Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-timers starting to see the same shit over and again. Try giving it up for a few months, then come back and see if you still feel that way.
One thing that has happened, that I suspect may have ruffled some feathers, is that HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be. This is still a board for entrepreneurs before it is a board for hackers, but some of the more out-there John Galt type stuff will now get picked apart and downvoted, or even just ignored, where before you either clucked your tongue in agreement, remained silent, or donned your flame suit.
As an old-timer who used to be very active but isn't anymore I agree with you. When I first created an account 1883 days ago I thought this place was amazing, and that I'd never seen such high quality discussion on the Internet before. Now I don't find the quality to be quite as high, but after thinking about it I've realised what has changed: Me.
It's been 5 years, and I've changed. I've become much more knowledgeable than I was five years ago (partly because of HN) and obviously the barrier for what I find insightful has been raised. This is a natural progression in life, and it happens to everyone. Chances are that if you look at what you did 5 or 10 years ago you'll find it to be naive, shallow or obvious.
http://news.ycombinator.com/classic is a version of the front page sorted only by votes from accounts over one year old. Generally the ranking is not too different, at least for top items. (I know this is not the same thing you're talking about; it just reminded me of it. Also note that /classic was created at a time when there were far fewer accounts that old; perhaps a higher threshold would be more interesting now.)
Personally I've been here for 1472 days (3.5 years) and on the leaderboard for much of that time. I feel like the quality has gone through several up-and-down cycles, though some of that is probably because my tastes have changed too. Overall it feels much as it did several years ago.
Even old-timers rarely browse the /newest page to mod those up. This creates a bias favoring the ranking produced at /news because said old-timers will upvote those more than the ones at /newest (or /classic)
The problem is not only the home page ranking: it's the discussions. I see a lot of low-quality (as in "it's more important to be right than it is to debate in civilized ways") discussions. I did not correlate that to account age.
"... Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days? ..."
2024 days here @wensing, No.
Being here a long time doesn't confer any special status. All it really shows is curiosity and early adoption. Other than having seen a wider range of technology, topics, discussion and behaviour the one thing I've noted is the number of high ranking stories sans comments.
I'd really like to can articles limited to point threshold with no comments. No comments, no value & shouldn't get the chance to go up the story leader board.
Yep. I remember that when I saw the initial announcement (don't remember where), I grabbed my account name just incase I ever wanted to try the startup thing, trying to make sure that I could get my name rather than "some31337d00d_27".
It was on the reddit front page when pg made it public a long time ago. Well, 2027 days ago according to my created field. The only way to have an account older than 2027 days (as of today) is if you were in YC before news.yc was public.
Secondly, I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but that would actually be a very appropriate age cut-off for what strikes me as a remarkably elitist endeavor.
I'm at 730 days and I can support 1337 days, so long as I can read. I don't mind waiting just shy of two to be able to comment so long as the comment and post quality is exceptional.
TBH I'm fascinated to know how the community would differ from HN of 4 years ago, since all the older participants would be 4 years more experienced in life and hacking.
Or, as humans would say that, the cutoff could be the youngest of leaders.
However, that really doesn't answer the problem when you don't define what a leader is. If it's the highest amount of Karma past 7 days, then the youngest leader could even be a day old user. Please respond with solutions, not http wrappers.
If you go to the URL in the code, it defines what a leader is: the 100 people with the highest karma. By define get_leaders I meant write the scraper, not come up with the definition. Heh!
There has to be some element of truth in this. If I look at a post about javascript closures, and am as mind-blown as I was 5 years ago, I have failed as a programmer (or vim, or erlang, or whatever...).
I can't suggest that we try upping the "super deep"/"good intro or midlevel" stuff ratio, since there are always new people floating around who need to see this content to learn about it. And there are still plenty of good deep articles that float through here.
I work in a college department, I watch grad students come in each year, and the best graduate and move on. I have come to realize that it is just a necessary function of community to have to go through the "boring" set of discussions to get the new folks up to speed. These are more or less always the same. Its after the intro stuff that new and interesting things are taught, and the perception of the pace slows down. New stuff has been happening at the same rate forever, its just that "new to me" stuff has started to approach the "actually new" stuff rate. This can lead to quality seeming to go down.
I think this is true of every "kids these days are less worldly" article and the oft heard "favorite music/newspaper/other media isn't as good as it used to be." The world hasn't gotten dumber, you've just gotten better taste, and better at spotting bullshit that has always been there.
Making the claim that everything is objectively worse, back in my day everything was golden, get off my lawn, &c. seems to be easier than introspection for a lot of people. We are not impartial observers, nor are we immutable—we tend to forget that.
I don't have a citation for this (maybe someone else can help out there), but apparently there's ancient Egyptian scriptures with people writing about the youth those days were going to be the end of society, or something like that.
You are seeing the quality go down because YC requires applicants to join HN so now you have thousands of applicants who would have never joined if YC didn't required it. I believe this plays into the quality going down but I could be wrong.
Perhaps a clarification from anyone downvoting you as far as why you are being downvoted which I assume is because of this statement "quality go down because YC requires applicants to join HN"?
Or is it "now you have thousands of applicants who would have never joined if YC didn't required it." (sic)
For clarification, per PG:
"The first thing I notice when I look at an application is the username it was submitted under. If it's one I recognize for making thoughtful comments on Hacker News, I give the application extra attention."
So I can fully understand that while joining HN is not a dejure requirement to getting accepted to YC it certainly seems like a defacto requirement based on the above statement.
No one's complaining "too many usernames are taken"; people are complaining about the comment quality.
When you get a HN username to make a YC application, you're going to be hyperaware that you're here visiting pg's home turf. You'll either try really hard to post high-content, insightful comments, or you'll simply lurk. Either way, you're not likely to be wandering around urinating on the furniture.
tl;dr -- the requirement seems more likely to boost, rather than harm, comment quality - if it has any effect at all.
Maybe we just need an Erlang week. (or Haskell, which I'd prefer).
As people point out, HN may not have changed as much as people think it has. But it certainly wouldn't hurt to set the tone in the right direction in case there's any chance it has.
I have the impression the news is catered more towards silicon valley & YC people nowadays. Earlier HN was the best place for interesting tech & startup news. Now I don't really check HN that much.
To much dumb posts about something insignificant by somebody in SV or YC that are not interesting to me.
I do think that's their good right, to make their "own" new community ofcourse:) but then we have to look to other sources for quality tech & startup news.
Very good observation, mixmax. I've considered that too. Is my threshold heightening or is this material universally not of high quality anymore? We know, for certain, this DOES hold true in other cases. Falling in love is one example. In grade school, falling in mad love was much easier than it is now. Our level of awareness is much greater, and we consider many more things about a person (breadth) and whether we can see ourselves with this person down the line(depth). All this analytical thinking sort of prevents us from feeling and falling.
Back to whether the articles and comments on HN, as of late, are elevated enough to trigger intellectual gratification... to believe that after 1883 days, you've changed because you've soaked up all you can and must move on, is a disservice to yourself and to HN. If not HERE, then WHERE? It is the responsibility of our seasoned users, particularly like you, to keep the morale and the quality of this site as high as possible. Plus, users like you are what make this site valuable. You (and users like you) are the adequate benchmark beside which we can measure the quality of the articles. Moreover, the world of knowledge is a vast and limitless ocean, much of which (I'm sure) still remains for you to be discovered. And the nature of this web site and what it is intended for still works. All that needs to be done is to match the growth of the audience by growing the material proportionately. This proposal to use karma as currency makes a lot of sense. Before, the karma was meaningless anyway. This structure puts the karma to good use and forces everyone to contribute mindfully. Cheers to the original poster. I hope it's implemented.
Oldhead here as well. Yeah, the magic of discovering this place back then was incredible, and the discourse so intelligent. There was more of a kinship I felt with the old squad; I really cared what everybody thought and was much more engaged. I miss the old group, a very small village. There are newer posters who are just as intelligent, but the S/N ratio has definitely declined. Or maybe I've just changed.
This happens on many sites, and in many cases I'd attribute it less to a reduction in "quality," and more to a decrease in homogeneity: a successful site attracts more people, with increasingly disparate backgrounds.
For the original users, who were charmed by the fact that "everybody has (more or less) the right opinion, and we can discuss rather than argue!" this can be a shock, but I'd venture that it's often actually a rather healthy thing, even if you unfortunately also get more trolls and flamers along the way. Pleasant as it is to talk with one's close peers, one can often learn more by talking to people one disagrees with...
It can go bad, of course, but HN certainly doesn't seem to show the usual symptoms of an internet cesspool; based on my short time on HN (~1 year), the S/N ratio isn't bad at all.
I was thinking we could prove this with a blinded quiz: show you a post with no date or author, ask you to rate the quality, aggregate the results.
But it'd probably be too difficult to truly blind it; posts would reference startups or frameworks that didn't exist five years ago, or Obama, or other anachronistic events.
Here's a proposal. Add the ability to filter out users based on their membership date. You could theoretically use this to associate yourself with people who have been around HN as long as you have. Even setting a minimum threshold to something like 100 days or a year would definitely reduce a lot of noise in the "new" section.
One of the best parts to me is the data is already stored and it has a very high cardinality, so it would work exceptionally well as an indexed field.
I feel like there was a fast slide to content-free echo chamberism a while ago. HN was starting to become painfully predictable if it didn't talk about:
- Apple in glowing terms
- a LISP
- how massive overvaluations were not a bad sign
Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments and the fanboyism towards a few specific companies, products and people was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Anything that even smelled like dissent was downvoted until you couldn't even see the comment with a flashlight and a 100' rope.
Then a few things happened and it seemed to slowly wind down and I think even reverse. The quality and content of HN seems remarkably improved in the last year:
- Karma became invisible
- Steve Jobs passed away
- Gruber posts started getting flagged
- Android came neck and neck with iOS then surpassed it, then Apple started suing
- a few overhyped, overvalued, overinvested-in companies popped in very public ways
In fact the discussions about the above things have been some of the most spirited, invigorating discussions on HN in a long while. But the other posts and discussions on other topics started getting better as well. Sure the focus of HN has somewhat changed a bit since the old, small community, days. But a few internal and external factors seems to have kept the ship upright.
So, you don't seem to like posts about Apple but you do seem to like posts about Android. Isn't this the whole 'problem'? People only object to posts they don't want to see, so to a fandroid any post about Apple proves that HN is full Apple fanboys.
It's not posts about Apple per se. Apple makes fantastic stuff. It was the out of control community fawning and over reactionary responses to the slightest critical comment that was the problem.
A year ago even commenting that anything was wrong with any Apple product was met with derison, scorn and a flock of downvotes.
For whatever reason, the tone here has changed tremendously for the better so that this community can actually have serious, educational and productive discussions, and even present respectful competing opinions here. It was frustrating, but frankly it was boring as hell also.
I really think the turning point was the moment that pg turned off the points.
I find it extremely funny how any small of hint of criticism of Groklaw's 'analysis' or the sacred PJ was met with instant whiting out of the comment, but now that Groklaw took Google's side against Apple, comments, critical of Groklaw comments get a bunch of upvotes or at least are not flagged to death.
General rules I have noticed even after points stopped being show are (mostly regardless of the actual facts):
Take Apple's side(except if it's against Google) = upvotes
Take Google's side(except if it's against Apple) = upvotes
Take an anti-MS stance = upvotes
Take a non anti-MS stance: downvotes or no upvotes
I bet you can literally farm karma by following the above rules, based on seeing some posters' karma.
Mentioning religion is guaranteed downvotes, unless the thread is about depression or suicide. That's the reason that I am a 95% (or more) lurker rather than poster. I loved HN when it first came out, but the heavy anti-faith undercurrent is off-putting.
There are quite a few Christians here. I've made connections with many of them.
It's true that you are in a sense a guest of materialists in communities like these. I've found the only helpful thing is to make individual, atomic points or to write on a topic about which my conversant has no opinion. To say anything that is built on premises recognized and disputed by another is asking for a huge headache and yes, the CS training here greatly outpaces study of metaphysics.
Take heart and spend most of your time here talking about programming!
Most of my conversations here have been of a technical nature and that's fine, as I am both a geek and a pastor. I am just disappointed that off-topic conversations are welcome unless they enter the spiritual realm. Oh well, I have plenty of venues to show my spiritual side. I'll just keep it technical here, but it feels a little stifling to have to always keep it inside. Not that I want to bombard HN with matters of faith, but to never be able to mention it at all seems unrealistic.
Are you saying that it was more religion-friendly in the "old days"?
I don't think I've ever seen a single religion-related comment on HN, so I'm not sure where you see a "heavy anti-faith undercurrent". Isn't it more likely that religious discussion is just off-topic here, so we don't see much of it?
Any conversation that mentions evolution triggers it.
As for the old days, I don't recall it being an issue, but that could be because I have a bad memory or that previous work environments were hyper-sensitive about posting to websites (or some combination of both) so I didn't get involved directly.
> Any conversation that mentions evolution triggers it.
I've noticed the same trend. Even if no one questions or faults the point(s) being made re: evolution, a vitriolic jab at religion (particularly Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism) is quite common in the comments.
This is a loss. To quote Richard D. Alexander (professor of Zoology at Univ. of Michigan and an evolutionist):
"...indeed, at this moment creation is the only alternative to evolution. Not only is this worth mentioning, but a comparison of the two alternatives can be an excellent exercise in logic and reason."
As an ex-atheist who previously believed in evolution and is now a young earth creationist, such conversations have the potential to be very interesting. Sadly, they end up with subtle (if you're lucky) or less subtle jabs about how believers are all anti-science and uneducated and just want to brainwash people, especially children. And that is generally considered to be the ultimate slam on creationists from which no recovery is expected.
I have a comp.sci degree, spent much of my teens getting excited about meta-physics and still love science, especially astronomy and am loving the Mars missions ... how's that for anti-science? :-)
Unfortunately even if you are willing to debate evolution intelligently, almost nobody else describing themselves as a creationist is. This leads to a general feeling of, how shall I say, beating our heads against the wall when talking to these people, because they refuse to accept any evidence we offer.
As always, people holding the most extreme views color the perception of the whole community - even if most people who believe in creationism are perfectly willing to have an intelligent conversation and have no problem with their kids learning science, the vocal few that campaign ferociously against science in education make everyone on that side look bad.
Unfortunately nobody in the "sane" segment of the religious community seems to be speaking up against them or reining them in, which is why it is so frustrating.
I am sorry you had to deal with outbursts against your religion however - it can't have been too pleasant.
Back before I was a pastor (5'ish years ago) I used to blog regularly and often got into tussles with atheists, so fear not, these guys are just big ol' pussy cats compared to them.
I guess the emotion I want to express is sadness, because I expected better from thinking outside the box hackers and startup founders. No worries. I'm fine, the Lord still rules the universe and I'll be done with being bi-vocational at the end of this month. Life is good! :-)
> As an ex-atheist who previously believed in evolution and
> is now a young earth creationist
> loving the Mars missions
How on earth do you reconcile this? The mind boggles, although it might just be me missing a healthy dose of sarcasm here.
In any case: No, not all discussions of this type are in fact potentially interesting, enlightening, or fostering a culture of whatever. Telling yourself that is feel-good nonsense. Sometimes, debating the merits of creationism simply means lowering the level of discourse. Debating the merits of current evolutionary science is, of course, both admissible and valuable; considering creationism (esp. of the wildly implausible kind) a viable alternative is simply misguided.
Don't waste time when there are actual problems to be solved.
No sarcasm on my part. There is no problem reconciling any part of my statement. Why does it seem strange to you for a Christian to be interested in Mars? The scriptures teach that God created the heavens and the earth and the stars and by inference the planets. I find them very interesting, as apparently do the good folks at NASA and their sponsors the U.S. government.
The rest of your comment then wanders off further into the very attitude that I was commenting on, so thank you for illustrating my point. Discussing creationism does not lower the level of discourse, rather, dismissive attitudes such as yours, stifles intelligent discussion. You could have asked how I came to transition from professing evolution to embracing creationism, but instead you use words like misguided. I don't see any evidence that you'll care, but it was a thoughtful process and we could have discussed it. Looks like my personal policy of silence is the less misguided one.
Outside of my day job, I am a pastor (check my HN profile), so I also work on solving actual problems in my community and my congregation.
It seems to me his problem is was not so much with the Apple posts (except Gruber's which he calls out specifically), but rather the quality of the comments in Apple related discussion.
(I cannot say that I have noticed an increase in the number of Android posts here, but there does seem to have been a change in the tone of discussion.)
HN consists of a lot of actively voting and flagging Apple and Google fans(and employees) with >50% using Apple products. Thus most posts critical of them get flagged down. Microsoft friendly posts, comments or even product announcements? Not a chance, even if they get a few votes initially, they get flagged off the front page, whereas negative news go straight up.
In fact, http://winsupersite.com (run by Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott) has been flagged so much that it is has been hellbanned even from being submitted at all for the crime of being a Microsoft inside news site. This would be hilarious if it weren't sad commentary on the nature of the HN community echo chamber.
"HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments"
It would be interesting to test the same thesis that I have which indicates there is a halo effect on anyone considered a rockstar which allows them to get more upvotes than they would w/o the rockstar status.
This is of course the way life operates. The only question is to what extent it happens. People tend to pay more attention to someone who has the trappings of success and/or has had their ticket punched.
My guess is that a long thoughtful comment by a new user or non rock star would gain almost the same upvotes as the same long thoughtful comment by a HN rockstar.
However a short comment, I'm fairly certain, (and once again this would have to be tested) would generate more upvotes from the rockstar then it would by a new user or non-rockstar. The gap would be much wider.
I go back to the days when karma was visible and there was a clear and easily visible "rockstar" effect. I learned early on, from personal experience and watching other posts, to not disagree with a rockstar as it was likely to lead to being downvoted to oblivion.
I once disagreed with a rockstar member (someone currently in the top 10 or so on the all time karma list) and had to delete my comment quite rapidly as I was getting buried. My comment was not personal or flaming in any way - just a disagreement.
Since hidden karma I think voting is far more fair.
I too think that HN is better in many ways than before, although I would say the noise ratio has increased. Still easily one of my favourite news and discussion forums.
This is one of the few things that 4chan has right - by removing names, you take ego entirely out of the question.
Then, to avoid turning into 4chan, you can have posts be anonymous on the front end, but accountable to a user id on the back end only visible to the user themselves and the site staff.
But then it's nice to know you're at least talking to the same person over several comments. In 4chan you never really know, because anyone can claim to be op or to have written any other comment.
A good idea but I think it would have to be random and blind where the poster didn't know when it would happen to them. Would take considerable work so most likely the admins would not go for it.
Perhaps a random anon on a comment here and there to test on a rolling basis.
I think Karma being invisible is a huge factor. While I understand the idea behind the decision, I think it prevents the community from really seeing what its broader sentiments are.
More than that, I don't want to read all the comments. I just want to read the good ones. Without knowing which comments are good, I read the first set and move on to the next story.
Agree completely. I skim the threads in each post now, which is a shame because I'm sure I miss some good points.
To fix this, I would like to see threads bubble up to the top based on total karma score for the thread. Read the top half-dozen threads and you have a pretty good synopsis of both sides of the topic.
"Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments"
Except this, I agree with most of your comment. Most of the time I just up vote a good comment with out my eyes sliding to the poster's name (it provides me no meaningful information in most scenarios). Still, the comments I do up vote end being from the rock stars you are referring to. It's possible that they are able to put their thoughts into comments better than others. Since most of the names don't trigger a face to most people I don't see how this could be due to bias.
Most of the time I just up vote a good comment with out my eyes sliding to the poster's name (it provides me no meaningful information in most scenarios).
I do as well. I rarely pay attention to the handles on the site. There's probably less than a dozen I can remember on sight. The reason I do remember the names I recognize is because they used to consistently and always be at the top of the discussion.
Still, the comments I do up vote end being from the rock stars you are referring to.
I'm certainly not saying the folks on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders don't deserve to be there. By and large, I think most of the folks there provide tremendous value to this community (even the ones I vigourously disagree with on a routine basis).
But I've also noticed that it seems since pg turned off the points, the names I see at the top of a discussion are more and more ones I don't recognize, and more and more ones that aren't on the leaderboard (and even if the leaderboard members aren't the topmost comment, they usually show up near the top because they provide good comments).
i still feel the hn engine is optimised for expounding rather than discussion. the threading is nice, but in the absence of a reply notification, and with the nesting depth capped, having an actual discussion tends to be difficult.
It's true. There's no use replying to a comment that's a few days old, because I won't expect even the commenter to page that far back on their comments page, so likely nobody will even read it (given that it's far enough down the page).
Not really. People on both sides are just repeating the same discussion over and over again. Somewhat guilty of that myself, too. (disclaimer: generally not on Apple's side)
(also, maybe I'm reading it wrong but is the Steve Jobs remark not a little bit in bad taste? no matter your thoughts of him or Apple... )
I've predominantly been a lurker here for quite awhile (my account is only a few hundred days older than your own) and I feel the quality is down from when I joined. Contrary to most people's opinions though I never felt the quality was all that high to begin with. I think the users here vastly overrate their contributions.
I enjoy HN as a nice source of interesting links and stories to read on my own time. Yet I find that I can't make it through even half of the comments on any given thread that is popular. It's too difficult to squeeze out the insightful stuff. I tend to just keep track of several regulars via their comments feed and try my best to avoid the chatter of the masses anymore.
My biggest personal pet peeve since I first joined here back in August of 2008 is when bigger threads devolve into tangential side arguments about who is using ad hominen, straw men tactics and other meta discussion methods. When half of the comments are about someone else's commenting technique the thread has gone into the weeds for me.
I'm relatively new here so I readily admit to having a very limited perspective: I used reddit years before I came here, and now I use reddit for just a few specific subreddits; HN has more than enough technical and bigger-picture pieces to occupy me. Certainly, the discussion threads are consistently of the highest quality, so much that I have to fight to read the OP first rather than jumping to the comments. I also admire the mod philosophy of discouraging off-topic, even if clever, posts...it's a fine line between cultivating fruitful discussions and being overbearing, but HN seems to do it better than just about anyone else.
I think it's a universal trait among communities to think that things were better back then. Maybe they were, but part of that mindset is out of a natural regret of years passed and nostalgia. But it'd be interesting to see more data about the quality of HN...obviously it's not easily contained in a metric, but some analysis of discussion length, upvotes per user, upvotes in a time period, distribution of top posts among domains, etc. would be a place to start.
A couple of months ago, someone started an epic discussion about how HN was going downhill. But the crux of his complaint was that people weren't giving him enough positive feedback, and he saw the non-glowing reviews of his two projects as negative sniping. I checked out his two sites (one was defunct, the other didn't seem to have much presence) and the various links-to-them that he posted. There was very little, if at all, sniping, and there were at least a few very constructive, helpful comments. It was disappointing to see so many users, including pg, jump into agreement with the disenchanted user. His overall argument may have had merit, but the reasoning and experience he used to get there were questionable.
But back to the OP: I think a -1 karma per link isn't a bad idea at all. OTOH, I think the (as I've perceived it) penalty for posting too frequently also fulfills that role.
HN is definitely still a great place for discussion. I think the main problem right now is how impossible it is for the average user to get good feedback on their startup using HN. Many people on this site remember the old days when anyone could post a 'Show HN' and it would almost surely receive some really thoughtful, interesting feedback. When it comes down to it, that is what people are truly lamenting.
Today, 'Show HN' posts quickly fall out of the newest page (buried beneath an avalanche of a lot of useless link spam).
See my post yesterday, which fell off the newest page in under 10 minutes:
Or when people do comment on these posts, sometimes it is done so in a passive-aggressive way, more like a 'take down' than a thoughtful comment with advice and constructive criticism. This is not always the case, but it does seem more common than it did in the past.
I also haven't noticed a problem with bad comments. I've noticed a problem with bad submissions making the front page (political stories, mostly; we never used to see those), but the comments on other stories are still fine.
Right at this moment, actually, HN looks a lot like HN of old. There's one vaguely political article (Google fiber), but it's about a technical topic. There's nothing about BitTorrent, only one about Bitcoin (it's even technical!), nothing about Apple, and only this one complaining about how HN has changed. There are three Show HNs.
I think the comment quality is up to good standards in the current frontpage articles. For this reason addressing comment quality is putting the cart before the horse.
It seems like there should be some sort of corollary to "endless September" - an endless parade of suggestions on how to "fix" a community and nostalgia for the past.
You've got a point. I wonder if there's a good name for the cognitive bias that is captured by the joke, "Everything has always been getting worse." I have a pet theory re why this bias is so common: having been part of something before other people joined it is valuable identity currency. It makes you feel special and better. Best of all, it can never depreciate. Some things do get worse, but the discourse around it needs to be discounted – pretty sharply, I think – for this bias.
But it's kind of fun to see an HN metathread of the sackcloth and ashes genre in which the majority of commenters are being so sanguine.
I've been around for 1012 days and I can say that I still click on the "Comments" link before I click on the story link. Often the comments give me more detail or more meaningful discussion than the original article. After I read (some) of the comments I decide if I want to open the article link or not.
Compare that to reddit where I go to find links but never open the comments because the comments are useless and have no value to me at all. The comparisons to reddit are completely baseless. HN is still the best place I've found for intelligent discussion.
Neither post is arguing that there aren't still some substantive comments on HN. There are. But I've noticed a lot of posts that aren't trolls but that don't add anything valuable. Those, in some ways, are the worst kind: not quite bad enough to ban / delete, but not good enough to add real content.
I've been here for nearly 3 years, and I've been fairly consistently active over that time. I completely agree with you. The quality of discussion here hasn't changed that much at all.
As a whippersnapper who only signed up 1141 days ago, I believe the quality of the best commentary is still as good, though the bottom has gotten bigger and worse.
So far, good filtering that bubbles the best comments to the top is working at keeping the discussion readable. I find I no longer tend to bother following the comments all the way to the bottom, since that's where all the crap accumulates.
off-topic: I though it was called _Hacker_ News because it used to be a hacking oriented board. Apparently it has always been for entrepreneurs, so where does the name come from?
If you read Jessica Livingston's "Founders At Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" published around the same Hacker News came into being, the connection will become clearer. The founders interviewed in the book were (mostly) hackers who created notable products and companies -- it's their stories of how they became entrepreneurs.
Originally it was called "Startup News". PG announced he was making a new site not focused on startups, since that got kind of dull. Instead he changed the name of this site and nothing really changed. My memory is kind of vague, but I believe that is more or less accurate.
Is there a compsci oriented discussion forum with comaparable quality as HN in terms of discussions without the entrepreneurship bias? I would love to know and start following if a such a thing exists.
I still read Slashdot our of habit, but the technical content of the conversation is gone. It's mostly predestriant gripes about technopolitics and copyright/patent/microsoft/apple/google rantng.
reddit has a /compsci that is pretty good, and /programming gets pretty much all the same technical articles hn does without the entrepreneurship ones.
Are there any good subreddits for "patio11-esque" content? Not hard CS, not vc startups, not /r/SEO, but kinda the marketing/small-online-business thing?
LtU is extremely academic -- they expect Ph.D-level discussion in the submissions and comments. Which is wonderful, but mostly inaccessible to non--progrmaming-language-PhDs
From the news submission guidelines -- "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
But its the media's interpretation that made it popular and widespread, which is the only reason any of us care to "take it back". Seems rather ironic to me.
The self-identification with the term "hacker" (in the good sense) is pretty strong amongst a lot of people from "those days." The co-option by the media to mean something else was an annoyance, but really hasn't changed that a whole lot.
In other words, it's a personal issue, and nothing to with popularity per-se.
It's like you and a group of childhood friends called yourself "the bucket gang" or something, to the degree that this usage pervaded your personal communications. If suddenly the media started using that term to talk about terrorists or something, you and your friends would probably be annoyed, but it probably wouldn't affect your personal usage, because the connection is already simply too strong; you wouldn't suddenly start using this personal term more often because of the media co-option.
It seems to me that those trying to take it back now aren't the same ones that identified as (good) hackers 30 or so years ago (with a few exceptions I'm sure). The 20-somethings that are fighting for it now are too young to have known the original meaning. They are drawn to the word because of the power it has in our culture. But that power is tied to the negative meaning. It seems disingenuous to argue for its original meaning when the negative meaning is all you've ever known.
> HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be
As long as 2-3 years ago, I still got massively upvoted at times for (thoughtful) criticisms of Ayn Rand. The real problem used to be the transhumanists.
It's just a function of the increase in topic breadth.
When you get to articles about technical details, I still see the quality comments as before.
It's just that there are more tech-fashion articles and "bitch about the policy of company X" articles and political articles where comments inherently trend much more toward the subjective and thus half the audience is certain that half the posts are 'crap'.
And the audience pulled in by that growth in topic breadth still reads the more-technical articles. So the vaguely political/tribal quips that I'd always noticed strewn about in even the technical threads are no longer politely ignored, but become points of tangential debate.
I fully agree. Yet the OP and others like it keep getting upvoted (it's currently #1 on HN) some some people agree with the fact that HN is sliding. When I look at comments of that sort I see that they are generally based on "I feel", "it seems", etc. There must be tons of people on HN working on text analysis, twitter sentiment analysis and related, why doesn't someone come up with an analysis to back up that claim or to refute it. Then, at least, we would have something concrete to discuss like the methodology of the experiment and the HN data used.
These conversations about the declining conversation have been happening for at least the last 3 years since I started reading. I wonder how soon after the start of HN the first of these conversations came up.
One thing that has happened, that I suspect may have ruffled some feathers, is that HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be. This is still a board for entrepreneurs before it is a board for hackers, but some of the more out-there John Galt type stuff will now get picked apart and downvoted, or even just ignored, where before you either clucked your tongue in agreement, remained silent, or donned your flame suit.