Comment by stiiv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stiiv | Hacker News Reader

I've been a lurker on HN for about a decade. This is literally the first comment that I have posted.

Part of the reason is: while I am thoughtful, reasonably well-informed individual, I never felt up to the task of putting in enough effort to create an HN-worthy comment. This was inspired almost entirely by the _quality_ of the kinds of comments that I saw over the years -- at least for the kinds of posts that drew my attention.

- Many (most?) of the comments were made by experts - They often included disclaimers, especially when the poster considered themselves an amateur - They often included sources and links - They were conspicuously respectful and humane - Meta-comments were productive, and typically stopped propagation of nastiness before it could take root

Often enough, comments would truly enrich the original post, and I was truly grateful for them.

This was a stark contrast with the subreddits that I frequented. (I gave up on reddit a few years when they changed the default format to be more attention-greedy.)

From what I've seen, HN has become increasingly noisy -- at times, it's angry -- but overall, it just feels loud and crowded.

For that reason, I've basically stopped reading comments at all, even if there is high-quality content in there. It is a damn shame.

This concurs with my assessment. It's literally in the rules to not say what I'm about to say, but guess what: content-wise, HN threads are essentially Reddit threads at this point (ironically this stupid rule has likely played a hand in helping this become possible).

HN as a community used to heartily employ downvotes on comments that had low signal value. Those days are long gone; now you can make an offhand joke or pun and it will get upvoted to the moon. HN also used to track your ratio of karma per comment, which encouraged you to only comment when you really felt what you had to say was insightful lest you throw off your ratio with a comment that would only get a couple upvotes. Dang or somebody else removed that because they believed it was holding people back from participating (and it was, but it served a good purpose IMO).

HN has long required a karma threshold to downvote, but IMO they should've hid the upvote behind an even higher karma requirement. Without that, what has happened when waves of new users sign up, is they upvote garbage comments (likely from other new accounts), and over time this becomes normalized to be the community voice. Leading to the low signal quality we have today.

> overall, it just feels loud and crowded.

I think this is part of the real reason. More people have been coming there since I joined (2015 I think?). The submissions were also more technical then, a bit more, not much more.

I've been around much longer and things are always changing. What I've seen, probably in the timeframe since COVID, is that people used to drop a comment and rarely revisit any of the children comments. The child comments used to be mostly positive and potentially additive if only a pat on the back. Now, more so than before, I see the top level commenter coming back to defend themselves in GGP level comments. The children to their comment is likely to point out something they missed, why they disagree, point out broken functionality, critique or otherwise add a hint of negativity to the comments.

There's two parts. 1) the negativity is increasing a bit 2) the commenter came back and chose to defend/counter themselves. #1 alone typically has sorted itself out in the past, negativity got downvoted fairly heavy to the point where I think folks probably self censored themselves. The community and mods have managed this type of thing fairly well. The #2 part seems to me a relatively recent development. I'd blame it on the WFH flexibility giving everyone more real-time usage of the site and that facilitates debate/arguments.

That's my totally made up hypothesis on this. I still don't think I'd characterize the level of discourse as problematic. The fact we're discussing politics and world topics more often as a community it's natural for us to disagree more.

I've personally found people that don't come back to respond to any comment whatsoever to be of the most frustrating sort. They tend to seem to drive-by attack, possibly with an essay of a statement, and then when they're called on it, or when someone tries to help or clarify, there's silence.

Come to look at their account and they post maybe once every 3 weeks and never respond to a single thing that is a response to their post.

I've even considered making scrapers to find and avoid those kinds of users; but that's just me.

I've been making an intentional effort to be that kind of poster. I've found no benefit in responding to replies most of the time.

maybe they are busy or cannot defend themselves well

Or they just don't know that someone replied to them.

People like to post their opinions to the world. It feels good, and feels like you are being "heard". But for most it stops there. Not many care to debate online because a) it takes time and energy vs posting something you've had in your head for a while and b) they know almost no one changes their mind online.

On top of that, HN doesn't notify you when someone replies to your comment... so maybe they just forgot.

Part of the problem is that after a fairly short period of time you can't reply anymore. I want looking through my "threads" section for a particular comment and found someone had replied to an older comment I made and had misunderstood what I said. I wanted to reply to clarify, but the reply button had been removed. It seems like after so many hours or days, you can't continue the conversation. It's a shame, but it does keep zombie threads from living indefinitely.

I was recently cleaning up some passwords and unused accounts, and found an account I had created in my password manager that I forgot about. I signed in for the first time in about 5-6 years, and the same thread was the top thread from 5-6 years ago. So I get timing things out. But it seems way too short here.

> There's two parts. 1) the negativity is increasing a bit 2) the commenter came back and chose to defend/counter themselves

I've noticed this, and am not innocent myself. I suspect many of us have been abusing HN as a cathartic output from the frustrations of reality over the past couple of years, and as a form of escapism from the increased hysteria online in general.

As an example - I recently agreed fairly clearly, with a reply challenging one of my upvoted comments... the commenter then replied with even more aggressive rhetoric - Almost as if the expectation has become that comments must be adversarial and that people are not open to changing their minds, that our only recourse is to publicly ridicule others with more aggressive rhetoric. I don't think the commenter misunderstood even, they simply couldn't change their mode even after convincing their "opponent". Discourse has basically become too adversarial.

You joined May 31, 2015, it's on your profile page.

FWIW, I have found HN comments and submissions tend to ebb and flow. There are times when I feel the quality goes downhill, but then 3, 6, maybe 12 months later it seems like things get back on track. I'm unsure of the cause, possibly dang and co. are tweaking knobs in the background?

> Of course it's perpetually September for ~~Delphi~~ HN users, isn't it? [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The submission side is curious to me. I struggle to find stuff to submit these days.

I resonate with your views. I’ve not been around that long but I often visit old threads to get a perspective.

For those looking for an example to drive this home, look no further than the most hot button thread on HN when President Trump was elected. Inspect the quality of discussion. We were so much better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201

Note: As sad as it sounds, I need to clarify; I have no political position or axe to grind. Just showing how we used to have discourse about difficult topics and I chose an extreme example to convince you.

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