Is it just me or has the quality of links on HN improved significantly?
.. Especially the front page! I can't get enough reading the insightful articles and viewing the videos. If the content had indeed improved, what changed? What measures contributed to it?
EDIT: I mean the quality of tech/startups content. I usually ignore political posts.
I'd say it has definitely decreased significantly.
There's way more marketing posts and "tech news" which are nothing but barely informative opinion pieces around something. Quite a lack of quality content compared to years before.
Yes, I've also found that it has. The most likely reason is that either someone (mods) is vetting them to ensure that the high quality posts stay up, or maybe the community itself is doing the good thing by upvoting the good quality posts and downvoting the bad ones. Or maybe, its a combination of both!
No, I haven't noticed improvement, but my model of improvement may not necessarily be one that we share. I see a more thought-diverse community as an improvement. We learn from those who don't share the same views as us. Hacker News hasn't offered the opportunity for that to happen. I see valuable dissenting opinions buried at the bottom of the comments section all the time. This is for a variety of reasons, not just the opinions of the community. Two categorical reasons include architecture and design. Hacker News is designed to facilitate group-think. The timing of comment submissions and lack of nuance in the voting mechanism make it especially problematic for promoting thought diversity.
I think the more meta and wide ranging the subject matter, the better, because there's something for every user of HN to comment on, and oh do users love to snipe on specific sections of an article. Meta content is like crack for users. Narrowly constrained articles seem to be ignored.
Given that I'm a data engineer I have a bias towards this, but I love how many SQL articles have been posted lately.
The site still feels more inclined toward political discussion than it used to be. There were the occasional explosions like when Chelsea Manning was arrested and when Schwartz committed suicide, but the site used to feel more technical... at least to me. I have no hard data.
I would love to see demographic data on users and how they have changed over time as well.