The intellectual level achieved in HN is unparalleled in the history of internet.
The bad parts, except those mentioned other where:
1) very fast aging of threads, after a couple of days comments and discussion stop
2) relative lower quality in other fields except technology, especially medicine. As a doctor I would kill to take part in "deep water" discussions in HN, as eg it happens with physics, geology, finance.
> relative lower quality in other fields except technology
As a political aficionado, some of the political takes are surprisingly primitive given the seemingly high IQ here.
It reminds me of the phenomenon wherein you trust the articles you read written by journalists, until you read an article where they are opining on a topic you actually know something about… and realize they have no idea what they are talking about.
No hate to anyone, just wanted to provide a perspective on my version of you seeing people talk about medicine.
There were a lot of pre-internet 2.0 groups that were phenomenal in terms of competence density.
The first point I worry a bit less about but it does have moments when it's suboptimal - for certain specific discussions there's often a need for a more durable thread-space to continue discussion. Some of the heartbleed and cloudflare discussions, wherein there were ongoing developments day by day needed to be cut up into many threads and people discussing had to refer back to now dead-threads from earlier days.
As someone with a hard science background doing law, I agree with the second point. I agree and notice it fairly consistently where discussion moves into my areas of expertise. I feel like there's a lot of Bayesian overconfidence that bleeds into off-competence discussions on here. I think this fairly normal, where high-competence people are put into areas where they can't identify their own knowledge gaps.
I think Nobel disease is more of an apt moniker than the Dunning-Kruger effect to describe what happens here. People who are highly competent in some areas probably learn to have lower Bayesian uncertainty, so they speak in more confident terms and sanity check their own conclusions less.
1) very fast aging of threads, after a couple of days comments and discussion stop
2) relative lower quality in other fields except technology, especially medicine. As a doctor I would kill to take part in "deep water" discussions in HN, as eg it happens with physics, geology, finance.