Ask HN: Why has the quality of discourse on HN gone downhill?

[alephnerd]

I know - this is probably the thousandth time you have heard this complaint, but please hear me out.

I have been lurking and reading on HN since 2016 (I never actively commented til 2019), and the spirit of discussion was outstanding then (2016-2020). The amount of high quality posts and discussions about the technical and operational sides of technology and the tech industry was astounding! Yet, something seems to have changed with the culture on this site since 2020 - it feels as if the site has become a parody of itself, with “edgy” hot takes, cargo culting around supposedly conventional knowledge, and the insane amount of “stanning” of certain figures gossip and a handful of companies.

The increase in political content as well has been a massive change on this site as well, and as this is a discussion board it is fair game for everyone to have a say assuming civility. Yet this civility does not exist - discussions instead devolve into a passive aggressive form of brawling, with no actual insights coming out from other side.

Finally, as someone who is friends with a number of YC founders, there has been a recent trend among batchmates to start creating false traction/“demand Gen” for their products by astroturfing comments and submissions. And this is without explicitly saying it’s a marketing post.

Big picture, it almost appears as if HN has become what Reddit felt like in 2015-16, which pushed me to this site itself, and it is extremely depressing for me to see a discussion board that has helped propel my career start to lose it’s low noise to story ratio.

[ThrowawayR2]

I'm much more aggressive these days about downvoting and flagging both articles and comments that aren't in the spirit of HN, particularly the edgy hot takes, probable astroturfing, and political content. HN will become whatever its readership allows it to morph into so rather than post laments, use your up- and downvotes to actively take part in cleaning it up.

[panarky]

Why bother to downvote political content if you're just going to post a lot of political content yourself?

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[aman_jha]

Posting laments is a way readers can influence others and actively try to clean up the site. Increasing awareness is effective

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> the edgy hot takes, probable astroturfing, and political content.

The more popular and more well-established a site is, the more likely it will be targeted for such. That's sadly inevitable. And evident here.

[sircastor]

Given that this is largely anecdotal, I’m inclined to think that you’re either seeing your personal tastes have grown and the board hasn’t changed, or we’re facing an “endless September” situation, where we’re being subjected to a broader set of posts from people who have a different background than the traditional HN poster. In either case it is not uncommon, and if you find it unbearable it may be time to find a smaller community.

[alephnerd]

This does make sense! Now I just have to find those kinds of places! There is one board I like (the one named after a crustacean) that has a very old school HN-esque quality to it, but now I’d love to find a similar place to actually discuss the operational aspects of tech companies and startups.

[braingenious]

There’s one of these posts every few months and it’s always kind of funny.

I’ve never once seen anyone even remotely consider that they have changed in the years since they registered here.

It’s possible that you’re paying more attention to shitty posts than you used to or are clicking on more politically charged content. It’s possible that your overall standards for online communities have shifted as you’ve gotten older. Maybe the amount of time you spend on this website has changed, and your perception of The Discourse with it.

It’s also possible that virtually everyone has been made significantly dumber and more self-assured by years of exposure to social media.

It’s also also possible that the early 00’s-style “The only important value to uphold is The Immutable Value Of Decorum “ rule has been easily gamified by absolute assholes and self-styled Bond villain contrarians, which alienates genuinely nice people by making space for people to “just ask questions — POLITELY” about stuff like phrenology and thinly veiled race science.

[__ryan__]

I suspect it's because people aren't reading the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Ple...

[robbrown451]

Whether people read the guidelines and whether they follow them are different things. Sorta like with speed limits.... people can be well aware of them, but if they aren't enforced, only some subset are going to obey them. And that subset gets smaller when they see tons of people zooming past them.

That said dang does an admirable job.

[300bps]

The last of which says:

Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

[xnorswap]

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

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.

[dredmorbius]

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]

> 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

[dang]

When you cite 2016-2020, of all years, as a time of political peace and high intellectual discourse on HN, that's a strong indication of a perception in the eye of the beholder. HN was under intense political pressure during that period, presumably because of what was going on in society and world at large.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

We even tried an experiment to reduce it for a week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404. It was a disastrous, hellish failure. But we learned a ton, so in that sense it was a success.

As for YC founders trying to game HN, that's also nothing new, nor is it unique to YC startups - all founders try to do this, or nearly all (probably the ones that don't are the ones whose content would be best for HN - that's an irony we struggle with in lots of contexts).

The question is whether these founders (YC or otherwise) are succeeding in gaming HN. If they are, or if anyone else is, I need to know about it. From my perspective, what I see are a lot of failures to do that—but of course that's subject to hindsight bias, or sample bias, or whatever the bias is where we're more likely to see the cases we caught than the ones we didn't.

[dredmorbius]

That's the sort of bold statement that would require extraordinary familiarity with HN over a long duration, and probably internal data access.

/me checks poster's handle.

Oh, hi @dang, yep, that has merits.

I'll add for those reading this: if you do see suspicious activity, EMAIL THE MODS. [email protected]

I'll report one-note-flutes (consistently posting/commenting on a single topic or site), egregious misbehaviour (I mostly just flag, and yes, consistent flags will kill accounts), highly obvious spam that passes the filters (this ... happens quite rarely, I don't recall any instances in the past year or two), and a lot of suggestions for improved links or titles. Occasional disgreements on moderator calls, though that seems to be running about 1-2x per year.

Reading dang's comments is a good way to get a sense of what is / isn't permitted, and what does or doesn't get caught. Mods are human and can't read everything (posts, let alone comments), so the flagging and emails help.

I've been told to add the post ID to emails and typically do along with the title, e.g, "32228983" for this particular post. That apparently helps with the mod tools.

I also try to keep mod emails short and to the point:

  subject: <issue>: <post title> <post id>
  body:

    post url
    submission url

    brief description of issue --- rarely more than a line or so.
    suggested remedy or question (e.g., is this acceptable behaviour)

Providing a suggested fix (e.g., better title or disintermediated URL) helps make mods' work easier so far as I can tell. The suggestions aren't always taken, but the decision made is informed by them. My batting average is pretty good.

[KingOfCoders]

The only gaming I have seen was quite some time ago and seems to have stopped - when Paul Graham was defending (posting?) YC companies shady moves, E.g. AirBnB.

[KingOfCoders]

It hasn't.

[ericskiff]

As someone who's been around for over 10 years, I agree with this. The quality feels about the same, and still some of the most civil discourse to be found on the internet

[MattPalmer1086]

I haven't noticed a decline either, I still find discourse here to be very high quality and civil for the most part. No idea if the mix of posts has changed really.

[afavour]

> it feels as if the site has become a parody of itself

I feel with all the web3 hyperbole Silicon Valley itself has become a parody of its former self. To me HN has always had a delicate mix of hard tech (e.g. "here's how I used X new API") and startup buzz. The latter was always in danger of taking over the former once everyone realised how coveted the top spot of HN is for traffic. Combine that with tensions over what Silicon Valley even is today... and here we are.

[AlexandrB]

> I feel with all the web3 hyperbole Silicon Valley itself has become a parody of its former self.

I agree. With web3 the tech seems to take a backseat to the ideological flamewar of fiat currency vs. digital "gold". Most web3 discussions are about economic theory and esoteric financial jargon (leveraging, shorts, counterparty risk, etc.) and not Merkel trees, or cryptography, or any of that stuff.

[geuis]

Different opinion. I've been here since 2008. The levels of commentary and submissions is as high now as it ever has been.

[latch]

I'm going to beat a dead horse, and say that hiding comment score (1) was a mistake (1) - although I realize I'm in the minority. It removes information, and I think that's generally a bad thing.

I'll often see a comment that says "A", and the top reply will say "'A' is factually incorrect" and not only would I and everyone else who isn't an expert on "A" benefit from knowing that 75 people upvoted the reply vs the 5 on the parent, but the parent commenter in particular would benefit.

(1) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605

[benlivengood]

For comparison, lesswrong just introduced two-dimension scoring [0] which separates community behavior standards (karma) from truth/sensibility/belief and could plausibly help identify what you want to take from single comment ratings; whether the average reader agrees or disagrees and the rough spread of belief, but it still allows well-written comments by minority opinions to be highly karma-voted for expressing their opinion well and in line with community guidelines.

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HALKHS4pMbfghxsjD/lesswrong-...

[thrusong]

Personally for me, I think HN is as good as it's always been. Sure, there have been a few jerks reply to me here or there, but I wouldn't still be here over a decade later if it was as toxic as other corners of the internet.

[Sebb767]

Here's my edgy take - I think this sentiment comes from increased usage of HN. If you browse the start of high-voted threads from the front page, you'll usually find a pretty good and calm discussion. If you scroll down to the lower end of a 500 comment discussion page on the Corona virus, you'll obviously find worse discussions and strongly held opinions.

I personally don't think there's a decline in quality on HN and to me, the politics end of things seems pretty calm for a large discussion forum on the internet. It's obviously not perfect, but it's as close as a public forum can get.

[NoboruWataya]

If what you say is true, I assume the main drivers would be an increase in users (possibly fleeing from Reddit which has well and truly turned into a cesspit) and the general polarisation of politics in the developed world.

It is worth bearing in mind that everything always seems like it was "better in my day". I'm not here that long myself (maybe I'm the problem!) but going back four or five years, HN was kind of known in some online circles for its poor takes on certain subjects.

[dang]

> everything always seems like it was "better in my day"

Yes, there's no question that this is a major force and you have to try to control for it if you want a hope of perceiving things objectively. (How? I have no idea.)

I sometimes call it nostalgia bias [1]. Things have always been getting worse [2].

It's the same reason why most people think that music was better during whatever period they were first bonding with music.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[kjeetgill]

The only major decline I've seen he's been the proliferation of whiney Ask HN posts the last few months. In all seriousness. I'm flagging this too for the same reason.

I'm very wary of any and all premises that try to "community up" HN. There's a lot of smart people here who weigh in on subject because they're well read in their own communities.

Note: obviously any association can be used to define "community" around, but hopefully my point is clear enough.

[chomp]

I've been on this site since 2010. Yes the quality was higher back then, however all communities eventually regress to the mean - you can't avoid it.

The thing is though, relative to other areas of the internet, the quality of discourse is still much much higher than average, and until memes and witty retorts become common in the comments, I feel like it's still going to be a place of good discussion for a long time to come.

The political commentary and "hot take" Substack self-promoters is an issue but we have tools for those.

If you want more focused tech, visit lobste.rs and other sites in that circle, but note that those sites have issues in the same vein.

If you want my personal opinion, I don't think there's much different between the population here today, and 10 years ago. It's merely that back then there were much fewer people, and stories lasted much longer on the front page, so people had a longer time to comment on esoteric postings about Erlang behavior, or someone's implementation of LISP. Now, a post about a person's fun project might barely touch front page and then fall down rapidly, because there's just so many other articles posted by other community members.

[kazinator]

Then again, see the bottom-most entry in: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It has links to 2009-dated comments that HN is turning into Reddit.

To be objective, 2009 Reddit is not necessarily the same as 2022 Reddit. Maybe 2009 HN was turning into 2009 Reddit.

If HN and Reddit are both perpetually getting worse, and Reddit is perpetually worse than HN, then it always looks like HN is turning into Reddit; which then isn't a semi-noob ilusion.

:)

[wyager]

Lobsters was also reddit-ified years ago. It recreated the vibe of "old" HN for a while, but it didn't last.

[rsaz]

I feel this is a common trend for any social media. I feel similarly as you regarding how Reddit has changed, and while some of that was due to changes to the website, I'd attribute most of it to an increase in overall popularity. Reddit used to be a collection of fairly niche forums, but has really ballooned into almost Facebook levels of social media. It seems like that's just how the internet works, and eventually new, more niche places for people to discuss will pop up and the cycle will continue.

There probably aren't fewer smart/interesting people on HN than there used to be, but its possible they're just less likely to be seen often or voted to the top.

Of course I say all this as someone who started spending time here relatively recently, so its pure speculation on my part.

[cykros]

In my experience, the best solution is have a core group of people come to a decision to use a platform that is just inconvenient enough that it doesn't become too popular, be that an irc channel, usenet, xmpp, etc. The old war of AOL vs. the rest of the Internet is still very much alive and well; it's just that it turns out, AOL wasn't the real enemy -- it was just one head of the hydra. The beast itself was user-friendly platforms in general.

And as anyone who's received the gospel according to BOfH knows, users are nothing worth being friendly to.

That HN isn't as bad as reddit is likely due to the minimalist site design in the first place. Throw a few rounded corners around the place and perhaps some pretentious cartoon characters and we could get there in a heartbeat.

[sinenomine]

I think this is an intermittent state produced by a multi-year process of exodus from public communities into tightly vetted private communities, specifically discords.

Also there is an obvious generational dynamics with HN being avoided by smart zoomers having better communities to fit into.

Maybe it's not terminal.

[lampshades]

This is my thought as well. I’ve been here since 2013 and at this point we’re just a bunch of old (and often grouchy) people.

Going the way of slashdot.

[cykros]

I'd sure hope we'd at least be mostly made up of folks that'd at least have the decency to go to IRC, if not self hosted Matrix servers. If we're flocking to Discords, we really HAVE fallen a long way...

[robbrown451]

I'd suggest it is part of the natural evolution of discussion boards. Some go there more quickly than others. When people act badly, and get away with it (without having the post quickly hidden, all the way to them getting banned), the people who don't act that way start participating less. So it can be a downward spiral.

I do wish boards would use some more smarts to help manage the prominence of posts. Way back in the day Slashdot did this pretty well with being able to rate things as insightful, troll, etc, but they never imporoved their algorithm much after the initial design (and it sucked that only certain people could moderate at any given time). They also had meta-moderation. A lot of promising things. But Slashdot became horrible after a few years.

[digdugdirk]

One thing I recommend is to browse on HN Classic, I find it tends to weed out some of the lower value topics which helps the discourse you find in the comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

[cypherpunks01]

This is sort of funny, because one of the differences I can see is that this post is not on the frontpage of the "Classic" site right now.. How did you get here? :)

And yes, if someone can elucidate what HN Classic is, that would be cool. I assume it uses some older ranking algorithm that has since been swapped out?

[Sebb767]

It's pretty funny in context of the comment pg made on its release thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607285

I'd still agree.

[atsaloli]

What is HN Classic? Never heard of a such a thing. Google Search doesn't turn anything up.

[silent92]

Mind explaining what this is?

[ss48]

I've noticed this on a lot of tech sites. It switched from pure technology to focusing more on the intersection between tech and culture. Once the tech or business landscape reached a certain point, the focus seemed to shift towards targeting tech or businesses towards cultural problems, or identifying the impact of tech on culture. From that point on, it's going to be more speculative, and more likely that people are going to find more things to take personally or to disagree on. I'm not sure there is really any way to stop this. It just feels like the general direction things will take until a major change in technology brings about greater changes and more opportunities.