Ask HN: Why has the quality of discourse on HN gone downhill?
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.
89 comments
[ 85.5 ms ] story [ 401 ms ] threadI 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.
I do not think it means what you think it means
https://incels.wiki/w/Dogpill
(1) a ‘dog pill’ as in ‘a pill for dogs’ as in ivermectin
(2) that document you mention which is one of the most remarkable expressions of postmodernism in that it parodies the rest of that Incel wiki and all of the literature of the social sciences going back to durkheim’s book on suicide. In short that document calls into question the possibility that you could understand anything about human suffering no matter how much rhyme or reason you use.
(3) the logical endpoint of the idea that you can give someone a ‘pill’ that alters their world view permanently and changes everything about them. With bad ideas you can make people storm the capitol building or drop out of school, work and life (e.g. happened to incels I know)
1 and 2 are both cases of 3.
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.
Going the way of slashdot.
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.
Other side: "We should arrest or do violence to trans people, because they are abominations, groomers, and freaks"
You: "You both make good points, who could say? The right answer is probably between 'persecute' and 'not persecute'. I am enlightened."
One side: "We should acknowledge trans people and let them live their lives"
Other side: "Yeah, but it seems unfair to biological females to allow trans women to compete in competitive athletics"
First side: "You're denying the reality of trans people, and should be silenced."
My stance on trans people is not what you characterize; but it is not relevant to this discussion. There are many places where one's stance on $(political_issue) is not relevant, and that does not automatically imply that someone is taking the side opposite yours.
This is a super common attitude across all areas of politics, that somehow being neutral is admirable or positive. That it implies an absence of partisanism, and is therefore preferable.
That's fine when you are talking about, say, which coffee chain you like. But in today's politics, the issues being discussed are fundamental human rights for various groups. Being neutral when there is a massive power disparity empowers those who hold the majority.
Aren't stakes in politics typically fairly high? I would figure a coffee chain level of concern would have to be an anomaly.
It's not saying both sides have good points -- it's saying we're talking about something completely different, and neither side is on topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
I'd still agree.
And yes, if someone can elucidate what HN Classic is, that would be cool. I assume it uses some older ranking algorithm that has since been swapped out?
Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Edit: I know, that it is a semi-noob illusion as he says and people have said it for years. I've been here for years and actually feel an increasing decline (and I don't think I am alone - this is like the second time this question has been asked in a week) - but the argument is used to shut down conversation regarding HN's decline rather than just keep newcomers in check.
I think we can pretty safely say that 13 years in, the transformation hasn't finished yet. So it's totally okay to discuss this (as clearly shown by this thread being on the front page), but if you want to make that argument, you should probably have more data points than a gut feeling.
That said dang does an admirable job.
Now, I just need to fix where it thinks cat video games are revenge porn…
It's possible that we have different interpretations of what counts as a flamewar, but the likeliest explanation is just that we don't see everything.
If you see a comment that hasn't been moderated and should have been, you can always let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
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.
But fundamentally the established community is just as online, just as self protective, just as memey as any subreddit on a specialized topic.
The more popular and more well-established a site is, the more likely it will be targeted for such. That's sadly inevitable. And evident here.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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.”
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.
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.
(1) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HALKHS4pMbfghxsjD/lesswrong-...
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.
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.
It has links to 2009-dated comments that HN is turning into Reddit.
To be objective, 2009 Reddit is not necessarily the same as 2022 Reddit. Maybe 2009 HN was turning into 2009 Reddit.
If HN and Reddit are both perpetually getting worse, and Reddit is perpetually worse than HN, then it always looks like HN is turning into Reddit; which then isn't a semi-noob ilusion.
:)
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.
Maybe the occasional Google stanning - but they are much more polarized these days.
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.
Yes, there's no question that this is a major force and you have to try to control for it if you want a hope of perceiving things objectively. (How? I have no idea.)
I sometimes call it nostalgia bias [1]. Things have always been getting worse [2].
It's the same reason why most people think that music was better during whatever period they were first bonding with music.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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.
That's a misperception. It hasn't changed (or rather, it has actually been tightened a bit). I wrote an explanation about this a few years ago, because the question comes up so, er, frequently. Perhaps it belongs in the FAQ.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
You claimed that politics isn't becoming increasingly tolerated, that it is merely a misperception.
That post is itself inherently (US) political. The GDP isn't posted here every quarter, so the posting of this one is a political statement.
Note also almost every top level comment is referring to (US president) Biden and the political nature of whether the US or isn't technically in recession; further evidence that it is a political post and a tolerance of politics.
It may be true that complaints about the increasingly political nature of HN are old. That can be true even if HN is slowly and steadily tolerating more politics. The former doesn't discount the latter. In fact a slow increase of political stories would lead to a long slow drip of people complaining about it, since it's increasing from a very low base.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263444
It's possible to show front-page for any given date since HN launched, or with a bit more work, to use Algolia to search to top submissions for a given date range. My sense is that quality's held up admirably.
Keep in mind that Usenet's peak was about a decade (~1985 -- ~1995), and HN's running at about 1.5x longer with far less degradation.
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.