I have been lurking and reading on HN since 2016 (I never actively commented til 2019), and the spirit of discussion was outstanding then (2016-2020). The amount of high quality posts and discussions about the technical and operational sides of technology and the tech industry was astounding! Yet, something seems to have changed with the culture on this site since 2020 - it feels as if the site has become a parody of itself, with “edgy” hot takes, cargo culting around supposedly conventional knowledge, and the insane amount of “stanning” of certain figures gossip and a handful of companies.
The increase in political content as well has been a massive change on this site as well, and as this is a discussion board it is fair game for everyone to have a say assuming civility. Yet this civility does not exist - discussions instead devolve into a passive aggressive form of brawling, with no actual insights coming out from other side.
Finally, as someone who is friends with a number of YC founders, there has been a recent trend among batchmates to start creating false traction/“demand Gen” for their products by astroturfing comments and submissions. And this is without explicitly saying it’s a marketing post.
Big picture, it almost appears as if HN has become what Reddit felt like in 2015-16, which pushed me to this site itself, and it is extremely depressing for me to see a discussion board that has helped propel my career start to lose it’s low noise to story ratio.
I’ve never once seen anyone even remotely consider that they have changed in the years since they registered here.
It’s possible that you’re paying more attention to shitty posts than you used to or are clicking on more politically charged content. It’s possible that your overall standards for online communities have shifted as you’ve gotten older. Maybe the amount of time you spend on this website has changed, and your perception of The Discourse with it.
It’s also possible that virtually everyone has been made significantly dumber and more self-assured by years of exposure to social media.
It’s also also possible that the early 00’s-style “The only important value to uphold is The Immutable Value Of Decorum “ rule has been easily gamified by absolute assholes and self-styled Bond villain contrarians, which alienates genuinely nice people by making space for people to “just ask questions — POLITELY” about stuff like phrenology and thinly veiled race science.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2015-07-27
Is that so much different to now?
99 comments on the #2 story, the launch of Ethereum. (This surprised me, I had no idea of that date).
On politics:
The permissibility of political content is a change I've not enjoyed.
There's always been a US-centric approach to flagging, with US-politics getting a "pass" to the "no general news" rule if it's deemed important enough to the US audience. I've not enjoyed the fact that while a post about the elections in any other country would get flagged and hidden would be mass upvoted under the notion it's "important".
But I can accept this is a US site for a largely US audience.
But even taking that into account, generally politics hasn't been previously as allowed as much as it seems to be now.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
We even tried an experiment to reduce it for a week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404. It was a disastrous, hellish failure. But we learned a ton, so in that sense it was a success.
As for YC founders trying to game HN, that's also nothing new, nor is it unique to YC startups - all founders try to do this, or nearly all (probably the ones that don't are the ones whose content would be best for HN - that's an irony we struggle with in lots of contexts).
The question is whether these founders (YC or otherwise) are succeeding in gaming HN. If they are, or if anyone else is, I need to know about it. From my perspective, what I see are a lot of failures to do that—but of course that's subject to hindsight bias, or sample bias, or whatever the bias is where we're more likely to see the cases we caught than the ones we didn't.
I feel with all the web3 hyperbole Silicon Valley itself has become a parody of its former self. To me HN has always had a delicate mix of hard tech (e.g. "here's how I used X new API") and startup buzz. The latter was always in danger of taking over the former once everyone realised how coveted the top spot of HN is for traffic. Combine that with tensions over what Silicon Valley even is today... and here we are.
I'll often see a comment that says "A", and the top reply will say "'A' is factually incorrect" and not only would I and everyone else who isn't an expert on "A" benefit from knowing that 75 people upvoted the reply vs the 5 on the parent, but the parent commenter in particular would benefit.
I personally don't think there's a decline in quality on HN and to me, the politics end of things seems pretty calm for a large discussion forum on the internet. It's obviously not perfect, but it's as close as a public forum can get.
It is worth bearing in mind that everything always seems like it was "better in my day". I'm not here that long myself (maybe I'm the problem!) but going back four or five years, HN was kind of known in some online circles for its poor takes on certain subjects.
I'm very wary of any and all premises that try to "community up" HN. There's a lot of smart people here who weigh in on subject because they're well read in their own communities.
Note: obviously any association can be used to define "community" around, but hopefully my point is clear enough.
The thing is though, relative to other areas of the internet, the quality of discourse is still much much higher than average, and until memes and witty retorts become common in the comments, I feel like it's still going to be a place of good discussion for a long time to come.
The political commentary and "hot take" Substack self-promoters is an issue but we have tools for those.
If you want more focused tech, visit lobste.rs and other sites in that circle, but note that those sites have issues in the same vein.
If you want my personal opinion, I don't think there's much different between the population here today, and 10 years ago. It's merely that back then there were much fewer people, and stories lasted much longer on the front page, so people had a longer time to comment on esoteric postings about Erlang behavior, or someone's implementation of LISP. Now, a post about a person's fun project might barely touch front page and then fall down rapidly, because there's just so many other articles posted by other community members.
There probably aren't fewer smart/interesting people on HN than there used to be, but its possible they're just less likely to be seen often or voted to the top.
Of course I say all this as someone who started spending time here relatively recently, so its pure speculation on my part.
Also there is an obvious generational dynamics with HN being avoided by smart zoomers having better communities to fit into.
Maybe it's not terminal.
I do wish boards would use some more smarts to help manage the prominence of posts. Way back in the day Slashdot did this pretty well with being able to rate things as insightful, troll, etc, but they never imporoved their algorithm much after the initial design (and it sucked that only certain people could moderate at any given time). They also had meta-moderation. A lot of promising things. But Slashdot became horrible after a few years.
Examples: Brands like Apple and Tesla. People like Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump, and Joe Rogan. Diets like Veganism, Keto, Intermittent Fasting. Etc., Etc., Etc.. And that's before we even get into partisan politics.
It's not possible for people to be partial believers or skeptics or even show any sort of nuance with these groups. You're either all in or you're an idiot that should just go jump in front of a train. And threads are brigaded with this sort of bullshit, and dissenting opinions are suppressed with flagging and massive downvotes.
Compared to this, I have to chuckle at how mild and respectful the old hot-topic discussions were on things like copyleft vs permissive licensing. It's like comparing kindergarten tiffs with a supermax prison riot.
Politics has become more prominent because of people insisting that it has to be. "silence is violence" and even open software projects must take a stand on the issue of the day: the correct stance mind you; attempting to be neutral is the same as joining the Philistines.
Don’t forget the impact of COVID and everything else from the last few… years. Huge impact on the global psyche.
If I had to hazard a guess for a good word to describe large chunks of humanity right now, it would be “tired.” Maybe even “exhausted.”
Maybe the occasional Google stanning - but they are much more polarized these days.
I think the front page is increasingly dominated by programming and web-adjacent business, I wish people took some more interest in other aspects of business and technology.
For political content I'll grant a lot of stuff about cancel culture and dog pills get posted to new but it gets flagged before it makes it to the talk. My "reading between the lines" is that the people who post that stuff are offended (and think it is political) that anybody is talking about any subject other than cancel culture and dog pills for COVID-19.
For stanning do you mean Elon Musk? It's true that Musk gets talked about a lot on HN but he is not universally popular.
In terms of people doing marketing I do see two trends. (1) There is always somebody asking why their posts are getting automatically rejected when they post links to the same blog over-and-over again with the same account. They are always mystified at the idea that they should try to be a participant on the site that behaves like the other participants on the site (like link to somebody else's blog) (2) There are some firms that do the better form of content marketing (say pinecone.io) that post a lot of articles, some of which are high quality, some of which are filler. Some of those front page frequently.
Seriously though, I'm beginning to believe that this is the path of all general discussion platforms - jerks and morons infiltrate, and the rest of us fall for it.
I know that Hacker News has that stupid FAQ post saying that "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills," but (as I've said before), just saying it is not does not mean it is not. The Argument from Authority is philosophically considered the weakest argument. Also I've been here for nearly four years and think this, so I don't need to be insulted by being called a "semi-noob" for voicing similar concerns.
I don't necessarily blame Hacker News - I wouldn't say there are many places that aren't also in decline. Hacker News was a superior system, well-designed, but increasingly obviously fallible as all systems are.
It hasn't really changed over the past 5 years much, in my experience.
Edit: Hell site is a term of endearment. This place is the orange hell site, Twitter is the blue hell site.
The constant "it's capitalism" and "bosses want to ruin your life" and "Google/Apple want to spy on you" are just jaw-grindingly dumb.
Still HN is mostly about content tone rather than fact. And I think this is an effect of absolute value voting systems. On HN a 96 in favour, 100 against is a -4 post. Personally, I just use something like https://www.overmod.org/ to shut off people.
I've been here since 2013 and the quality of discourse has absolutely gone downhill, by a massive amount. The median link and comment are noticeably stupider than in the past.