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I've noticed a decline in comment quality the last months Not sure if I'm correct though.

• t-writescode 6y ago
  My operating theory is that isolation from the pandemic has made a lot of people on HN incredibly irritable in the last month or so. I see it at work. I see it on Reddit. I see it here on Hacker News. I’m taking some huge steps back from social media this week, myself, and also taking a week-long vacation. Edit: I’ve also seen it in myself.
• dfxm12 6y ago
  How many? 4? 24? 42? I noticed a decline almost Internet-wide since around the 2014 UK elections. I wish an opinion calling space exploration a waste of money was the worst of it.
  • howlgarnish 6y ago
    People have been moaning about the decline of discussion on the internet since 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
    • Tsiklon 6y ago
      In less than 3 weeks it will be the 10,000th of September 1993!
• Razengan 6y ago
  I’ve been noticing that for a couple years, along with downvote abuse.
• rossdavidh 6y ago
  So, that sounds like it could be frustrating, but one possibility is to try to find a metric for measuring it, to double-check your sense that quality is declining. Looking at frequency of [flagged] and downvoted leaves open the possibility that it is the sensitivity that has increased, rather than the quality decreased. So, you make a web scraper that brings to you a random sample of HN comments, without telling you the date, and you rate them as to quality. Then it stores the date, and your rating, in a datastore which you can analyze. There, you have just found a nice little project to occupy your mind less frustratingly than before. Once you do the analysis, either: 1) you discover there is no real trend, and can relax 2) you discover there IS a real trend, and you can bring us back that evidence, which would be fascinating