love hacker news as well as reddit. I have noticed a trend though, and I'm unsure if it's intentional, or just a result of how both sites are used: 1.) The stories on Hacker News are mainly about start ups (not all, but most). 2.) The users of /r/javascript, or /r/programming (and other programming related subreddits) are very helpful when it comes to finding answers to programming related questions.
I find myself pursuing reddit more often because I am not involved in a start up, or have any interest in starting a start up. I just like to code, and reddit fuels my interest more than hacker news does in that regard. I'm sure I'll get "downvoted" to hell for saying that.
The problem is that when a forum like Hacker News loses its focus, it loses its value.
I've observed this as Reddit has expanded. /r/programming used to be a good source for learning about neat new technologies and programming techniques. Now, in part because it's one of the default front-page subreddits for an expanding user base on Reddit that mostly aren't programmers, the programming content gets buried beneath jokes, general technology or computer related articles that aren't about programming specifically, and the like.
If Hacker News loses its focus on programming and startups, it risks this happening as well. The detention conditions of PFC Bradley Manning may be interesting, but they are not on topic for a site like Hacker News. There are many other places you can read about and discuss that topic. There aren't many places where I can read about and discuss a broad range of programming and startup related information like I find on Hacker News.
Quick caution: there's selection bias here bigtime. If you read the comments on this thread, Hacker News is clearly in urgent danger of becoming Reddit. Of course, this post is designed to attract people worried about Hacker News becoming Reddit.
Can someone provide an example of an online community that has an appropriately positive attitude?
Hacker News is the most civil, useful and intelligent conversation on the internet, period. HN is easily two standard deviations less cruel or petty than any other discussion site you could name. The rest of the internet makes us look like Miss Manners.
I'm sorry that people weren't supportive of your personal projects, sw007. But do you have any idea how much worse things would have been on reddit? TechCrunch comments? God forbid, 4chan?
HN is an amazing resource and I'm glad to have it. The top comment is always 1) the other side of the argument being presented in the story or 2) information from someone on the inside (ie, "I work at fb and here is what is really going on"). If there's any online discussion site that's significantly more positive than Hacker News, I'd love to hear about it.
This is a site for computer science and entrepreneurship, right? Over the past few months I've seen a lot of posts unrelated to those two topics and it seems like Reddit is very much bleeding into here, not just politics.
My opinion is that this place is great for two reasons: It's narrow focus on one topic, and a userbase that consists of experts in that one topic. When Hacker News strays from it's area of expertise I feel that Gell-Mann Amnesia is apparent and the quality of discussion much lower. Again not just for the politics but for other random news as well.
I like Hackernews because I actually learn things here and have genuinely interesting conversations with relatively polite people, but we only seem to talk about tech stuff. Cryptography, web dev, programming, etc. Nobody here wants to talk about like, motorcycles or raising pet rats or other things I'm interested in outside of technology, so it can't replace reddit for me.
I use both but don't use Reddit for tech news. From my personal experience on hacker news the contrary opinion does surface a lot more in the discussions and people only join a conversation when they feel something needs to be added to the discussion rather than piling on the side of the popular opinion.
In my experience, Hacker News has been one of the places that's unusually sympathetic to Reddit, probably because it originated with YCombinator. If you get the impression that people here generally dislike Reddit you should take that as a a strong indicator that Reddit has actually become a cesspool.
I worry that as reddit becomes less useful, hacker news becomes more interesting to people who want to have the sort of ideological conversations that eventually drown out the interesting stuff about tech and startups.
Realistically too, a lot of the content on Hackernews is also on Reddit. However the difference a lot of the time is the intelligence level in the comments can vastly differ. I find Hackernews is where you come for a less political, more logical set of opinions on different articles. The nerdier version of reddit.
I think they each have their own place, the culture here is still very startup-centric (for obvious reasons) even though pg tried to change it. The programming reddit is still a better place for hacker/coding links (and comments) IMO, just avoid the other reddits. =)
Reddit has a problem with content quality, as the existence of Hacker News proves (at the time of writing this, the top post in /r/programming is a useless "funny" picture).
Also, the missing isolation from other Reddits can be a good thing, since some people might want to only talk about their interest and not bother with the circlejerk.
HackerNews gives me the freedom to say contrarian things without instantly being down-voted to hell. HackerNews also encourages me to be level-headed and polite. The mods here are mature and are relatively unbiased. I like this one intellectual feed over Reddit's many frivolous subreddits. Does the subreddit differentiation tend to attract low quality mods and users? Probably. But Idk.
I find myself pursuing reddit more often because I am not involved in a start up, or have any interest in starting a start up. I just like to code, and reddit fuels my interest more than hacker news does in that regard. I'm sure I'll get "downvoted" to hell for saying that.
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