3 ms·

Okay, let's do a fair comparison, let's compare to the last Monday of July in 2015 to see what the top stories were then: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?da

Okay, let's do a fair comparison, let's compare to the last Monday of July in 2015 to see what the top stories were then: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2015-07-27 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.

dang 4y ago
> The permissibility of political content is a change I've not enjoyed. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
- xnorswap 4y ago
  @dang - This US GDP figures post [1] is an example of the "increasingly tolerated politics" to which I was referring. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263444
  - dang 4y ago
    That post would have been just as likely to appear on the old pg-operated HN as now. People have distorted perceptions of how things were in the past.
dredmorbius 4y ago
This. 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.

dang 4y ago

> The permissibility of political content is a change I've not enjoyed. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

xnorswap 4y ago
@dang - This US GDP figures post [1] is an example of the "increasingly tolerated politics" to which I was referring. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263444
- dang 4y ago
  That post would have been just as likely to appear on the old pg-operated HN as now. People have distorted perceptions of how things were in the past.

dredmorbius 4y ago

This. 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.