I think the Hackernews' "echo-chamber-ness" is extremely exaggerated. It only feels like that if you're in the minority viewpoint in a thread (which happens to me, too). However, it's not echo-chambery if dissident viewpoints live side-by-side dominant viewpoints, even if the latter are 80% of the thread replies and upvotes.
An echo chamber is arguably more when we actively suppress dissident viewpoints. Reddit is infamous for moderators doing that simply by deleting comments under some pretext of 'spirit of the subreddit' or such. With Facebook there's a first-and-last-name-and-picture-visible shaming that can be scary and damaging, repulsing the opposite viewpoints. At a more extreme, you can help foster an echo chamber by organizing a large group of people to scream and picket and threaten a speaker that has the wrong views, reminding all the others of what happens.
HN to me is an oasis. Even if I get downvoted when I have a minority view. I still feel as if intelligent arguments are considered.
With Reddit, how many intelligent comments are there? The English grammar alone is awful, full of shortcuts, cliches and new millennial-speak. But worse: the responses are short. One-liners. And even worse: argumentation is ad-hominem and emotive.
In summary, I think Reddit is about emotional expression, and HN is about (an attempt of) rigor and rationality.
I've seen a lot of very interesting, usually quite short comments on politics-related threads in the past few weeks, that were posted less than ten minutes prior and already grayed out and marked "[dead]". In each instance, the user was not using inflammatory language at all, yet HN was implicitly saying "yeah we're not going to allow discussion on this topic." I'm sure there's Very Good Reasons(TM) for this but it always feels like wasted opportunity for interesting, out-of-the-box discussion.
> In each instance, the user was not using inflammatory language at all,
Downvotes are not only for inflammatory language; a comment can be a negative contribution to the signal-to-noise ratio, and even violate the commenting guidelines, without using inflammatory language.
Ah. HN is special: they punish political discussions. It's unfortunate, even tragic in my opinion. They allow it sometimes if there's specifically a tech or science-related topic very very closely attached.
I avoid poking the moderator lions (I used to post political articles maybe a year or more ago), but I do wish HN would have another view of that particular topic. It's rather unavoidable that adults (and we are adults), highly-educated ones at that, would sometimes slip into politics when science or tech news (or legal news about tech or science) is discussed.
But yes, you're generally right about that.
I think emotive political discussion is useless, but rational policy discussions aren't useless.
An echo chamber is arguably more when we actively suppress dissident viewpoints. Reddit is infamous for moderators doing that simply by deleting comments under some pretext of 'spirit of the subreddit' or such. With Facebook there's a first-and-last-name-and-picture-visible shaming that can be scary and damaging, repulsing the opposite viewpoints. At a more extreme, you can help foster an echo chamber by organizing a large group of people to scream and picket and threaten a speaker that has the wrong views, reminding all the others of what happens.
HN to me is an oasis. Even if I get downvoted when I have a minority view. I still feel as if intelligent arguments are considered.
With Reddit, how many intelligent comments are there? The English grammar alone is awful, full of shortcuts, cliches and new millennial-speak. But worse: the responses are short. One-liners. And even worse: argumentation is ad-hominem and emotive.
In summary, I think Reddit is about emotional expression, and HN is about (an attempt of) rigor and rationality.