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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

I am slowly feeling like I should move on from HN. I used to find comments much more mature in the past and learned a lot. Lately I predict the general trend I'll see in the comments before even opening the page.

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Somehow that has been my experience as well. I used to love HN for the rational and mature comments. Now, I find more of the comments to be idealistic and biased. More of the comments are from people who don't seem to have read the linked post.

I feel the same. Comments used to be more thoughtful and nuanced, and I often found comments that changed my perspective on things. Now so many comments are massively negative and sweepingly generalize in uninteresting ways, eg just to pick a random example from replies to this current post:

"Every offering they have is worse today than it was a year ago."

HN should be better than this.

One of my least favorite trends about how HN comments go these days is that nearly all of them are reflexively supporting the company over the employees in any sort of story involving conflict between employer/employee. It's like, goddamn, y'all can stop bootlicking for companies already, as I know most of you are employee class rather than owner class.

I've had the same feeling. I've also noticed what feels like an increase in shallow, emotionally driven "gotcha" replies that are almost always from post-2020 accounts.

But I have to wonder if it's because as I have tried to quit Reddit and other mass market social media, I'm browsing this site a lot more. So I'm seeing more comment sections in general and clicking more threads than I would otherwise.

It's even in the community guidelines.

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

And that links to comments all the way back in 07!

My account is new but I've been reading HN since the late 00s. There has definitely been a slow redditification of HN over the years.

I used to like it when I didn't live in the Bay and avoided all the "local news" threads because it was not interesting to me. I kinda left after I moved because I don't wanna be in a site where the consensus solution to poop on the street on some neighborhoods is basically concentration camps.

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