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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

I've been on this one for a pretty long time. A little over 7 years according to my user page.

The quality has not noticeably gone down. There are a lot less technical articles now than I feel like there used to be, but that might very well just be because I've gotten more technical, and now everything seems like an opinion.

I think it's because HN is actually willing to defend itself. We used to have days where everybody would ONLY submit articles about some obscure programming language (although I have forgotten which one it was...not arc, I don't think...scala maybe? I think it started with an S).

We don't seem to do that anymore, but I think the culture is still there. People are willing to tell you to leave if you're not a good member. That's really important.

View on HN

Indeed, I joined 9 days after you (and have within 1% of your karma (!)), and my experience is the same. HN was founded with a keen awareness of how online forums tend to go downhill over time, and there are specific rules to avoid it.

But IMHO, the saving grace is the fact that HN is not built to grow. Growth is what ruins every online community. There are still plenty of small communities have have been going fine for years or even decades because they didn't experience explosive growth. As soon as you have something like Twitter with massive investment and market expectations, you know the community is done for. To Twitter's credit though, the mechanic of following individuals does scale much better than a forum though. Subreddits were also a good idea that allows some community while scaling. But in both those cases it works because they create sub-divided communities rather than one massive one which inevitably breaks down.

It also doesn't have to live on life support from the advertising industry. That's quite important.

Your comment brought to mind my favourite story about a long-lived online community (which was definitely not aiming for growth):

http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-Possibl...

I'm wondering how many similarities your comment also has to do with capitalism...

Some areas of business make a good local idea, regional idea, but VC firms want you to expand and swallow the world. Maybe that's also the wrong way to think about it: maybe coexisting in the local economy is a better, more stable, and amicable way to go.

Just a thought that your post had on me.

Either Haskell or Erlang. I'm 90% sure it was Erlang.

It was Erlang!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919897

pg sparked the original one. Be sure to read the top comment as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

Edit: that was March 11, 2009. Someone should see if the Internet archive took a snapshot of the all-Erlang front page.

Edit 2: Nope, it fell between snapshots. I wonder if we could reconstruct it from the logs. But here's HN from the day before: https://web.archive.org/web/20090310152751/http://news.ycomb....

If I recall correctly, there was a noticeable difference in the HN front page on Christmas day. More unusual articles were upvoted than what usually gets posted. It could be due to the difference in visitors, but it might also be just that fewer people were voting, and there was less people to upvote what might normally be a popular post and that caused less generic posts to stay visible.

HN still works if you belong to the right school of thought. Quality has gone down in the sense that variety of viewpoints has been diminished. Within the filter bubble, there are still enough interesting articles to make it worthwhile.

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