Virtually every blog post that makes it to the front page is full of shit. They're either folksy wisdom porn, or a novice who just discovered a minor technical detail that is superficially new information to the HN audience (and leads to wrong conclusions). But the real key is a clickbait title; it's the "shocked face thumbnail" of every YouTube video made today. We can't stop clicking on them.
The "wisdom of the crowd" is a combination of ignorance and mesmerization, and the result is a front page of dreck.
> Virtually every blog post that makes it to the front page is full of shit.
While I agree many posts are full of shit, I think it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are tons of HN posts that I find incredibly insightful and informative. The ones I like usually fall into 2 categories:
1. They are a detailed description of something the author actually did, and show a really cool solution or implementation of something. They don't always have to be jaw-droppingly amazing (though some are), but they just have to show that the blog post is the outcome of the work, not the other way around.
2. The author has been thinking about a problem for a while and brings a clear, informative, well-argued insight to the problem space. E.g. this post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507, is one of my favorites that helped me understand phenomena I was definitely aware of but hadn't yet tied together.
For me, this "folksy wisdom porn" is a cheap, bad, superficial version of #2 (FWIW, I think what you describe as "a novice who just discovered a minor technical detail that is superficially new information" is the cheap, bad, superficial version of #1). It has the veneer of some sort of deep insight, but when you actually get to the details and try to understand it, it either just doesn't make sense or is essentially word salad.
In response to this, I was going to craft a comment that critiqued the critiques and began with the same wording as the critiques but instead I'll say this...
A nuanced critique! - excellent.
Please, nobody reply to this comment.
> 1. They are a detailed description of something the author actually did, and show a really cool solution or implementation of something
This is certainly entertaining, and feels insightful and informative. But usually it is inaccurate, subjective, or wrong, because it's an individual non-expert's experience.
> 2. The author has been thinking about a problem for a while and brings a clear, informative, well-argued insight to the problem space
Again, feels like wisdom, but an armchair expert is not an actual expert, and "I thought about it for a while" is not the same thing as "academics critically discuss at length and come to a consensus".
In almost all cases, actual experts have actually studied a thing for a long time, or practiced it for a long time, and have actual evidence to go on. Blog posts don't - because real experts tend to publish in books and journals first (which are peer reviewed), not blogs. If the blog post isn't showing its work with a lot of evidence, critical study, and consensus, it's extremely likely to be bullshit.
I say all this because in the 16 years I've been on this forum, I can count on one hand the number of front page blog posts that accurately portray my field. I'm guessing the real information is not clickbaity enough, or it doesn't validate the biases and expectations of readers. However, the number of posts full of bullshit has been endless.