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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3312 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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DAE get infuriated reading HackerNews comments?

The userbase is sufficiently tech literate to have passable to good discussions about tech. But boy is is jarring when they comment about anything other than tech. Blatantly wrong use of economics/politics/pop-science jargon, extremely naive shitlib or doomer takes, shitty ass model of how things work combined with shitty articulation of said model, Autism so profound most mottizens would want to give them swirlies, I can go on.

The annoying part is the discrepancy in quality post to post. I read an informative and insightful set of comments about the Golang compiler in one post and let my guard down and the comments in the next post would be undifferentiable from a mainstream reddit thread. At least Reddit is garbage through and through and I've primed myself to have 0 expectations from "the discourse".

Reading Hackernews feels like being put in a class full of "smart kids". The kids are clearly smart, but they are a bit high on their own supply. You were one of them too once, but you have grown out of the act (because in the big bad real world, you are probably just a midwit). But they will try to sneak in jargon every chance they get to let everyone know that they know the jargon, If I have to read another comment chain that includes a guy having an orgasm/circlejerk because he found out about GoodHarts Law, I am going to kill someone.

I find Reddit's economics takes so horrible that it's worse, though on most other things I agree that you often expect it to be bad, unlike hacker news.

Reddit's economics takes are amazingly bad. It's common to have comment sections where easily more than 99% of the comments are saying things that are blatantly at odds with the most basic and established economic concepts.

And I get the sense that this represents a large block of people, and politically active ones too! And not merely advocating things that could be bad, but things that would be outright disastrous, like not allowing people to go above a given net worth.

Yes. One of the crazier ones I've seen which is really popular is making it illegal to own an investment property unless it's a purpose built rental. So that's the only that renters would be allowed to live in. Another one is capping the price of food.

Right. The first leads to less building; the second leads to shortages. Neither a lack of homes nor a shortage of food are what they would want.

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