[Eiriksmal]

Definitely some are lurking out of sheer addictive habit. But there's fewer reasons to leave comments because a) the community grew and there's already someone who articulated your point, so no sense in repeating it and b) the hivemind has moved in a different direction and it's more challenging to have reasonable discourse here without it feeling like you're "debating" 14-year-olds on Reddit.

[Goronmon]

...the hivemind has moved in a different direction...

This is definitely a big one.

The focus did use to be a lot more specific to startups with all the good and the bad that came with it. Things like a less negative view of "dark patterns" and more marketing related topics were definitely a part of a community back then.

Questions like "Should I be tracking as much data about my users as possible" would have been answered with "Yes, absolutely, the more data the better." much more often than you would ever see nowadays.

[kragen]

Agreed, but most of my own reluctance to engage comes not from the generally low intellectual level of the commentary but from the pervasive character assassination that accompanies it.

Some of this is a result of importing the culture-war mentality that destroyed Twitter, but some of it is not; see how often the word "disingenuous" gets posted, generally as an assertion that the parent commenter must be a liar because they couldn't possibly be so stupid as to believe what they wrote. That's pure native HN viciousness, not a Twitter import.

[bugfix-66]

There is evidence that a large fraction of Hacker News readers are early in their programming journey. Presumably people migrate elsewhere as they mature? I don't know of another forum like Hacker News, so where are they going?

To understand the level of programming skill on Hacker News, consider that less than 5% of Hacker News readers succeed in adjusting a loop iteration variable to avoid unsigned overflow (despite repeatedly attempting to do so):

https://bugfix-66.com/8617f16fa68e021b656b1856f94afebf7a3117...

This is an empirical observation and not an attack (please don't flag/downvote this comment). It tells us something about the population of users on the forum, and where they are on the developmental timeline as programmers.

It seems like more senior programmers move on, maybe.

[r3trohack3r]

This rings true for me. The value of HN early in my career was exposing me to a firehose of industry content while I tried to figure out my place.

As I get further into my career, the signal to noise ratio is shifting quite a bit. I’ve seen many iterations of what’s being posted already, most of the comments aren’t novel, etc.

At this point HN is a habit. And a hard one to break.

[bee_rider]

Well, it tells us about the Go programmers on the forum. One possibility is that as Go has become more mainstream, Go programmers have become less competent on average.

[Swizec]

> Presumably people migrate elsewhere as they mature? I don't know of another forum like Hacker News, so where are they going?

As someone who has been reading and posting here regularly since 2009, here's what I'm finding: The further I get in my pursuits, the more my concerns and tribulations become specialized and weird. To get a useful answer from the public internet would require so much backstory and explanation that it's barely worth trying. And the answer would likely be wrong or not useful.

Instead real world social networks and specialized micro communities are where it's at. A lot of paid consultations as well. Pay a few hundred (or thousand) bucks to an expert and get the correct customized answer to a specific problem. Worth every penny compared to reading tea leaves off the wild internet.

But HN is still one of the highest signal broad communities out there so it's fun to stick around.

[Gollapalli]

Does your bugfix problem actually test said code? Or does it just look for a specific change to be made, because I'm reasonably certain I input multiple correct solutions and they were all marked as having not solved the problem.

[travisjungroth]

Downvoted for loose epistemology.

1. No comparison to base rate. 5% shouldn’t make us believe they’re early in their journey. You haven’t given any observations about experience and the rate of error fixing.

2. Ignored sample bias. <5% of the users who submit to your site that you can track to HN solve the problem. That is very different from “<5% of HN readers”.