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Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly com

Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? The signal-to-noise ratio has dropped slightly compared to when I started reading about four years ago, but this is still a great place for technical discussion. Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. HN does not need any major overhaul or whatever else. I think a lot of this is just old-timers starting to see the same shit over and again. Try giving it up for a few months, then come back and see if you still feel that way. One thing that has happened, that I suspect may have ruffled some feathers, is that HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be. This is still a board for entrepreneurs before it is a board for hackers, but some of the more out-there John Galt type stuff will now get picked apart and downvoted, or even just ignored, where before you either clucked your tongue in agreement, remained silent, or donned your flame suit.

Jyaif 14y ago
off-topic: I though it was called _Hacker_ News because it used to be a hacking oriented board. Apparently it has always been for entrepreneurs, so where does the name come from?
- brudgers 14y ago
  The original definition of "hacker" before it entered the media.
  - hackinthebochs 14y ago
    But its the media's interpretation that made it popular and widespread, which is the only reason any of us care to "take it back". Seems rather ironic to me.
    - irishcoffee 14y ago
      Only people who have some hipster-like affinity for the term I think. "A rose by any other name..."
    - snogglethorpe 14y ago
      This is not true, I think. The self-identification with the term "hacker" (in the good sense) is pretty strong amongst a lot of people from "those days." The co-option by the media to mean something else was an annoyance, but really hasn't changed that a whole lot. In other words, it's a personal issue, and nothing to with popularity per-se. It's like you and a group of childhood friends called yourself "the bucket gang" or something, to the degree that this usage pervaded your personal communications. If suddenly the media started using that term to talk about terrorists or something, you and your friends would probably be annoyed, but it probably wouldn't affect your personal usage, because the connection is already simply too strong; you wouldn't suddenly start using this personal term more often because of the media co-option.
      - hackinthebochs 14y ago
        It seems to me that those trying to take it back now aren't the same ones that identified as (good) hackers 30 or so years ago (with a few exceptions I'm sure). The 20-somethings that are fighting for it now are too young to have known the original meaning. They are drawn to the word because of the power it has in our culture. But that power is tied to the negative meaning. It seems disingenuous to argue for its original meaning when the negative meaning is all you've ever known.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- koushikn 14y ago
  Is there a compsci oriented discussion forum with comaparable quality as HN in terms of discussions without the entrepreneurship bias? I would love to know and start following if a such a thing exists.
  - evolve2k 14y ago
    Is this the moment to reflect on Slashdot? I have a few nontrepeneurial geek friends who still swear by /.
    - akldfgj 14y ago
      I still read Slashdot our of habit, but the technical content of the conversation is gone. It's mostly predestriant gripes about technopolitics and copyright/patent/microsoft/apple/google rantng.
  - stonemetal 14y ago
    reddit has a /compsci that is pretty good, and /programming gets pretty much all the same technical articles hn does without the entrepreneurship ones.
    - pkamb 14y ago
      Are there any good subreddits for "patio11-esque" content? Not hard CS, not vc startups, not /r/SEO, but kinda the marketing/small-online-business thing?
  - recursive 14y ago
    Lambda the Ultimate is pretty good. If anything, I'd say the quality is higher than HN.
    - akldfgj 14y ago
      LtU is extremely academic -- they expect Ph.D-level discussion in the submissions and comments. Which is wonderful, but mostly inaccessible to non--progrmaming-language-PhDs
- marklabedz 14y ago
  From the news submission guidelines -- "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
- ilamont 14y ago
  If you read Jessica Livingston's "Founders At Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" published around the same Hacker News came into being, the connection will become clearer. The founders interviewed in the book were (mostly) hackers who created notable products and companies -- it's their stories of how they became entrepreneurs.
  - sausagefeet 14y ago
    This usage of the term predates even that. http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is
- thedeuce 14y ago
  good question; it should be renamed to Entrepreneurs news then
- aquateen 14y ago
  Originally it was called "Startup News". PG announced he was making a new site not focused on startups, since that got kind of dull. Instead he changed the name of this site and nothing really changed. My memory is kind of vague, but I believe that is more or less accurate.
danso 14y ago
I'm relatively new here so I readily admit to having a very limited perspective: I used reddit years before I came here, and now I use reddit for just a few specific subreddits; HN has more than enough technical and bigger-picture pieces to occupy me. Certainly, the discussion threads are consistently of the highest quality, so much that I have to fight to read the OP first rather than jumping to the comments. I also admire the mod philosophy of discouraging off-topic, even if clever, posts...it's a fine line between cultivating fruitful discussions and being overbearing, but HN seems to do it better than just about anyone else. I think it's a universal trait among communities to think that things were better back then. Maybe they were, but part of that mindset is out of a natural regret of years passed and nostalgia. But it'd be interesting to see more data about the quality of HN...obviously it's not easily contained in a metric, but some analysis of discussion length, upvotes per user, upvotes in a time period, distribution of top posts among domains, etc. would be a place to start. A couple of months ago, someone started an epic discussion about how HN was going downhill. But the crux of his complaint was that people weren't giving him enough positive feedback, and he saw the non-glowing reviews of his two projects as negative sniping. I checked out his two sites (one was defunct, the other didn't seem to have much presence) and the various links-to-them that he posted. There was very little, if at all, sniping, and there were at least a few very constructive, helpful comments. It was disappointing to see so many users, including pg, jump into agreement with the disenchanted user. His overall argument may have had merit, but the reasoning and experience he used to get there were questionable. But back to the OP: I think a -1 karma per link isn't a bad idea at all. OTOH, I think the (as I've perceived it) penalty for posting too frequently also fulfills that role.
- unreal37 14y ago
  Can someone summarize what the "penalty for posting too frequently" is these days?
  - sukuriant 14y ago
    lower "average" maybe? I don't actually know how average works, so meh.
bane 14y ago
I feel like there was a fast slide to content-free echo chamberism a while ago. HN was starting to become painfully predictable if it didn't talk about: - Apple in glowing terms - a LISP - how massive overvaluations were not a bad sign Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments and the fanboyism towards a few specific companies, products and people was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Anything that even smelled like dissent was downvoted until you couldn't even see the comment with a flashlight and a 100' rope. Then a few things happened and it seemed to slowly wind down and I think even reverse. The quality and content of HN seems remarkably improved in the last year: - Karma became invisible - Steve Jobs passed away - Gruber posts started getting flagged - Android came neck and neck with iOS then surpassed it, then Apple started suing - a few overhyped, overvalued, overinvested-in companies popped in very public ways In fact the discussions about the above things have been some of the most spirited, invigorating discussions on HN in a long while. But the other posts and discussions on other topics started getting better as well. Sure the focus of HN has somewhat changed a bit since the old, small community, days. But a few internal and external factors seems to have kept the ship upright.
- tomrod 14y ago
  > Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments Oh! To be one of the principate! What networking that would lead to ;-)
- debacle 14y ago
  I think Karma being invisible is a huge factor. While I understand the idea behind the decision, I think it prevents the community from really seeing what its broader sentiments are.
  - sin7 14y ago
    More than that, I don't want to read all the comments. I just want to read the good ones. Without knowing which comments are good, I read the first set and move on to the next story.
brown9-2 14y ago
It seems like there should be some sort of corollary to "endless September" - an endless parade of suggestions on how to "fix" a community and nostalgia for the past.
- DanBC 14y ago
  This must exist! Meatball wiki has "insincere goodbyes" (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye), they also have the life-cycle of wikis (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/WikiLifeCycle http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/WikiLifeCycle). They must have something to describe the continual suggestions for a "fix".
- gruseom 14y ago
  You've got a point. I wonder if there's a good name for the cognitive bias that is captured by the joke, "Everything has always been getting worse." I have a pet theory re why this bias is so common: having been part of something before other people joined it is valuable identity currency. It makes you feel special and better. Best of all, it can never depreciate. Some things do get worse, but the discourse around it needs to be discounted – pretty sharply, I think – for this bias. But it's kind of fun to see an HN metathread of the sackcloth and ashes genre in which the majority of commenters are being so sanguine.
- ANTSANTS 14y ago
  Some have taken to calling it "meta".
mixmax 14y ago
As an old-timer who used to be very active but isn't anymore I agree with you. When I first created an account 1883 days ago I thought this place was amazing, and that I'd never seen such high quality discussion on the Internet before. Now I don't find the quality to be quite as high, but after thinking about it I've realised what has changed: Me. It's been 5 years, and I've changed. I've become much more knowledgeable than I was five years ago (partly because of HN) and obviously the barrier for what I find insightful has been raised. This is a natural progression in life, and it happens to everyone. Chances are that if you look at what you did 5 or 10 years ago you'll find it to be naive, shallow or obvious. Maybe it's simply time to move on.
- edw519 14y ago
  Or maybe it's more like this: 2007. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2008. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2009. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2010. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2011. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2012. edw519, too busy building to comment. Community: Where have all the old timers gone?
  - wensing 14y ago
    I've been around for 2,017 days. Number of comments has gone down steadily, but I agree with mixmax as for the reason. Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days?
    - larrys 14y ago
      And what might that "n" be that lets the last man over the bridge?
      - gameshot911 14y ago
        550 days. :)
mike-cardwell 14y ago
I've been here for nearly 3 years, and I've been fairly consistently active over that time. I completely agree with you. The quality of discussion here hasn't changed that much at all.
bjplink 14y ago
I've predominantly been a lurker here for quite awhile (my account is only a few hundred days older than your own) and I feel the quality is down from when I joined. Contrary to most people's opinions though I never felt the quality was all that high to begin with. I think the users here vastly overrate their contributions. I enjoy HN as a nice source of interesting links and stories to read on my own time. Yet I find that I can't make it through even half of the comments on any given thread that is popular. It's too difficult to squeeze out the insightful stuff. I tend to just keep track of several regulars via their comments feed and try my best to avoid the chatter of the masses anymore. My biggest personal pet peeve since I first joined here back in August of 2008 is when bigger threads devolve into tangential side arguments about who is using ad hominen, straw men tactics and other meta discussion methods. When half of the comments are about someone else's commenting technique the thread has gone into the weeds for me.
jameswilsterman 14y ago
HN is definitely still a great place for discussion. I think the main problem right now is how impossible it is for the average user to get good feedback on their startup using HN. Many people on this site remember the old days when anyone could post a 'Show HN' and it would almost surely receive some really thoughtful, interesting feedback. When it comes down to it, that is what people are truly lamenting. Today, 'Show HN' posts quickly fall out of the newest page (buried beneath an avalanche of a lot of useless link spam). See my post yesterday, which fell off the newest page in under 10 minutes: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=opscotch http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=opscotch Or when people do comment on these posts, sometimes it is done so in a passive-aggressive way, more like a 'take down' than a thoughtful comment with advice and constructive criticism. This is not always the case, but it does seem more common than it did in the past.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
amalcon 14y ago
I also haven't noticed a problem with bad comments. I've noticed a problem with bad submissions making the front page (political stories, mostly; we never used to see those), but the comments on other stories are still fine. Right at this moment, actually, HN looks a lot like HN of old. There's one vaguely political article (Google fiber), but it's about a technical topic. There's nothing about BitTorrent, only one about Bitcoin (it's even technical!), nothing about Apple, and only this one complaining about how HN has changed. There are three Show HNs. I think the comment quality is up to good standards in the current frontpage articles. For this reason addressing comment quality is putting the cart before the horse.
Jun8 14y ago
I fully agree. Yet the OP and others like it keep getting upvoted (it's currently #1 on HN) some some people agree with the fact that HN is sliding. When I look at comments of that sort I see that they are generally based on "I feel", "it seems", etc. There must be tons of people on HN working on text analysis, twitter sentiment analysis and related, why doesn't someone come up with an analysis to back up that claim or to refute it. Then, at least, we would have something concrete to discuss like the methodology of the experiment and the HN data used.
Osiris 14y ago
I've been around for 1012 days and I can say that I still click on the "Comments" link before I click on the story link. Often the comments give me more detail or more meaningful discussion than the original article. After I read (some) of the comments I decide if I want to open the article link or not. Compare that to reddit where I go to find links but never open the comments because the comments are useless and have no value to me at all. The comparisons to reddit are completely baseless. HN is still the best place I've found for intelligent discussion.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
As a whippersnapper who only signed up 1141 days ago, I believe the quality of the best commentary is still as good, though the bottom has gotten bigger and worse. So far, good filtering that bubbles the best comments to the top is working at keeping the discussion readable. I find I no longer tend to bother following the comments all the way to the bottom, since that's where all the crap accumulates.
roc 14y ago
It's just a function of the increase in topic breadth. When you get to articles about technical details, I still see the quality comments as before. It's just that there are more tech-fashion articles and "bitch about the policy of company X" articles and political articles where comments inherently trend much more toward the subjective and thus half the audience is certain that half the posts are 'crap'. And the audience pulled in by that growth in topic breadth still reads the more-technical articles. So the vaguely political/tribal quips that I'd always noticed strewn about in even the technical threads are no longer politely ignored, but become points of tangential debate. It's pretty much inevitable with growth.
jseliger 14y ago
Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? Possibly. I posted some examples here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deterioration-and-hacker-news http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-communit... and here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/comment-when-you-have-something-to-say http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/comment-when-you-ha... , with the latter discussing how I try not to comment unless I have something substantive to say or ask. Neither post is arguing that there aren't still some substantive comments on HN. There are. But I've noticed a lot of posts that aren't trolls but that don't add anything valuable. Those, in some ways, are the worst kind: not quite bad enough to ban / delete, but not good enough to add real content.
guelo 14y ago
These conversations about the declining conversation have been happening for at least the last 3 years since I started reading. I wonder how soon after the start of HN the first of these conversations came up.
philwelch 14y ago
> HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be As long as 2-3 years ago, I still got massively upvoted at times for (thoughtful) criticisms of Ayn Rand. The real problem used to be the transhumanists.
goggles99 14y ago
That will always happen with popularity. More idiots will inevitably jump on board and dilute the quality.
tripzilch 14y ago
> Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. Besides, in the technology/coding oriented subreddits, comments aren't that bad, either.

Jyaif 14y ago

off-topic: I though it was called _Hacker_ News because it used to be a hacking oriented board. Apparently it has always been for entrepreneurs, so where does the name come from?

brudgers 14y ago
The original definition of "hacker" before it entered the media.
- hackinthebochs 14y ago
  But its the media's interpretation that made it popular and widespread, which is the only reason any of us care to "take it back". Seems rather ironic to me.
  - irishcoffee 14y ago
    Only people who have some hipster-like affinity for the term I think. "A rose by any other name..."
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    This is not true, I think. The self-identification with the term "hacker" (in the good sense) is pretty strong amongst a lot of people from "those days." The co-option by the media to mean something else was an annoyance, but really hasn't changed that a whole lot. In other words, it's a personal issue, and nothing to with popularity per-se. It's like you and a group of childhood friends called yourself "the bucket gang" or something, to the degree that this usage pervaded your personal communications. If suddenly the media started using that term to talk about terrorists or something, you and your friends would probably be annoyed, but it probably wouldn't affect your personal usage, because the connection is already simply too strong; you wouldn't suddenly start using this personal term more often because of the media co-option.
    - hackinthebochs 14y ago
      It seems to me that those trying to take it back now aren't the same ones that identified as (good) hackers 30 or so years ago (with a few exceptions I'm sure). The 20-somethings that are fighting for it now are too young to have known the original meaning. They are drawn to the word because of the power it has in our culture. But that power is tied to the negative meaning. It seems disingenuous to argue for its original meaning when the negative meaning is all you've ever known.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
koushikn 14y ago
Is there a compsci oriented discussion forum with comaparable quality as HN in terms of discussions without the entrepreneurship bias? I would love to know and start following if a such a thing exists.
- evolve2k 14y ago
  Is this the moment to reflect on Slashdot? I have a few nontrepeneurial geek friends who still swear by /.
  - akldfgj 14y ago
    I still read Slashdot our of habit, but the technical content of the conversation is gone. It's mostly predestriant gripes about technopolitics and copyright/patent/microsoft/apple/google rantng.
- stonemetal 14y ago
  reddit has a /compsci that is pretty good, and /programming gets pretty much all the same technical articles hn does without the entrepreneurship ones.
  - pkamb 14y ago
    Are there any good subreddits for "patio11-esque" content? Not hard CS, not vc startups, not /r/SEO, but kinda the marketing/small-online-business thing?
- recursive 14y ago
  Lambda the Ultimate is pretty good. If anything, I'd say the quality is higher than HN.
  - akldfgj 14y ago
    LtU is extremely academic -- they expect Ph.D-level discussion in the submissions and comments. Which is wonderful, but mostly inaccessible to non--progrmaming-language-PhDs
marklabedz 14y ago
From the news submission guidelines -- "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
ilamont 14y ago
If you read Jessica Livingston's "Founders At Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" published around the same Hacker News came into being, the connection will become clearer. The founders interviewed in the book were (mostly) hackers who created notable products and companies -- it's their stories of how they became entrepreneurs.
- sausagefeet 14y ago
  This usage of the term predates even that. http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is
thedeuce 14y ago
good question; it should be renamed to Entrepreneurs news then
aquateen 14y ago
Originally it was called "Startup News". PG announced he was making a new site not focused on startups, since that got kind of dull. Instead he changed the name of this site and nothing really changed. My memory is kind of vague, but I believe that is more or less accurate.

danso 14y ago

I'm relatively new here so I readily admit to having a very limited perspective: I used reddit years before I came here, and now I use reddit for just a few specific subreddits; HN has more than enough technical and bigger-picture pieces to occupy me. Certainly, the discussion threads are consistently of the highest quality, so much that I have to fight to read the OP first rather than jumping to the comments. I also admire the mod philosophy of discouraging off-topic, even if clever, posts...it's a fine line between cultivating fruitful discussions and being overbearing, but HN seems to do it better than just about anyone else. I think it's a universal trait among communities to think that things were better back then. Maybe they were, but part of that mindset is out of a natural regret of years passed and nostalgia. But it'd be interesting to see more data about the quality of HN...obviously it's not easily contained in a metric, but some analysis of discussion length, upvotes per user, upvotes in a time period, distribution of top posts among domains, etc. would be a place to start. A couple of months ago, someone started an epic discussion about how HN was going downhill. But the crux of his complaint was that people weren't giving him enough positive feedback, and he saw the non-glowing reviews of his two projects as negative sniping. I checked out his two sites (one was defunct, the other didn't seem to have much presence) and the various links-to-them that he posted. There was very little, if at all, sniping, and there were at least a few very constructive, helpful comments. It was disappointing to see so many users, including pg, jump into agreement with the disenchanted user. His overall argument may have had merit, but the reasoning and experience he used to get there were questionable. But back to the OP: I think a -1 karma per link isn't a bad idea at all. OTOH, I think the (as I've perceived it) penalty for posting too frequently also fulfills that role.

unreal37 14y ago
Can someone summarize what the "penalty for posting too frequently" is these days?
- sukuriant 14y ago
  lower "average" maybe? I don't actually know how average works, so meh.

bane 14y ago

I feel like there was a fast slide to content-free echo chamberism a while ago. HN was starting to become painfully predictable if it didn't talk about: - Apple in glowing terms - a LISP - how massive overvaluations were not a bad sign Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments and the fanboyism towards a few specific companies, products and people was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Anything that even smelled like dissent was downvoted until you couldn't even see the comment with a flashlight and a 100' rope. Then a few things happened and it seemed to slowly wind down and I think even reverse. The quality and content of HN seems remarkably improved in the last year: - Karma became invisible - Steve Jobs passed away - Gruber posts started getting flagged - Android came neck and neck with iOS then surpassed it, then Apple started suing - a few overhyped, overvalued, overinvested-in companies popped in very public ways In fact the discussions about the above things have been some of the most spirited, invigorating discussions on HN in a long while. But the other posts and discussions on other topics started getting better as well. Sure the focus of HN has somewhat changed a bit since the old, small community, days. But a few internal and external factors seems to have kept the ship upright.

tomrod 14y ago
> Certain HN rockstars would receive hundreds of upvotes for the most minor of comments Oh! To be one of the principate! What networking that would lead to ;-)
debacle 14y ago
I think Karma being invisible is a huge factor. While I understand the idea behind the decision, I think it prevents the community from really seeing what its broader sentiments are.
- sin7 14y ago
  More than that, I don't want to read all the comments. I just want to read the good ones. Without knowing which comments are good, I read the first set and move on to the next story.

brown9-2 14y ago

It seems like there should be some sort of corollary to "endless September" - an endless parade of suggestions on how to "fix" a community and nostalgia for the past.

DanBC 14y ago
This must exist! Meatball wiki has "insincere goodbyes" (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/GoodBye), they also have the life-cycle of wikis (http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/WikiLifeCycle http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/WikiLifeCycle). They must have something to describe the continual suggestions for a "fix".
gruseom 14y ago
You've got a point. I wonder if there's a good name for the cognitive bias that is captured by the joke, "Everything has always been getting worse." I have a pet theory re why this bias is so common: having been part of something before other people joined it is valuable identity currency. It makes you feel special and better. Best of all, it can never depreciate. Some things do get worse, but the discourse around it needs to be discounted – pretty sharply, I think – for this bias. But it's kind of fun to see an HN metathread of the sackcloth and ashes genre in which the majority of commenters are being so sanguine.
ANTSANTS 14y ago
Some have taken to calling it "meta".

mixmax 14y ago

As an old-timer who used to be very active but isn't anymore I agree with you. When I first created an account 1883 days ago I thought this place was amazing, and that I'd never seen such high quality discussion on the Internet before. Now I don't find the quality to be quite as high, but after thinking about it I've realised what has changed: Me. It's been 5 years, and I've changed. I've become much more knowledgeable than I was five years ago (partly because of HN) and obviously the barrier for what I find insightful has been raised. This is a natural progression in life, and it happens to everyone. Chances are that if you look at what you did 5 or 10 years ago you'll find it to be naive, shallow or obvious. Maybe it's simply time to move on.

edw519 14y ago
Or maybe it's more like this: 2007. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2008. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2009. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2010. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2011. edw519: blah blah blah. Community: You should speak less and build more. 2012. edw519, too busy building to comment. Community: Where have all the old timers gone?
- wensing 14y ago
  I've been around for 2,017 days. Number of comments has gone down steadily, but I agree with mixmax as for the reason. Would any old-timer care to use the open-source HN code and create a vintage HN by automatically inviting anyone with an age of >N days?
  - larrys 14y ago
    And what might that "n" be that lets the last man over the bridge?
    - gameshot911 14y ago
      550 days. :)

mike-cardwell 14y ago

I've been here for nearly 3 years, and I've been fairly consistently active over that time. I completely agree with you. The quality of discussion here hasn't changed that much at all.

bjplink 14y ago

I've predominantly been a lurker here for quite awhile (my account is only a few hundred days older than your own) and I feel the quality is down from when I joined. Contrary to most people's opinions though I never felt the quality was all that high to begin with. I think the users here vastly overrate their contributions. I enjoy HN as a nice source of interesting links and stories to read on my own time. Yet I find that I can't make it through even half of the comments on any given thread that is popular. It's too difficult to squeeze out the insightful stuff. I tend to just keep track of several regulars via their comments feed and try my best to avoid the chatter of the masses anymore. My biggest personal pet peeve since I first joined here back in August of 2008 is when bigger threads devolve into tangential side arguments about who is using ad hominen, straw men tactics and other meta discussion methods. When half of the comments are about someone else's commenting technique the thread has gone into the weeds for me.

jameswilsterman 14y ago

HN is definitely still a great place for discussion. I think the main problem right now is how impossible it is for the average user to get good feedback on their startup using HN. Many people on this site remember the old days when anyone could post a 'Show HN' and it would almost surely receive some really thoughtful, interesting feedback. When it comes down to it, that is what people are truly lamenting. Today, 'Show HN' posts quickly fall out of the newest page (buried beneath an avalanche of a lot of useless link spam). See my post yesterday, which fell off the newest page in under 10 minutes: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=opscotch http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=opscotch Or when people do comment on these posts, sometimes it is done so in a passive-aggressive way, more like a 'take down' than a thoughtful comment with advice and constructive criticism. This is not always the case, but it does seem more common than it did in the past.

deleted 14y ago

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amalcon 14y ago

I also haven't noticed a problem with bad comments. I've noticed a problem with bad submissions making the front page (political stories, mostly; we never used to see those), but the comments on other stories are still fine. Right at this moment, actually, HN looks a lot like HN of old. There's one vaguely political article (Google fiber), but it's about a technical topic. There's nothing about BitTorrent, only one about Bitcoin (it's even technical!), nothing about Apple, and only this one complaining about how HN has changed. There are three Show HNs. I think the comment quality is up to good standards in the current frontpage articles. For this reason addressing comment quality is putting the cart before the horse.

Jun8 14y ago

I fully agree. Yet the OP and others like it keep getting upvoted (it's currently #1 on HN) some some people agree with the fact that HN is sliding. When I look at comments of that sort I see that they are generally based on "I feel", "it seems", etc. There must be tons of people on HN working on text analysis, twitter sentiment analysis and related, why doesn't someone come up with an analysis to back up that claim or to refute it. Then, at least, we would have something concrete to discuss like the methodology of the experiment and the HN data used.

Osiris 14y ago

I've been around for 1012 days and I can say that I still click on the "Comments" link before I click on the story link. Often the comments give me more detail or more meaningful discussion than the original article. After I read (some) of the comments I decide if I want to open the article link or not. Compare that to reddit where I go to find links but never open the comments because the comments are useless and have no value to me at all. The comparisons to reddit are completely baseless. HN is still the best place I've found for intelligent discussion.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

As a whippersnapper who only signed up 1141 days ago, I believe the quality of the best commentary is still as good, though the bottom has gotten bigger and worse. So far, good filtering that bubbles the best comments to the top is working at keeping the discussion readable. I find I no longer tend to bother following the comments all the way to the bottom, since that's where all the crap accumulates.

roc 14y ago

It's just a function of the increase in topic breadth. When you get to articles about technical details, I still see the quality comments as before. It's just that there are more tech-fashion articles and "bitch about the policy of company X" articles and political articles where comments inherently trend much more toward the subjective and thus half the audience is certain that half the posts are 'crap'. And the audience pulled in by that growth in topic breadth still reads the more-technical articles. So the vaguely political/tribal quips that I'd always noticed strewn about in even the technical threads are no longer politely ignored, but become points of tangential debate. It's pretty much inevitable with growth.

jseliger 14y ago

Am I the only one who hasn't noticed this huge drop in quality that has everyone bitching and moaning lately? Possibly. I posted some examples here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deterioration-and-hacker-news http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-communit... and here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/comment-when-you-have-something-to-say http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/08/04/comment-when-you-ha... , with the latter discussing how I try not to comment unless I have something substantive to say or ask. Neither post is arguing that there aren't still some substantive comments on HN. There are. But I've noticed a lot of posts that aren't trolls but that don't add anything valuable. Those, in some ways, are the worst kind: not quite bad enough to ban / delete, but not good enough to add real content.

guelo 14y ago

These conversations about the declining conversation have been happening for at least the last 3 years since I started reading. I wonder how soon after the start of HN the first of these conversations came up.

philwelch 14y ago

> HN is not the objectivist echo chamber it used to be As long as 2-3 years ago, I still got massively upvoted at times for (thoughtful) criticisms of Ayn Rand. The real problem used to be the transhumanists.

goggles99 14y ago

That will always happen with popularity. More idiots will inevitably jump on board and dilute the quality.

tripzilch 14y ago

> Comparisons to Reddit and other such nonsense are baseless. Besides, in the technology/coding oriented subreddits, comments aren't that bad, either.