That's an alternative, but not a particularly good one, IMO.
The Comic Book Guy is strong over there - meaning that a significant number of conversations carry that sort of condescending, unfriendly tone as the Simpson's Comic Book Guy; intending to show that the author is clearly a superior human being due to their knowledge of ARM opcodes and their interaction with GCC or whatever else the subject is.
The biggest risks I see for HN are:
* Simply getting too big. Not much to do about that.
* Noisy political articles (like, say, about China...) that attract people who like noisy political discussions.
* Outrage articles. There are a lot of horrible injustices in the world. Enough to completely drown out tech and startup news, and in the grand scheme of things, often much more important than, say, Scala vs Clojure.
I'm finding I have to check HN around 10-15 times a day, lest I miss some of the more interesting submissions.
I really enjoying a lot of the ShowHN, Startup news, and discussions around programming languages/libraries.
I primarily come to HN to learn. This seems to be the place that many clever people congregate to share opinions and ideas. I really just like to listen to what they have to say to each other.
However, it seems that a lot of the good submissions drop off the front page after just a few hours. The ones that tend to stick around seem to be more "political" than anything else. I guess it's easier to voice an opinion on an outrage-article as you don't need any real expertise.
I do wish we could just get back to talking mostly about development/tech stuff. There is so much to learn in this industry and HN is one of the few places where it all comes together.
> "The Comic Book Guy is strong over there - meaning that a significant number of conversations carry that sort of condescending, unfriendly tone as the Simpson's Comic Book Guy; intending to show that the author is clearly a superior human being"
Wait, are we talking about /r/programming or HN? ;)
Seriously though, I see a lot of that here, it's frustrating. Lots of rude, condescending ad hominem shit. Lots of Alpha Geek posturing and (to borrow pg's term) middlebrow dismissals to seem smarter.
Like any time somebody shares anything. You're guaranteed to have a few people rip apart the color choice, or layout, or whatever.
I get that HN commenters are the pinnacle of the design industry, but there are better ways to remind people of it than ripping apart something unique based on the color of the buttons on the web page.
It's not even the crappy, nitpicky criticism that bothers me, it's how it's so frequently presented with zero tact, and an overdose of aggression.
Reading some of the threads around here you'd think we're giving points for being rude, condescending, assuming everyone else is a complete idiot, and utter and complete verbal evisceration of other posters.
In short, there are an awful lot of people here that behave like complete assholes to everyone else, and when called out on it they'll yell loudly about how they're being oppressed for expressing valid opinions in vitriolic ways, and then follow that up with some variation of "well, the world isn't nice, wuss".
+1. When I started learning to develop for the web in 2001 I was part of a list with an iron-clad list mom (of some repute). I fell foul of him numerous times, but it kept the discussions good and on track. I learned a lot, the feedback I got improved my coding no end, and everyone kept a level of respect for each other.
Yes, it's not like it's absent here, but there's more of a presumption against it, and the guidelines do ask that the tone is one of talking in person.
It's interesting to compare the HN[0] and Reddit[1] comments for the same article.
The second highest voted comment on Reddit is "this is high levels of bad ass." at 276 points. I guess HN is still far ahead of other communities after all (if you're interested in serious discussion).
Nice sample size you have there. There are many extremely insightful comments on the programming subreddit, and there are also many empty, predictable comments on HN. I bet many people here can guess the top comment on particular threads based solely upon the submission title. (There's a high probability the top comment has the phrase "Am I the only one, or ...")
So is HN ahead of /r/programming? At times, definitely. However, anyone who frequents both will attest to the fact that /r/programming is much better at ignoring linkbait, while HN seems to fall for it on a daily basis.
I bet many people here can guess the top comment on particular threads based solely upon the submission title. (There's a high probability the top comment has the phrase "Am I the only one, or ...")
The comment is indeed funny but I don't come on HN to get my daily dose of humour just like I don't go out to a bar to debate the latest HTML5 specs. Yes, I do enjoy humour, drinking and debating HTML5 specs but each has its own time and place.
Most of the subreddits dedicated to a specific language or technology are nice, although it usually takes at least 1,000 subscribers to reach a critical mass, with the sweet spot between 10,000 and 100,000 subscribers. If you are doing front-end web development, for example, /r/webdev, /r/javascript, and /r/html5 are pretty good places to keep on top of interesting projects and exchange ideas.
/r/javascript is full of basic questions, small simple libraries and otherwise not really interesting content. I feel that signal/noise rate was much lower on /r/javascript than on any other subreddit I'm subscribed to. I have unsubscribed half a year ago, and I would never recommend it as an interesting read.
But for me the people on proggit are too communist. If you show the slightest bit of evidence that you're (at least somewhat) in it for the money, they hit the downvote button hard.
And many other subreddits besides.