Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdlyga | Hacker News Reader

It's the natural progression of websites like this. Reddit went through the same progression: it was very positive and felt like a community when the migration from Digg first happened. 10 years ago, Hacker News felt like an insider website for professionals. It still does, but there's definitely an uptick in negativity.

View on HN

Community size and cohesion are definitely key factors. But there is still strong signal to noise ratio here (thank you dang et al for all the work).

yeah HN really reminds me of reddit before the Digg exodus. I wonder if it will have the same fate eventually as it gets more popular and moderation can't keep up

Hacker News didn’t turn into Reddit because of AI, but it’s certainly turning into Harvard Business Review. The primary benefit of the HN-saturating component of modern AI is about allowing untrained managers to delegate some or all their work to cheap labor. Without that benefit of delegating to one’s contracted agents, the majority of HN’s AI interests over the past two years evaporate. So, yes, we’re still an insider community for professionals, but a lot of those professionals have revealed their preference for management rather than individual contribution, and in a very short period of time. It’s no wonder the community is tearing itself apart: I can think of no greater insult to our ICs that aren’t interested in delegating their work to others, than turning this community into an HBR forum. “Ten ways to get more work out of your workers” is just as offensive a submission to ICs as it always has been whether they’re employers, contractors, or generative AI — but now that anyone can be a manager, with HNs mods choosing to remain powerless against submissions of managerial content, here we are. The only recourse left is for users to start flagging managerial content as unsuitable for the site, since the mods will be forced by their own adopted principles to accept that popular opinion as well. Sadly, I don’t think there’s enough ICs left here to outweigh the managers’ upvotes.

Management incompetence in tech is a serious problem that predates the AI fiasco by leaps and bounds.

I’m talking about the new management focus at HN since AI lowered the bar for ICs to become managers, not about “management incompetence in tech”.

I am curious about this take. What I have seen personally & my understanding of the broader industry pressure is for managers to go back to IC.

The broader industry pressure, at least as it shows up in HN posts about AI usage at work, is apparently to pressure ICs to manage AI workers without being granted access to the management pay scales. As we’re seeing on HN, a lot of our ICs are clearly itching to be managers when the workforce has no ability to complain about or contest their demands. It must be an infuriating time to be a middle manager, both jealous of the ICs who get to manage compliant workers rather than human ones, and terrified for their own jobs, and having to see HN enraged at all the managerial content being posted with ‘AI’ after years of HN rejecting those exact same topics when it’s about managing humans rather than AI.

(Outside of the context of HN I don’t have anything to say here about the industry as a whole. Someday in another more appropriate post about the tech industry I will, though!)

> 10 years ago, Hacker News felt like an insider website for professionals. It still does, but there's definitely an uptick in negativity.

I will just speak for myself, but a large part of that "uptick in negativity" is from professional insiders who changed their views, not necessarily from newbies "poisoning" the site. Tons of people who were incredibly optimistic about the role of tech and specifically the startup ecosystem in society 20 years ago feel very differently today.

Its funny, because the Digg migration is probably when Reddit started going down hill.

I specifically remember one commenter saying, "Look, we're not happy about what happened either but we have no where else to go. Now scoot over."

Was the Digg exodus the start of Reddit’s Eternal September?

I think so. That was the first big shift from Programmers / IT / Nerds to rage comics if I remember right.

Reddit started showing signs of terminal illness in 2011 and spez since ran it into the ground along with CondeNast. 2015 was the death knell after the CEO, Ellen Pao, was featured at the top of /r/PunchableFaces, which then temporarily went private. Staff shakeup ensued.

At the time it was a massive conversation around whether reddit should have to host content its advertisers didn't agree with, except they had heavily contributed to killing off old forums whose free speech was not compromised by advertisers. This was part of a larger conversation about free speech protection online and right-to-platform which still ensues. Corporations frequently cite their own free speech interests while suppressing speech of individuals and organizations. The current organization of the web is just perverse and tenuous.

Hacker News is quite unique in that while it is an aggregator, I have never felt that staff moderation crossed over into censorship, even when I've been on the receiving side of it. The moment dang leaves and pg retires, it's over. Tom Howard might do OK for a while, but the reason HN, despite eternal September and growing amounts of negativity, spam and astroturfing, continues to be a fun place on the web is because Dan is the man and fully embodied Paul Graham's established foundational principles.

We all need to be thinking about what kind of internet we want our grandchildren and future society to inherit and start building today.

Dang is the best moderator I’ve ever encountered.

Traditionally Tumblr was blamed for that in the late 2010s, although Digg is plausible. I think the sheer volume of Tumblr had more impact on Reddit than Digg ever could have, its a size thing.

A lot of Reddit problems were own-goals. Lets have a civil war over being a free speech or being a brutally censored speech site, I'm sure the civilians trapped in the middle will love the experience. Spoiler -> They did NOT.

But humans can always be replaced by bots if you're selling advertising views, LOL. HN doesn't sell ads (or at least none have ever gotten past my ad blocker) so there's fewer bots here so the decline due to bots is slower here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com