HN Explorer

The decline of the HN Community

30 points by androvoid ↗ HN
I'm sad to say the HN community has deteriorated beyond tolerability. How can this be measured? By an increase in the use of logical fallacy, including ad hominem, appeal to authority, straw man, false analogy.

Even popular members of the community have fallen victim. You see it in the use of language like, "You haven't really thought it out." Linking to PG's older posts to help you make a point. Comparing a startup to another startup. Name calling.

I've noticed a decline in my interest to read comments. I still read the articles, but the comments are rarely worth bothering with anymore. At one time, I loved to participate in the discussion, but I suppose since the community has grown and the pace of the place has increased, people don't read the comments anymore, they just quickly respond with some quick criticism or thoughtless retort.

The post on the cover right now about skepticism being the default response is indicative of the negativity. It's easy to quickly attack something, but to think about it and understand the value in what is said is more difficult.

The homeless experiment is an example. Rather than discuss what was learned or the experiment, the top post just said, "It's impossible to understand homelessness without being homeless."

Perhaps that is true. Perhaps it is as true as "It is impossible to understand being an elephant without being an elephant." However, that does not mean that elephant studies cannot reveal some insights.

The individual took a big risk and ventured into a land foreign to many of us and wrote about it -- and got attacked -- quickly. Why?

I see this deterioration correlate with community size. The first posts on youtube are fake or some condescending remark to the submitter.

I'm sad. I loved this community. It was one of the only places on the web where truth was valued above all. Where science and reason and rational thought were the primary basis for discussion. Now it has degraded to fanboyism, cynicism, and logical fallacy.

The signal-to-noise ratio has simply degraded too much. PG, I wish you the best in turning the tide, but you're losing the best members of your community to the buzz of the mundane.

20 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 59.0 ms ] thread
electrichead
I don't see what was wrong with the first comment in the homelessness "experiment". It actually was a direct response to the article. It's all about sample size. You wouldn't make grandoise statements if your sample size was a miniscule section, regardless of the experiment. Spending 5 days on the streets wouldn't give you any idea of what it was really like to live there permanently.

I found the discussion on that article very lively, with good comments.

nollidge
Not only that, but even if the top post is unthinking, inflammatory crap, you need to keep reading. Someone will respond with an insightful criticism. Assholes seem to draw out the smart people.
minalecs
I agree for the most part , once any one site reaches a critical mass outside of its initial core group , this always happens. While I still enjoy the community, I do find that there are less and less articles about tech and startups and more about random topics. Just on the homepage now I see .. "The Sun is changing the rate of radioactive decay", "Things I've Learned from Traveling Around the World for Three Years", "An unusual linkage between solar flares and radioactive elements on Earth" .. etc. While all interesting reads, I would prefer to read about them through reddit rather than on hackernews.
wvenable
I agree. The best part about hackernews was it was all about startups, programming, and technology and it was well populated and intelligent. At first non-relevant topics quickly disappeared, then a few hung around, and now the site is approaching the level of reddit clone.

I think I'm going to go protest this now and flag every non-relevant topic on the front page.

tptacek
That's not a protest. That's what you were supposed to have been doing already.
wvenable
Definition of protest:

* a formal and solemn declaration of objection [check]

* express opposition through action or words [check]

* the act of making a strong public expression of disagreement and disapproval [check]

Maybe you are right in that I should have been doing that already but I didn't feel comfortable using the flag feature for anything that wasn't obviously off topic (like politics).

I've changed my mind -- I'm flagging any topic that is non-hacker science, politics, or random news. I'm also encouraging anyone who agrees to do the same. I flagged 8 posts on the homepage.

tptacek
(I voted you back up from zero).

Please: stop overthinking it. Use the button in good faith. I'm guessing it takes about 4 keystrokes for Graham to change the flag thresholds (either karma or flag-count) if this becomes a problem.

It is a much bigger problem that people don't use the flag button at all than the fact that some people might flag otherwise good stories.

milesf
How much karma do you need to flag stuff as non-relevant?
pclark
submissions like this help.
sofuture
Reasons for community decline, in order of magnitude: 1) Growth 2) People messily suiciding their accounts/participation in dramatic 'this-place-sucks-now' goodbyes in response to #1 3) Snarky followups to #2 4) This is soooo meta
itsalive
I disagree with this post. OP is a poopoo face. But what do I know, I'm just a burnt out software engineer looking for some interesting tech links.
tptacek
Respectfully (you posted anonymously, so I'm not sure this could be taken personally):

Navel-gazing comments like this have always been my least favorite part of HN.

There's no content here. "The best members of the community" --- who are they? Why are they the best? What aspect of their comments are being drowned out or replaced with the mundane?

Sure, there are answers to these questions. At least, things we can come up with, now that the questions have been posed. But your post doesn't address them up front. Instead, it spends much of its time dissecting a discussion of homelessness. I suspect that it's motivated more by dissatisfaction with one comment thread, rather than a careful consideration of the "Hacker News community".

Maybe we should consider carefully whether the deterioration of comment threads has something to do with the commenters, or whether it's a symptom of the site getting more permissive about the topics themselves. Maybe we shouldn't be spending our time talking about homelessness here.

samd
The points and comment sorting system discourages thoughtful posts in favor of quickly formulated quips which capture the mainstream view and are posted soon after the article is submitted. Like this one.
matwood
I have been wondering if others were noticing what the OP is saying. I noticed it on the last article about weight gain where I posted links to research and people whose job it is to understand and comment on that research showing that insulin is not some magic weight gainer or the boogey man. I simply got down voted, I'm guessing because the research conflicted their view regardless if they were based in fact or not.

I still like HN and just understand that every group at some point solidifies its own social mores.

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shiftb
I see one of these posts every few months. Yawn.
zavulon
I've been here from the beginning, and I disagree almost entirely. In my opinion, the quality of this community stayed remarkably high from the earliest days. While Reddit became a sad, sad place where dissenting opinions are quickly shut down by an angry mob, here we can actually have intelligent arguments without any name calling, where two sides seem to genuinely respect each other. I have not seen this in any other online community that got this big and existed for more than a couple of years.

It seems like most people here really do follow the "if you wouldn't say it to a person's face, don't type it", which is incredible.

As far as non-relevant links - yes, there's that. To me, most of those are still interesting, some of those are annoying. But - I've learned to just ignore the ones that I'm not interested in.

So - of course everyone is going to have their own opinion on this - but I think HN is still nowhere near "jumping the shark" point

jakevoytko
This is an open community, so you have power to make positive changes. Your post is a good start. There are several simple things that could help alleviate the problem. Point out the guidelines[0] to bad offenders. Subscribe to interesting blogs and submit the best posts. Flag content on the front page that needs to be flagged. Try to write insightful comments. Firm disagreement is fine, but try not to be a dick. Don't upmod dicks. And most of all, set a good example!

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

fgf
"Linking to PG's older posts to help you make a point." The notion that this is bad is baffling. Citation is central to all serious science it also has a place in other forms of (rigorous/serious) thinking. If a scientific article proves something you cite it. If I think you're wrong in a way described by someone else, I'll cite that. This isn't as neat. You prove very little. But you do show what you think about the matter. The aversion against doing this (wich is normal for those who spend a lot of time reading and thinking about for example policy) is strange. It's not an appeal to authority if you agree with it, if it can serve as a description of your position. The fact that pgs essays in particular get cited alot may just be that 1) a lot of people here have read them 2) they're densely argued (you don't expect a lefty to read hayek cause you say he should, a paragraph of a pg essay is more reasonable and 3) they are carefully argued, wich makes it more likely you'll agree with it than more bombastic works or works built on the assumptions and arguments of other people (wich isn't necessarily a bad thing but it does create additional points of failure)