HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why HN discussions are almost always on a tangent?

20 points by mclightning ↗ HN
I have been on HN for nearly a decade now. I don't know if it is a recent phenomenon.

But in contrast to reddit, HN comment threads always seem to go on a complete tangent to the original post.

This renders comments pretty useless for me to find out any insight into the original post. In contrast, you can learn a lot about original post on Reddit via comments.

The pattern usually follows; Commentary on the brand/topic in general rather than the specific news, Personal anecdotes which barely have any connection or insight to the topic at hand, Just a dump of personal preference based on emotion without much insight.

What's going on here? Please go and check any thread.

23 comments

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arkitaip
This has always been an issue. The very design with nested threads practically encourages tangents. You also have a community of opinionated people who consider HN to be their main outlet for intellectual discussions.
viraptor
I partially agree and it's been going on for a long time. But that's why I hang out there - even if there's a lot of noise, there's interesting info about the tangential topics too.

For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27286948 on a post about IRC. I never really read what the xfree/xorg change was about, but that's an interesting comparison and something I can read up on.

On the other hand the m1racle post happens to be close to 100% on topic.

I guess it's because HN is always very generic while Reddit allows specialisation via subreddits.

yen223
We have strong opinions about random things, and have few opportunities to talk those opinions. So when the opportunity presents itself, we will talk about our strongly-held opinions, no matter how little relevance it has to the topic at hand.
thisistheend123
Personal anecdotes which barely have any connection or insight to the topic at hand, Just a dump of personal preference based on emotion without much insight.

It says more about SW engineers in general. We are mostly male, relatively high earning people who reek of entitlement and think they are very smart.

HN discussions are mostly boring with recurring themes and arguments.

Check out n-gate for more insight.

mclightning
haha I love n-gate! I have been checking it out every now and then!

I agree %100 with your observation as well.

dalmo3
The site design means that any sufficiently popular post will have one big deep comment thread, while other top level comments are hidden under 'more'. That incentivises users to read/comment on the first thread, which invariably goes on a tangent, recursively too.

Reddit for all its woes does better in that regard by hiding deep comments.

HN is depth-first, Reddit is breadth-first.

I find it particularly bad that you can't comment on a popular post that's just a few hours old because no one will ever read it.

mikewarot
>I find it particularly bad that you can't comment on a popular post that's just a few hours old because no one will ever read it.

That's not true... I use the "Threads" feature to keep up on the comments I make, and conversations can go on for days. It's not all a huge rush to first post here.

austincheney
The behaviors differ as the rewards differ. There is no punishment, on HN, to distracting away to a side conversation so long as that tangent is informative and logically connected to the primary conversation. Even if this were punished there is a maximum ceiling to that punishment: 5 down votes.

Reddit, on the other hand, is an echo chamber. Conformity is king dictated by populism of votes subdivided by subjective criteria into subreddits. There is no ceiling there to the maximum punishment for defiance of the populism.

krapp
The tree based structure of the threads encourages conversational tangents by design. The original comments are replies to the original topic, but the further in you go, the more comments become replies to other comments, and conversations deviate from general and abstract to concrete and specific. If Hacker News wanted every comment to relate directly to the OP, it should have a flat comment structure.

This happens on Reddit too, it's just easier to notice here because threads here tend to be deeper rather than longer.

Remember, this isn't a symposium. We're not here just to offer professional criticism or trade theses at one another. There's no rule that all conversation must strictly be relevant to the topic, and primarily of a technical nature, nor should there be. We're here to have conversations about things we find interesting, and using casual language and personal anecdotes are perfectly acceptable. The only times I've seen the mods step in for something being off topic is when a tangent violates some other guideline.

username90
Because the original posts are usually worse than the comments, so people talk about the comments. Most posts are just some crappy blog who wrote about a topic they just learned about or equivalent, while in the comments you see people who know what they are talking about and therefore don't feel the need to write a blog post about it but spending a few minutes writing a comment is fine.
sdevonoes
I come to HN for the tangent comments/rants/crazy ideas. 50% of the time I don't even read the original post.

I don't use HN as a way to gain insights on trendy (tech) news, just as a way to disconnect and (sometimes) to have fun. Sure, YMMV.

burntoutfire
There are a few hot subjects that the HN crowd loves to talk about: UBI, FAANG salaries, interviewing/leetcode, opinions on Agile, house prices in the US etc. Eventually, someone makes some remark that is touching on one of these and it triggers a tangential subthread that can generate more posts than the OP, in which (usually) few people were originally interested.
matt_s
1. People don't RTFA and just start commenting thinking they know what the article is about.

2. Many strong minded people that firmly believe they are right and others are wrong on so many topics. See vi vs. emacs.

3. It's common on reddit to get a lot of points for simply quoting the relevant bits of an article because there are a lot of people that do #1 from above.

4. Tangents on sites like reddit do exist and often devolve into insider jokes and memes. I've been brought to tears laughing so hard at some stuff on there.

mikewarot
>2. Many strong minded people that firmly believe they are right and others are wrong on so many topics. See vi vs. emacs.

All those people are nuts, Notepad++ is the way to go. ;-)

busyant
Isn't this a common phenomenon with all conversations... unless there is a moderator with a strong mandate to keep things on topic? Or if all participants agree and self regulate.

I agree that there are many tangents, but I frequently enjoy them. I wouldn't be here if I didn't enjoy the comments, including the tangents.

Edit. I feel like I see similar behavior on reddit, but I guess you have a different experience.

giantg2
Because even simple topics aren't so simple. Everything is a part of a complex system of interrelated parts. Sometimes the most interesting discussions aren't on the direct effects but on the indirect effects throughout the system.
mrfusion
To this end I’ve always wanted a “bail out” button in threads.

Sometimes you’re super deep in a comment tree and realize you don’t want to be there. It would be great to collapse up to the first parent at that point.

It’s somewhat difficult to scroll up and find the first parent plus I do that pattern so much it would be great to have a button.

thomastjeffery
Reddit does this with the vertical lines on the left margin.
mrfusion
I just tried it. Doesn’t seem to work on iPhone? Awesome feature if it worked though.
codingclaws
Agreed. I often only want to read root level comments. There should be an option to only show root comments; I have been thinking about adding this feature to my reddit/hn clone.
mgh2
I am also guessing a lot of Reddit users have moved here after the pandemic.

Partly seen on the downgraded quality of comments, especially dealing with pure sentiment rather than facts (ex: crypto promoters)

*Going on a tangent is a typical technique used to derail an argument in favor of the actor

dlsa
People get sidetracked, the conversation drifts a little or somewhat or even a lot. Then it continues to do so. Maybe it steers back to the original point but usually only if under deliberate control. At least with tree based commenting the divergence can be collapsed at each branch.

...And I'm painting my house. We're thinking of a reddy color to match the surrounds. Then we talk about what those surrounds are, what plants, pots, the weather, when they can visit...

This is actually how casual conversations work.

Too strict and you lose spontaneous interesting side topics appearing. Too lax and the plot is lost completely. This is a balancing act.

Reddit can go off-topic quite fast as well. Like a lot of others.

This has been my experience so far on HN.

K0balt
Tangential conversation is similar to orthogonal thoughts, leveraging the intersectionality of ideas to spark new ones, often leading to innovative or creative directions of discussion. I wonder how well correlated those thought habits are with innovation in the technology space in general?