> Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it.
There's tons of incentive to game it. If it wasn't, why would all kinds of startups and tech companies have alert bots and slack channels implemented to allow their employees to swoop in and participate in HN threads that are relevant to their marketing interests?
IIRC, the one's who've come clean about doing that have been fairly scrupulous about, but I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.
What I like is that there's always someone on here who's a legit expert on any subject imaginable. Like someone can post a pic of an obscure tape drive from the 60s and almost instantly someone can tell you all about it.
Or a rigorous back and forth on the horse-riding tribes who spawned the Indo-European languages.
Or people can put in context some outlandish quantum computing headline in a way that you'd never get from the actual article.
There's tons of incentive to game it. If it wasn't, why would all kinds of startups and tech companies have alert bots and slack channels implemented to allow their employees to swoop in and participate in HN threads that are relevant to their marketing interests?
IIRC, the one's who've come clean about doing that have been fairly scrupulous about, but I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.