and LLMs are good for only a few things, one is shitposting
At every juncture there have been people reminiscing about the good old days that never actually existed at all. About how great it used to be compared to today.
I think the funniest are the constant "man, remember when the BIGS used to engage with us proles?" Ignoring that there are still many founders and the like hanging out here, present, future and past, what a weird thing to reminisce about. It's like "I used to be in the presence of people who mattered". I mean, matter yourself, because pretending you're in a club with them is foolhardy.
And then LLM happened. And HN got more LLM writing, more LLM articles, more complaints about LLM-written material, plus AI became a dominant subject of conversation. LLM is in addition to the other negative changes.
While HN is part of the set, I think we need to look larger. Is it just HN, or is it everywhere? If it's not everywhere, what percentage of sites is it? What are the sites that don't have this issue like or do different.
I think part of it is that HN has grown a lot because of a lot of other sites getting worse. The problem is that growing makes it worse. Then add on top of that there are a lot of high value targets here on HN that bots try to target, financially or politically.
Internet is a messy place now. I remember years and years ago, like early 2000s people thought that things like astro-turfing weren't real, and governments were not targeting individuals/groups on forums. How nieve their were.
I'd bet the closure of other walled gardens like reddit drives traffic more than anything of content.
These comment sections follow the same trajectory of all comment sections since the birth of the internet.
While it has always been a thing on here to some degree, the one growing trend I will note is that people are increasingly more forceful in demanding that everyone know about the things they aren't interested in, and more demanding that other people don't talk about things that don't interest them.
It's like people can't just skip a submission on the front page. They absolutely must go in to every discussion to tell everyone how much they don't want to read about or talk about that subject, and how much they want everyone to stop talking about it.
It's tilting at windmills. Right now this can mostly be seen in AI discussions where just about every AI-related submission will have a number of people declaring that it's all so boring and they wish there was an HN ban on such submissions. Cue someone foolishly believing them making yet another "HN without the AI" variant that sits unloved.
But the same thing could previously be seen against things that people don't want to be a thing. When WWDC happens people will announce that they're sick of all of the Apple news. The same for Google during I/O. Etc. People are against some thing and they really, truly think they can shame or scold others into falling in line.
Which is why every few days, I have to post a comment along the lines of:
"At some point in the future, the obsession with whether something was written by AI or not will be classified as a mental disorder."
I get downvoted every time, but it's refreshing to know others share my gripe that it is tiring to virtually every day see this discussion play out in some HN thread or other. Those threads rarely add anything to the discussion.
More specifically: comments with an opinion and no justification are modded up. "PHP is garbage" or "Person X is a terrible person" used to be considered noise. Not because they were right or wrong, but because "PHP is a language that can't keep a consistent function names and argument poisitoning in it's own standard library" or "Person X is a terrible person because their engineering milestones are frequently delayed".
Dan or whoever will throw out "everyone one every site always thinks the site's going downhill" but it is, really.
I understand people have their reasons to be negative about tech but they could go somewhere else to post their comments. Going to a Star Wars forum to tell everyone how much Star Wars sucks would be nonsensical. Imagine a Star Wars forum full of people saying Star Wars sucks. That’s how I HN has felt for years now.
I’ve taken breaks from this site from time to time because eventually it just makes you feel bad. It wears you down.
Are they complaining about the tech or are they complaining that bad people are doing bad things with it?
The current hot topic with me is LLMs. Someone could be doing nice things with it, but the only ones I see are making "educational" videos with hallucinated information. By the time I figure out that the channel is slop, I now have to purge several videos worth of fake facts from my knowledge base. And all this so someone can make a quick buck off of youtube ads.
Then you might be surprised. I'm old enough to remember Episode I and the ... love for Jar-Jar shortly after the release of the movie.
Have you ever interacted with a fandom?
No one complains about Star Wars as much as Star Wars fans.
I agree with you about HN sucking all the joy out of everything, but that's been part of the culture for as long as I can remember. And when Show HN is almost nothing but AI slop and landing pages and half the threads are people shitting on programming and anyone who cares about it as an art or a science, or as anything but a means to generate monetary value, the frustration is understandable. HN seems to be undergoing a cultural schism and a lot of people just don't belong to it anymore.
But I'm a creep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don't belong here
Note that it may actually be true. One way to look at it is all successful organizations and communities are continually dying. In order for an organization to get critical mass and start attracting people, it has to be far above the mean in quality; the mean idea, after all, never gets realized. After that, everything is regression to the mean, i.e. downwards, until it ceases to exist.
If you rarely discover real places you've never been to, the memory will just be compressed and it seems like last year that you moved from your last place, when it was actually forty years ago.
Now, this can be alleviated by instead of visiting new places learning new things, but those things have to be actually new to your brain and not just more of something you are already familiar with. Otherwise it gets compressed all the same.
Subjectively it felt like I lived about 5 years in the first 2 months after my first kid was born - certainly they were more memorable than the previous 5 years. We were basically confined to the apartment except for doctor's visits during that time period, but the experience of caring for a little person was dramatically different from everything that came before. And then the newborn periods of our 2nd and 3rd kids flew by, because we had all the routines down.
2020 also felt like I lived a lifetime in a year, even though we were shut-in, because of all the events and changes of routine that year.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, World War 2 was ancient history, but at the time, it was only 20 years ago. And now, 20 years ago is only yesterday.
Then their children show up and the cycle repeats again.
Time flows like a river, and history repeats itself...
See several thousand year old commentary on how the youth is rotten
Eventually you end up with stackexchange or Reddit or 4chan where 95%+ of posts are bots or at least LLM generated, and the remaining 5% is crazy people who refuse to leave. HN is behind in that cycle but will inevitably and unavoidably catch up because as I stated there's no repair mechanism. All successful online orgs and communities attract bots and LLMs that kill the organization. There is no immune system other than unplugging and touching grass IRL.
My guess about "large scale socioeconomic effects" is we can't talk about Dead Internet Theory in public in polite company, but we can talk about "too much LLMs" or whatever in a vague sense while describing all the symptoms of Dead Internet Theory. Like those people who complain about poop on the sidewalks but can't be permitted socially to declare any sort of dislike of homeless people, so the talk is focused solely on the symptoms as if the symptoms appeared magically, an uncaused causation. The advertising fraud bubble will pop, eventually, and it'll all be blamed on LLM bots on social media, it totally wasn't planned and aided and abetted by the companies themselves, no, LOL. Their profits off advertising fraud were totally accidental and unintentional, you see, so they should get away with it. The people to blame are those vague AI bot things that magically appeared and totally had no legally prosecutable humans behind them.
Another large scale effect to talk about is massively pulled forward demand. A decade or two of Facebook and that pulls a lifetime of demand forward. What happens when the bill's due and nobody left but a tiny fraction of hopeless addicts? If the population as a whole does a lifetime of doomscrolling in 20 years, the next generation at least will be a total drought. Internet access will never go away because its too useful to pay your bills online, but social media will almost certainly go the way of the late 1970s CB Radio crash. I assure you CB radios are still being made, people still making money off them, and people are still using them, however only a microscopic fraction of the population uses CB Radios. So it will be soon, for "socializing online".
When you have a mirror, you can shine light wherever you want.
HN is extremely variable by submission:
The more general or mainstream or meta, the more reddit-like posts there are.
The more technical or mathematical or niche, the less.
None of the juvenile humor.
I mean if I'm gonna be preached at by jerks who think I'm stupid I'd rather they be funny jerks.
But Reddit's shitposting culture makes threads difficult to follow and powerfully impacts the culture there. On the better, closely moderated subreddits, threads are swiss-cheesed with deleted comments. It's just a very different reading experience.
Absolute nonsense.
> > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]
The guidelines post above links to nine comments echoing yours, some almost 20 years old.
On the other hand putting it in the rules that you’re not allowed to say X and then quoting the rule as evidence against X is at the very least not an intellectually interesting way of making a point. Imagine if everyone put in their profile that they’re never wrong and kept pointing at that when challenged.
HN allows anything that "hackers" might find interesting. On lobste.rs, anything that's not directly programming-related is generally off-topic.
HN encourages self-promotion, lobste.rs discourages it.
Until recently lobste.rs was very actively anti-AI. Newer rules have rolled that back somewhat, but there is still a rather vocal anti-AI contingent that is not afraid to pick fights with people who openly admit to being interested in machine learning as a technology.
Ignoring the actual submissions, which are usually mirrored on HN, I find the small user base often doesn't offer much in interesting comments. Many are short with little value, and I don't recall seeing many submission authors piping in, or luminaries with the deep knowledge that you sometimes see drop in on HN.
Friends tell me there is a definite political bias that leaks out.
I think Hackaday is a good alternative for hardware oriented HNers.
Go and compare it with HN on any big recent story and judge for yourself.
1. They have abandoned their former policy of “everything non-programming related is off topic” to allow discussion about politics
2. They have lost most of their users. It’s like a ghost town.
HN have some flaws but is still the gathering place for many technical people.