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How does HN handle its Eternal September so well? Discussion quality is still great and dang does a great job and introducing newcomers to the HN rules & cultur

How does HN handle its Eternal September so well? Discussion quality is still great and dang does a great job and introducing newcomers to the HN rules & culture.

lukan 3y ago
There also is rigerous downvoting and flagging of anything not fitting the general standard.
atombender 3y ago
I agree, he does a great job. But the last couple of years I've noticed a couple of worrying trends. First, there has been a huge surge in activity. Back in the day, 50-100 comments on a post felt like a big thread. Now we regularly see threads that are 500+ comments, sometimes even more (the recent one on the xz back door has 1,700 comments). Because of how HN paginates long threads, this encourages new commenters to reply to the top comment rather than adding new top-level comments. (In some threads, the entire first page is just the top comment and its replies.) In short, I'm not sure HN can sustain that many comments in terms of the reading and discussion experience. As a possible improvement, I'd like to see big threads having some way of "aging out" older sub threads and promote new comments. But at that scale, how do you even follow a discussion? HN doesn't have a "highlight new comments since last visit", for example. Secondly, there's been a significant uptick in lower-quality, low-effort comments. The regulars (some of whom are so active that I don't fully understand how they can be productive in their day job) are still keeping the quality high, and HN is still often the best place to get commentary that is superior to the article being commented on. But the quality drop is still noticeable, and I see an increase in comments that are low effort (memes, jokes, "lol", "this tbh" etc.), promote conspiracies, and so on. I suspect that with time, it's going to be increasingly harder to control the influx from other sites like Reddit without even more diligent supervision.

How does HN handle its Eternal September so well? Discussion quality is still great and dang does a great job and introducing newcomers to the HN rules & culture.

lukan 3y ago

There also is rigerous downvoting and flagging of anything not fitting the general standard.

atombender 3y ago

I agree, he does a great job. But the last couple of years I've noticed a couple of worrying trends. First, there has been a huge surge in activity. Back in the day, 50-100 comments on a post felt like a big thread. Now we regularly see threads that are 500+ comments, sometimes even more (the recent one on the xz back door has 1,700 comments). Because of how HN paginates long threads, this encourages new commenters to reply to the top comment rather than adding new top-level comments. (In some threads, the entire first page is just the top comment and its replies.) In short, I'm not sure HN can sustain that many comments in terms of the reading and discussion experience. As a possible improvement, I'd like to see big threads having some way of "aging out" older sub threads and promote new comments. But at that scale, how do you even follow a discussion? HN doesn't have a "highlight new comments since last visit", for example. Secondly, there's been a significant uptick in lower-quality, low-effort comments. The regulars (some of whom are so active that I don't fully understand how they can be productive in their day job) are still keeping the quality high, and HN is still often the best place to get commentary that is superior to the article being commented on. But the quality drop is still noticeable, and I see an increase in comments that are low effort (memes, jokes, "lol", "this tbh" etc.), promote conspiracies, and so on. I suspect that with time, it's going to be increasingly harder to control the influx from other sites like Reddit without even more diligent supervision.