4 ms·

I think the HN culture is slowly dying. Reflexive downvoting has become very common as of late, the eternal September is brining in more people steeped in polit

I think the HN culture is slowly dying. Reflexive downvoting has become very common as of late, the eternal September is brining in more people steeped in political hivemindedness. That isn’t to say all is lost, but this site feels markedly different from the beginning of the decade.

SolaceQuantum 7y ago
I would argue that HN culture is evolving within the culture it exists in. I don't recall the beginning of the decade having so many intersections of tech and everyday life. In the beginning of the decade, Google wasn't known to have paid off high level employees for sexual harassment, Facebook wasn't known to have hordes of contractors watching horrible stuff for their job, no one knew the good and bad effects of the 'gig economy' yet, etc. That is to say, I don't recall the beginning of the decade tech and politics to be so intertwined due to how tech has become more and more a part of people's lives.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  My problem doesn't come from topics but the discourse one finds in the threads themselves. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what the site exists for. Perhaps I'm just an old man yelling about "back in the day," but on these axis I feel HN is trending downward.
- 18pfsmt 7y ago
  I remember exactly where I was when I first heard NPR tell listeners they could visit "their FB" or follow them On Twitter in 2010. I got a visceral bad feeling. In the 90s, the prevailing wisdom was not to disclose personal info on the internet because it was understood that "the IP stack" was designed with maximum liberty and tolerance for all kinds of garbage (with personal tools to filter, and the assumption of personal responsibility). Comparing the dynamics of Usenet vs. FB is quite revealing and brings insight into the discussion about distributed vs. centralized power. We've dumbed everything down to the point of ridiculousness.
arethuza 7y ago
How do you know that downvoting is "reflexive" - certainly any time I've been downvoted it was, on reflection, fairly well justified.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Not the person you're replying to but I wrote a script to track when I got upvoted and downvoted and that parsed my comment tree for the past 24hr. The highest downvote to upvote ratios and highest downvote to comment tree depth increase (i.e. discussion happening) occur in the time periods of 12-1 and 3-4 US East coast time by a factor of about 2. Those are actually the only hours of the day when my account personally (the only one I was tracking) has an upvote/downvote ratio less than 1 (ratio was 1.5-2 for the rest of the day). Based on the fact that I would say that there certainly exists a group of users who "reflexively" downvote. An alternate explanation is that people who hate what I have to say are most likely to use HN during those hours. Both those options seems highly plausible to me. This analysis is about a year old and based on about 6mo of data. I have since lost the script and the records so don't expect any further analysis.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    Do you remember how you got the upvote/downvoted signal? We're you just polling the API and looking at the score?
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      I looked at my overall karma once per minute and keeping a running total in a text file as well as the increase/decrease from the last file. For comments I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed and whatever URL the "more" link was, found every comment of mine that was < 1 day old and then every comment not by me that was a reply to one of those and then listing the ids of additional comments by me and additional replies to my comments for that minute. Comments were tracked by ID to avoid duplicates. Pages were grabbed with wget and all the parsing was done with the standards linux/bash utilities
tunap 7y ago
I am afraid you are correct. As popularity rises, degredation of discussions(and never-ending o-t tangents) increase. A write-up of the quality mods in the New Yorker will not change that tide, IMO. It's not "goodbye" yet, but nevertheless, thanks for all the fish, Dang!
pjc50 7y ago
The external culture war is a serious problem for anyone running a functioning discussion site. HN keeps it at bay but ultimately everything interesting is in some sense political. The problem with the culture wars is making everything factional as well. Not to mention the rampant dishonesty and bad-faith arguing. As with Cloudflare, ultimately you have to pick a pro- or anti-Fascist stance, because unresponsiveness will leave you pro-Fascist by default.
rubidium 7y ago
Then the beginning of the decade yes... but really not any different over the past 7 years or so (source: HN reader since the beginning). 2007-2012: The first 5 years everything was new and cool and shiny and we were just going thru the economic crash. 2012-2017: growth and scaling. Slightly more political posts, but that's mostly because tech and politics mix a lot more then the previous 5 years. 2017-present: stabilization. An even mix of similar articles, voting sentiments, repetitive opinions. The main thing missing is actual NEW ideas. We get tropes on "AI will rule the world", "10 reasons we need universal basic income", "why self driving will/will run the roads in 5 years", "FANG is evil", etc... all very predictable dicussions. The revolution will not come from Hacker News : )
hoseja 7y ago
Would you say the article itself isn't politically hiveminded?
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
HN culture or SV culture? I suspect it may be far more a reflection of a) which continents are awake/asleep and b) the increasingly international nature of HN compared to early years. In its earliest years HN felt to me to be a decidedly American place, steeped in the politics, culture and views you might expect of its origins. Now, there's far more Europeans, Asians - and increasingly Chinese as HN apparently isn't firewalled. The attitudes to many things have moved to being more international, whether that's in terms of politics, healthcare and regulation, or simple corrections to the trivial but often fascinating things that are just done or viewed differently around the world. Sometimes the split shows up quite clearly with votes going one way when it's mostly the US awake, and quite another once Europe and Asia has had a chance. Early GDPR discussions were probably the clearest follower of this pattern. :)
JudgeWapner 7y ago
it's reddit-ization of the comments. Reddit -> facebook. HN -> reddit

SolaceQuantum 7y ago

I would argue that HN culture is evolving within the culture it exists in. I don't recall the beginning of the decade having so many intersections of tech and everyday life. In the beginning of the decade, Google wasn't known to have paid off high level employees for sexual harassment, Facebook wasn't known to have hordes of contractors watching horrible stuff for their job, no one knew the good and bad effects of the 'gig economy' yet, etc. That is to say, I don't recall the beginning of the decade tech and politics to be so intertwined due to how tech has become more and more a part of people's lives.

mieseratte 7y ago
My problem doesn't come from topics but the discourse one finds in the threads themselves. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. > Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what the site exists for. Perhaps I'm just an old man yelling about "back in the day," but on these axis I feel HN is trending downward.
18pfsmt 7y ago
I remember exactly where I was when I first heard NPR tell listeners they could visit "their FB" or follow them On Twitter in 2010. I got a visceral bad feeling. In the 90s, the prevailing wisdom was not to disclose personal info on the internet because it was understood that "the IP stack" was designed with maximum liberty and tolerance for all kinds of garbage (with personal tools to filter, and the assumption of personal responsibility). Comparing the dynamics of Usenet vs. FB is quite revealing and brings insight into the discussion about distributed vs. centralized power. We've dumbed everything down to the point of ridiculousness.

arethuza 7y ago

How do you know that downvoting is "reflexive" - certainly any time I've been downvoted it was, on reflection, fairly well justified.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Not the person you're replying to but I wrote a script to track when I got upvoted and downvoted and that parsed my comment tree for the past 24hr. The highest downvote to upvote ratios and highest downvote to comment tree depth increase (i.e. discussion happening) occur in the time periods of 12-1 and 3-4 US East coast time by a factor of about 2. Those are actually the only hours of the day when my account personally (the only one I was tracking) has an upvote/downvote ratio less than 1 (ratio was 1.5-2 for the rest of the day). Based on the fact that I would say that there certainly exists a group of users who "reflexively" downvote. An alternate explanation is that people who hate what I have to say are most likely to use HN during those hours. Both those options seems highly plausible to me. This analysis is about a year old and based on about 6mo of data. I have since lost the script and the records so don't expect any further analysis.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  Do you remember how you got the upvote/downvoted signal? We're you just polling the API and looking at the score?
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    I looked at my overall karma once per minute and keeping a running total in a text file as well as the increase/decrease from the last file. For comments I went to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dsfyu404ed and whatever URL the "more" link was, found every comment of mine that was < 1 day old and then every comment not by me that was a reply to one of those and then listing the ids of additional comments by me and additional replies to my comments for that minute. Comments were tracked by ID to avoid duplicates. Pages were grabbed with wget and all the parsing was done with the standards linux/bash utilities

tunap 7y ago

I am afraid you are correct. As popularity rises, degredation of discussions(and never-ending o-t tangents) increase. A write-up of the quality mods in the New Yorker will not change that tide, IMO. It's not "goodbye" yet, but nevertheless, thanks for all the fish, Dang!

pjc50 7y ago

The external culture war is a serious problem for anyone running a functioning discussion site. HN keeps it at bay but ultimately everything interesting is in some sense political. The problem with the culture wars is making everything factional as well. Not to mention the rampant dishonesty and bad-faith arguing. As with Cloudflare, ultimately you have to pick a pro- or anti-Fascist stance, because unresponsiveness will leave you pro-Fascist by default.

rubidium 7y ago

Then the beginning of the decade yes... but really not any different over the past 7 years or so (source: HN reader since the beginning). 2007-2012: The first 5 years everything was new and cool and shiny and we were just going thru the economic crash. 2012-2017: growth and scaling. Slightly more political posts, but that's mostly because tech and politics mix a lot more then the previous 5 years. 2017-present: stabilization. An even mix of similar articles, voting sentiments, repetitive opinions. The main thing missing is actual NEW ideas. We get tropes on "AI will rule the world", "10 reasons we need universal basic income", "why self driving will/will run the roads in 5 years", "FANG is evil", etc... all very predictable dicussions. The revolution will not come from Hacker News : )

hoseja 7y ago

Would you say the article itself isn't politically hiveminded?

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

HN culture or SV culture? I suspect it may be far more a reflection of a) which continents are awake/asleep and b) the increasingly international nature of HN compared to early years. In its earliest years HN felt to me to be a decidedly American place, steeped in the politics, culture and views you might expect of its origins. Now, there's far more Europeans, Asians - and increasingly Chinese as HN apparently isn't firewalled. The attitudes to many things have moved to being more international, whether that's in terms of politics, healthcare and regulation, or simple corrections to the trivial but often fascinating things that are just done or viewed differently around the world. Sometimes the split shows up quite clearly with votes going one way when it's mostly the US awake, and quite another once Europe and Asia has had a chance. Early GDPR discussions were probably the clearest follower of this pattern. :)

JudgeWapner 7y ago

it's reddit-ization of the comments. Reddit -> facebook. HN -> reddit