Why Hacker News?

Very smart people. Far less snark than other open communities, except on certain topics. But the snark will get downvoted most of the time.

Humor is a little suppressed here, but after going to Reddit, I think that's a good thing. Otherwise, attempts at humor becomes disruptive to the conversation.

Politics seems largely community/self moderated here, it is not outright avoided but purely ideological posts tend to get down voted or ignored. It seems a nice balance and I do not have to tiptoe around accidently triggering people who are ruled by the absolutes of their ideology and derailing a thread.

It results in a community which can be somewhat slack when it comes to the rules, makes everything more conversational which is important for having quality discussion on anything.

Good signal-to-noise ratio and a surprising number of commenters who work at the companies/projects mentioned.

Td;LR Because there is nothing better out there.

The Signal to Noise Ratio isn’t that great. Depending on topics and your level of understanding on the subject. It could be 90-95% noise. But if you compare to other internet forum, which could easily be 99% or 99.9999999999999% noise. Measuring signals only HN is many orders of magnitude better.

And then, possibly the most important part, the quality of signal. You have SVPs, CTO of not small startups, but large established companies, many veterans over 60s talking about the good old days from Mainframe, IBM, Microsoft era. Engineers from TSMC, ASML, Intel and Samsung Foundry. People working for NASA, Government officials, Lawyers, Scientist from ITER, Experts working on State of the Art Compiler techniques. Engineers from WebKit, Safari, Edge, Chrome, People who worked on the original USB-C ( Hint not Apple ), and the list goes on and on. ( I am not going to name them )

It’s unfortunate a lot of them no longer do HN.

Others have pointed out to several other points. I agree with those. My personal reasons are these:

1. Without HN, I would not have known about Nand2Tetris, OCaml, Non-Linear Dynamics, Neal Stephenson, Greg Egan, or Aaron Schwartz. In a way, HN has changed my life. I came to know and love functional programming, I came to know about great resources on Computation, Programming, advanced Math and so many more things. Culture outside of HN is much duller, and no offense, are for people with much lesser intelligence. Especially for someone like me who weren’t born in Stanford or UCLA-B uni campus. I am sure that there are places with better culture exist- that are better fit for the intellectual minds. But, HN is a paradise to me. It honestly changed my life. I come here regularly for the educational resources recommended in comments and posted here as stories.

2. It is a good news source, and that news that are super interesting for hackers are encouraged to post here- is super nice.

3. It has less political noise and the discussions are nuanced. I can find, albeit in minority, sane right wing voices here. Where all other major outlets are overrun by the super-woke ideology, and even sane RW voices are deplatformed and banned from forums, it is refreshing to see some opposing voices in here. (I am a common-sense abiding humanist, and definitely more left than right, I still see reasons in many RW arguments and agree to some of their policies.) It's very nice that, in HN, RW voices are not supressed.

For one it’s not releasing stupid redesigns that make the site a pain in the ass to use.

First-class moderation, intelligent discussion, great reads, no ads.

Fast load times, lots of decent articles, very skimmable. Gets pompous sometimes though.

There are people here that I have known of for a long time though I have never communicated directly with them. You might not who you are but I do.

The boldness of its orange color palette, obviously

Better validation to your thoughts, more so on tech. No Ads/Images/GIFs/Flash; lesser distraction. Talk to the point or thread is downvoted. Better managed Karma! Difficult to fake it.

Checking internet connectivity.

Bonus: Watch new JS frameworks every week.

For serious: Know how many people agree/disagree with you. (I recommend HN to change upvote/downvote into agree/disagree).

No politics, on topic discussions, well moderated, good insights in the comments, surfaces news I want to see without many temptations I need to avoid.

I find the mixture of postings aligns well with my interests. The comments provide valuable additional information and enlightening perspectives.

On any topic it’s common that the people who comment have both range and depth of experience. From people who built foundational technologies 30 years ago to unicorn founders/C-suite responding directly to user feedback (and lots of super thoughtful folks in between).

While I agree with some of the comments about high SNR, I’ve noticed an increasing Redditization of HN, where a shallow, snarky comment or joke gets upvoted to the top. Some voting limits (say, a user can give out no more than 10 upvotes a day) may help.

Where else can you read latest news on with serious discussions with no trolling and memes?

I learn the most from this community.

I've also learned that there's an attitude type here that I struggle to appreciate. There's a negativity that makes this place almost unbearable.

I'm terrified of my first "Show HN".

And the lack of clout, images, gaming too.

Appreciate the topicality moderation and the community reminding others not to post low effort comments that do not contribute to the conversation.

@dang

* People are more likely on HN than than reddit to read the article before commenting.

* Low-effort comments generally don't get upvoted.

There's a gopher mirror.

smart people

A lot of fluff in this post's comments. I will be brutally honest and simply say there is nothing better.

The "intellectual" argument falls flat. I do not consider myself "enlightened" in any respect yet I find the amount of pseudo-intellectual naval gazing here to rival reddit. If we are to compare HN to it's nearest grandparent, slashdot, at least people had a sense of humor there. There is no such thing here. If you don't toe the line cast by the technocratic neo-liberal agenda you will be downvoted. If you don't like XYZ framework, are critical of Rust/Haskell/Whatever you will get downvoted. If you are an inch right of center you will get downvoted. Sometimes you get downvoted for just existing. /r/shithnsays has a select of posts exemplifying many of the above traits. If someone told me they were an HNer I would more likely avoid them just like I tend to avoid redditors.

The SNR is atrocious. It's very obvious there are as many, if not more, astroturf accounts here than there are legitimate posters.

It's truly a forum for the silicon valley yuppie who believe they hold the single truth to all things. It's obnoxious, it's annoying, oftentimes it's outright terrible. Questionable moderation, obvious political bent, and pseudo-intellectualism abounds.

Yet, there's nothing better. Maybe someday. Until then, shitposting here is all I have since slashdot is dead, USENET is dead, and forums are mostly dead. The one upside of this place is the relatively simple format. It's far better than the thousand-dark-pattern-deep designs of other places.