I'll chip in with the "2 worst things I hate about HN", since I enjoy being contrary.
1) The groupthink that arises in certain political/scientific/social debates. I find that the nontech debates here are more uniform and less varied than they are on sites with similar quality.
2) While the site's filtration is good, the fact that its only two lenses are "news" and "jobs" makes the community less flexible and, frequently, less engaging.
It's still easily a top three social news site, though, so I'll resume my lurking and quit being a pest.
I agree with the groupthink thing, there are some pretty well defined no-fly-zones for ideas and opinions, but given that the charter is more "be nice" than "get to the bottom of every issue", I'm happy to let things slide when I don't agree with the dominant line of thought.
I so far gravitate toward other sites to balance my conversational diet.
I think point 2 is a bit off. Normally the items that hit the front page are indeed news, but a largish percentage of the content is not new, just interesting to hackers and accepted because it hasn't been posted to HN in a while.
I meant "news" in the "social news" sense, where if it's new to me I'm fine with it. That said, it's a category that gets clogged with trivial announcements from YC companies, a lot of tech gossip that I don't care for, and articles on subjects I'm not interested in that other people really dig. I wish there was some system that would let me see what I wanted and remove the rest.
1) The groupthink that arises in certain political/scientific/social debates. I find that the nontech debates here are more uniform and less varied than they are on sites with similar quality.
2) While the site's filtration is good, the fact that its only two lenses are "news" and "jobs" makes the community less flexible and, frequently, less engaging.
It's still easily a top three social news site, though, so I'll resume my lurking and quit being a pest.