Comment by solardev 2 days ago
Have "good" small webs EVER prevailed?
Every content system seems to get polluted by noise once it hits mainstream usage: IRC, Usenet, reddit, Facebook, geocities, Yahoo, webrings, etc. Once-small curated selections eventually grow big enough to become victims of their own successes and taken over by spam.
It's always an arms race of quality vs quantity, and eventually the curators can't keep up with the sheer volume anymore.
Well, niche forums are kinda different when they manage to stay small and niche. Not just HN but car forums, LED forums, etc.
But if they ever include other topics, they risk becoming more mainstream and noisy. Even within adjacent fields (like the various Stacks) it gets pretty bad.
Maybe the trick is to stay within a single small sphere then and not become a general purpose discussion site? And to have a low enough volume of submissions where good moderation is still possible? (Thank you dang and HN staff)
I'm not entirely sure it's about content (while HN is certainly tech-focused, politics, health, philosophy all come up with regularity) or even content moderation, although they both certainly play a part (particularly the moderation around here. Thanks, staff!)
I wonder if it is more to do with the community itself. HN users tend to have very intelligent discussions on pretty much anything, and discourages shitty, unnuanced, one-line takes. This, coupled with a healthy moderation system, makes it hard for the lower quality discussion to break in and override the good stuff.
The car headlight forums seem to expose the weakness of small web though, in that a lot of the forums that show up in search are "sponsored" by one or two major brands and any open discussion or validation of off-brand solutions, AliExpress parts, etc are quickly shunned or banned.
Yes. That's the small web.
A good example of the generalization problem you discuss is reddit.
You have to unsubscribe from all the defaults and find the small, niche, communities about specific topics. If not, it's the same stuff, reposted, over and over, across different subs and/or social sites.
It's high quality when the content is within HN's bubble. Anything related to health, politics, or Microsoft is full of misinformation, ignorance, and garbage like any other site. The Microsoft discussions in particular are extremely low quality.
When economics has come up I've been curious and asked my brother about some of the stuff in the more upvoted comments (he has his PhD in economics with a focus on labor specifically) his reaction has always been something like "that doesn't match my understanding of that" or "I think their analysis is a bit oversimplified".
My experience here is that it's pretty good for things outside of tech (at least better than the average internet) but definitely not great.
I don't have a PhD but I do have some background in economics, and economics is consistently one of the worst areas on HN. I think it's representative of society in general. There's something about economics that makes it feel like you can just reason through it with common sense, whereas that's rarely true in reality.
IMO HN actually scores quite highly in terms of health/politics and so forth content because the both mainstream and fringe ideas get both shown and pushback.
A vaping discussion brought up glycerin used was safe and the same thing used in smoke machines and someone else brought up a study showing that smoke machines are an occasional safety issue. Nowhere near every discussion goes that well but stick around and you’ll see in-depth discussion.
Go to a public health website by comparison and you’ll see warnings without context and a possibility positive spin compared to smoking. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/e-cigarettes/index.html I suspect most people get basically nothing from looking at it.
As a software engineer married to a healthcare professional, I disagree strongly about the quality of the healthcare discussions here. A whole lot of the conversation is software engineers who think that they can reason from first principles in two minutes about this thing that professionals dedicate their whole lives to mastering, and who therefore don't understand the most basic concepts of the field.
Sometimes I try and engage, but honestly, mostly I think it's not worth it. Otherwise you end up doing this with your life: https://xkcd.com/386/
> IMO HN actually scores quite highly in terms of health/politics and so forth content because the both mainstream and fringe ideas get both shown and pushback.
As someone with domain expertise here, I wholeheartedly disagree. HN is very bad at percolating accurate information about topics outside its wheelhouse, like clinical medicine, public health, or the natural sciences. It is also, simultaneously, extremely prone to overestimating its own collective competency at understanding technical knowledge outside its domain. In tandem, those two make for a rather dangerous combination.
Anytime I see a post about a topic within my area of specialty, I know to expect articulate, lengthy, and completely misguided or inaccurate comments dominating the discussion. It's enough of a problem that trying to wade in and correct them is a losing battle; I rarely even bother these days.
It's kind of funny that XKCD #793[0] is written about physicists, because the effect is way worse with software engineers.
Politics and philosophy discussions here are intelligent in that most of the commenters aren’t dumb. They tend to be entirely uneducated and resistant to the educated.
I hide every single article about MS because it's filled with all the neckbeardy tropes about their products being garbage spyware, switch to Linux, they're stealing your data, the OS is trash etc. It's comments from people who have never managed large scale MS based environments comparing their Windows Home to the other 90% of the business ecosystem that has nothing to do with home users or MS's main cash cow, businesses, Azure/Entra and M365. I'm done wasting my breath on MS here.
its so easy to solve this problem, not sure why anyone hasnt done it yet.
1. build a userbase, free product
2. once userbase get big enough, any new account requires a monthly fee, maybe $1
3. keep raising the fee higher and higher, until you get to the point that the userbase is manageable.
no ads, simple.
This sounds like a good idea. I do wonder if enough people would sign up for it to be a worthy venture because I think the main issue with ads is I think once you add any price at all dramatically reduces participation even if it’s not about cost some people just see the payment and immediately disengage.!
> Have "good" small webs EVER prevailed?
You ask on HN, one of the highest quality sites I've ever visited in any age of the Internet.
IRC is still alive and well among pretty much the same audience as always. I'm not sure it's fair to compare that with the others.