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I think it's worse than that. Social media sites suffer from their own popularity as they attract new younger audiences. I think HN is suffering from its own

I think it's worse than that. Social media sites suffer from their own popularity as they attract new younger audiences. I think HN is suffering from its own success with a notable drop is comment / post quality. The first rule of HN is you don't talk about HN. ... also, if you've found a new forum, please let me know!

dang 5y ago
The attempt to avoid or at least stave off the traditional decline curve of internet forums is kind of the original idea behind HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=stave%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... I don't think this particular issue is related to new younger audiences, because—by inspection at least—the initial wave of objections isn't noticeably coming from newer users. I haven't specifically analyzed that though. Complaints about "notable" drops in quality go back all the way to the beginning of HN. Of course it's possible that they're all true, but that would be a lot of notable drops. Or maybe some are true and some aren't, in which case we're fluctuating within a range... or maybe they didn't use to be true but now they are true? That's of course what the person perceiving the "notable drop" always feels—but there are also other explanations for this feeling, such as sample bias and nostalgia bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20nostalgia%20bias&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It's pretty hard to establish anything objective about it. If I randomly look at past frontpages and past comments, they don't seem consistently better or worse (but see the previous sentence).

dang 5y ago

The attempt to avoid or at least stave off the traditional decline curve of internet forums is kind of the original idea behind HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=stave%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... I don't think this particular issue is related to new younger audiences, because—by inspection at least—the initial wave of objections isn't noticeably coming from newer users. I haven't specifically analyzed that though. Complaints about "notable" drops in quality go back all the way to the beginning of HN. Of course it's possible that they're all true, but that would be a lot of notable drops. Or maybe some are true and some aren't, in which case we're fluctuating within a range... or maybe they didn't use to be true but now they are true? That's of course what the person perceiving the "notable drop" always feels—but there are also other explanations for this feeling, such as sample bias and nostalgia bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20nostalgia%20bias&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It's pretty hard to establish anything objective about it. If I randomly look at past frontpages and past comments, they don't seem consistently better or worse (but see the previous sentence).