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I think there could be an aspect of social cooling contributing to decreased per-user engagement. I find myself considering my online comments more carefully n

I think there could be an aspect of social cooling contributing to decreased per-user engagement. I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms.

rezonant 2y ago
Hard agree- a lot of people just opt not to at all- that's what I usually do (other than HN). And when you do decide to go ahead and participate, the energy it takes for each post is a lot higher- you have to consider every contingency you can think of and make sure they all check out. And none of us know if we're going to be wrong when they unearth these posts and pin them on us later, unfortunately.
ryukoposting 2y ago
> I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms. I find myself doing this, but I chalked it up to aging and the reality that I may eventually have no choice but to work for one of the companies I have ridiculed online.
osm3000 2y ago
> I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms. I am curious, why is that? Is the medium less safe than before (e.g., unpleasant interactions)? Or is it a high effort to engage in a discussion, and perhaps there are other priorities now? Perhaps something else
- ryandrake 2y ago
  I have found myself doing the same. 1. I use my real name, which has a strong cooling effect on the kinds of stuff I write. I'm not going to get into a flame war or say career-ending things under my real name. I do this deliberately to force me to keep my responses as high quality as I can. 2. As I temper what I write based on today's norms and taboos, I also have to think about (guess) what might be taboo in 10, 20, 30 years. Assume HN will be searchable forever. People today have a habit of drudging up things that their opponents wrote decades ago, and measuring them against today's (more restrictive) yardstick. I've told jokes back in the 90s that were benign and funny then, but would get me fired today. Imagine people decades from now reading the innocent things I am writing today and how they will be offended by it!
  - osm3000 2y ago
    Yeah that is sensible. It is one thing that I miss about the internet back in the early 2000s. I am still a bit conflicted tbh about what to do concerning that. The accounts don't really get deleted, and it is not far-fetched to imagine tools that correlate the styles accross multiple accounts (so, one mistake, and the identity is unveiled).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
bane 2y ago
I know that participating on HN has made my comments on all forums more thoughtful, less hyperbolic, more serious, and generally better considered. The reasonable rules, excellent moderation and the community culture here have been excellent teachers. The voting mechanism helps me gauge if my comments are reasonable (I don't care about the magnitude but more the negative/positive score telling me if I'm off the rails). Perhaps a similar effect eventually takes hold on many of the contributors, and for the ones who can't moderate themselves to the culture here, I guess they'll recess into lurkers or simply go away elsewhere.
- rezonant 2y ago
  > The voting mechanism helps me gauge if my comments are reasonable (I don't care about the magnitude but more the negative/positive score telling me if I'm off the rails). This is my sense of why pg picked a balance number, not a + and - number separately.
pvg 2y ago
The "decreased per-user engagement" evidence in this post is a bit thin. Mostly based on a kind of strange apparent outlier of accounts going idle (1+ year) in 2023 but the binning is also a full year and the 'idle year' is counted in a weird clippy (i.e. looking at calendar year rather than elapsed year) way. So it's one (aggregate) data point at the very end of the data. It might not be wrong but it feels somewhat iffy to draw conclusions from.
- osm3000 2y ago
  > Mostly based on a kind of strange apparent outlier of accounts going idle (1+ year) in 2023 Well, it is just outliers in 2023. This is an upward trend since 2020. > but the binning is also a full year and the 'idle year' is counted in a weird clippy (i.e. looking at calendar year rather than elapsed year) way Granted, and I acknowledge this limitation. My idea, however, is that when studying many users in the same manner, this will even out. Why? Because a full calendar year implies somewhere between 0-2 elapsed years. So the average elapsed year, over many users, is 1 year.
  - pvg 2y ago
    The upward trend is much smaller than what happens in 2023 so that looks worth looking into. When you have this one outlier and one year can actually mean two years, it's not completely clear how much of the outlier is actual outlieriness and how much is some accidental artifact.
    - osm3000 2y ago
      I will double check. I see your point
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - osm3000 2y ago
      Hey, I double checked. I don't really see an issue. The only specific thing that affects 2023 is that I removed the users seen / last seen in 2024 (since it is not complete year). The aggregation is simple also: count the users first seen, grouped by year. count the users last seen, grouped by year. There was a separate issue though (I didn't filter out the "dead" and "deleted" stories / comments). I fixed that and updated the article. Some values changed, but the patterns and conclusions stands.

rezonant 2y ago

Hard agree- a lot of people just opt not to at all- that's what I usually do (other than HN). And when you do decide to go ahead and participate, the energy it takes for each post is a lot higher- you have to consider every contingency you can think of and make sure they all check out. And none of us know if we're going to be wrong when they unearth these posts and pin them on us later, unfortunately.

ryukoposting 2y ago

> I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms. I find myself doing this, but I chalked it up to aging and the reality that I may eventually have no choice but to work for one of the companies I have ridiculed online.

osm3000 2y ago

> I find myself considering my online comments more carefully now than I did 10 years ago across all platforms. I am curious, why is that? Is the medium less safe than before (e.g., unpleasant interactions)? Or is it a high effort to engage in a discussion, and perhaps there are other priorities now? Perhaps something else

ryandrake 2y ago
I have found myself doing the same. 1. I use my real name, which has a strong cooling effect on the kinds of stuff I write. I'm not going to get into a flame war or say career-ending things under my real name. I do this deliberately to force me to keep my responses as high quality as I can. 2. As I temper what I write based on today's norms and taboos, I also have to think about (guess) what might be taboo in 10, 20, 30 years. Assume HN will be searchable forever. People today have a habit of drudging up things that their opponents wrote decades ago, and measuring them against today's (more restrictive) yardstick. I've told jokes back in the 90s that were benign and funny then, but would get me fired today. Imagine people decades from now reading the innocent things I am writing today and how they will be offended by it!
- osm3000 2y ago
  Yeah that is sensible. It is one thing that I miss about the internet back in the early 2000s. I am still a bit conflicted tbh about what to do concerning that. The accounts don't really get deleted, and it is not far-fetched to imagine tools that correlate the styles accross multiple accounts (so, one mistake, and the identity is unveiled).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

bane 2y ago

I know that participating on HN has made my comments on all forums more thoughtful, less hyperbolic, more serious, and generally better considered. The reasonable rules, excellent moderation and the community culture here have been excellent teachers. The voting mechanism helps me gauge if my comments are reasonable (I don't care about the magnitude but more the negative/positive score telling me if I'm off the rails). Perhaps a similar effect eventually takes hold on many of the contributors, and for the ones who can't moderate themselves to the culture here, I guess they'll recess into lurkers or simply go away elsewhere.

rezonant 2y ago
> The voting mechanism helps me gauge if my comments are reasonable (I don't care about the magnitude but more the negative/positive score telling me if I'm off the rails). This is my sense of why pg picked a balance number, not a + and - number separately.

pvg 2y ago

The "decreased per-user engagement" evidence in this post is a bit thin. Mostly based on a kind of strange apparent outlier of accounts going idle (1+ year) in 2023 but the binning is also a full year and the 'idle year' is counted in a weird clippy (i.e. looking at calendar year rather than elapsed year) way. So it's one (aggregate) data point at the very end of the data. It might not be wrong but it feels somewhat iffy to draw conclusions from.

osm3000 2y ago
> Mostly based on a kind of strange apparent outlier of accounts going idle (1+ year) in 2023 Well, it is just outliers in 2023. This is an upward trend since 2020. > but the binning is also a full year and the 'idle year' is counted in a weird clippy (i.e. looking at calendar year rather than elapsed year) way Granted, and I acknowledge this limitation. My idea, however, is that when studying many users in the same manner, this will even out. Why? Because a full calendar year implies somewhere between 0-2 elapsed years. So the average elapsed year, over many users, is 1 year.
- pvg 2y ago
  The upward trend is much smaller than what happens in 2023 so that looks worth looking into. When you have this one outlier and one year can actually mean two years, it's not completely clear how much of the outlier is actual outlieriness and how much is some accidental artifact.
  - osm3000 2y ago
    I will double check. I see your point
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - osm3000 2y ago
    Hey, I double checked. I don't really see an issue. The only specific thing that affects 2023 is that I removed the users seen / last seen in 2024 (since it is not complete year). The aggregation is simple also: count the users first seen, grouped by year. count the users last seen, grouped by year. There was a separate issue though (I didn't filter out the "dead" and "deleted" stories / comments). I fixed that and updated the article. Some values changed, but the patterns and conclusions stands.