The Difference Between Hacker News and Reddit
I tend to read Hacker News quit a bit and Reddit on occasion. On Hacker News I also spend my time reading the comments, something I generally never do on Reddit.
Quit simply, the disparity between the quality of comments on each site is appalling. Witness “Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming the Men”, a recent editorial by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch. The article made it to the top of both Hacker News and Reddit.
The very first comment on Hacker News is
I’m always slightly puzzled as to why this is an issue. Surely the goal is to have lots of innovative and successful startups, and the gender of who is founding them is irrelevant.
There aren’t, as far as I can tell, any real barriers to women starting a tech company; being able to code, having a lot of mental resilience and having some starting capital is not something that’s only possible if you’re male.
A thoughtful post, an inquiry for clarification that then led to more interesting comments.
The very first comment on Reddit
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
It speaks for itself.
At least Reddit isn’t Digg. This story also made it to #1 on Digg and the first 14 comments there are about some boycott of Digg itself. One has to get to #15 to find the first vaguely relevant comment, and it is this gem
f**k off Techcrunch… You have submitted so much s**t over the last few hours that there are 4 auto-submitted news from your site.
I guess it all comes down to the kind of community the users want to create.
Command Line Error
Not quit as egregious as the fabled ‘rm -rf /’, it turns out one can beachball TextMate pretty easily by accidentally typing
~/Sites/client_site (master) : mate /
instead of
~/Sites/client_site (master) : mate .
Good times.
Leo Demoralized
Something happened tonight that made me question everything I’ve done with social media since I first joined Twitter in late 2006.
Recently Google Buzz stopped publishing Leo Laporte’s posts (or whatever it is that Google calls them) for reasons unexplained and Leo has become upset that no one noticed. Writes Leo:
“It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me….”
Indeed.
With all due respect to Leo, what exactly did he think people are using Twitter, Facebook, Buzz et al. for? “Social” media is perhaps the single most narcissistic system humanity has ever created. It is devoted, in its entirety, to people shouting into the void solely for their own gratification.
That we can pay attention to others at all is almost a side-effect of the publishing mechanisms (social side-effect, not a technical one). A side-effect that largely exists simply to give a semblance of utility to the publishing side.
All of this is a bad thing, as far as I can tell, only if you want – nay, expect – other people to pay attention to you. In effect, for actual narcissists a system that democratizes narcissism is truly a terrible thing: a billion people all shouting “why won’t anyone pay attention to me?” all at the same time. The horror, the horror.
(I’m picking on Mr. Laporte here a little bit but only because I suspect he simply gave voice to what many others are hand-wringing over. In fact Mr. Laporte is one of the few worth paying attention to).
But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.
I think Mr. Laporte might be misunderstanding what happened to him in that he’s confounding “paying attention to Buzz” with “paying attention to me”. I suspect every time he posts to Buzz thousands of people read it, absorb it, click it, re-tweet it, and then promptly forget all about it. Like they do for everyone else. But no one’s sitting around thinking “Leo hasn’t posted in a day, two days, a week – the void in my life, oh how it grows!”
He’s right in that it’s lost, but that’s only because none of it has been designed to be remembered. Why would we?
