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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I've also been here since the beginning and thought that comments have been getting meaner...but when I actually look back at old threads, I'm reminded that that's not, in general, true, and we were just as bad back then.

The obvious conclusion to me is that my standards have changed. I'm older, hopefully wiser, and less inclined to put up with bullshit. So Hacker News has improved over the years, but my expectations have gone up faster than the rate of improvement, and so it seems like the quality of discourse has gone down.

Reminds me of a comment I left on Reddit in 2012, which was basically that while it wasn't as engaging for me, it's worth remembering that there are still millions of new people who are just finding the site for the first time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/rbqwc/by_request_i_di...

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I've been here and on Reddit (I remember that exact post of yours on Reddit) for years and I've had the same realization after going over old threads. I think that while the quality and meanness haven't changed much here on HN, there has been a marked shift away from "hard tech" content. For example, the article posted the other day about suicide in Greenland wouldn't have been posted here years ago. It was an interesting read and a thought provoking discussion but it doesn't fall in the realm of hacker news.

> It was an interesting read and a thought provoking discussion but it doesn't fall in the realm of hacker news.

You're a hacker, and you found it "interesting" and the discussion was "thought provoking", so by the guidelines (which have been in place for very many years) it is solidly on topic for HN.

Here's a thread from pg from 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128439 "Ad exec driven to suicide (partly) by trolls (nytimes.com)"

Part of the reason you're seeing more discussion of suicide and mental health is because we're seeing less stigma and less taboo around these subjects.

>For example, the article posted the other day about suicide in Greenland wouldn't have been posted here years ago.

Really? Top articles from 2 random months in 2010:

http://www.economist.com/node/16636027?story_id=16636027

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-american-gustation-crisis...

http://archive.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color...

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.htm...

http://mentalfloss.com/article/18692/he-took-polaroid-every-...

http://ruhlman.com/2010/09/so-you-wanna-be-a-chef%E2%80%94-b...

The content has become much more 'mainstream'. I think this is partly because over the last 10 years they're a been a popular culture fetishization of startups and entrepreneurship, and ycombinator in general has become much more widely known. I keep coming back but less so than in the past. I think the site has shifted a little away from my central interests.

But it does.

We (or at least I) miss your long insightful rants :-)

:-) I've shortened my average comment significantly over the years, mostly because of time and attention constraints. I suspect that the comment ranking algorithm actually penalizes posts > ~5 paragraphs in length now; that'd explain why eg. edw519's posts rarely rank highly now.

https://twitter.com/edw519/status/692478097837391872

While the rating for an entirely identical comment seems about as scientific a test as one could hope for, perhaps at least some of the fall-off in points is a penalty for literally copying old comments?

(Also, any one comment could fall through the cracks; the best comments can sometimes, by pure chance, fail to catch initial attention and fall out of view, without it necessarily reflecting anything but who was awake and browsing then—there's definitely a "rich get richer" effect in any system that promotes highly ranked content. For example, it would be interesting to know what times of day these two comments were posted.)

The comments were not identical. He starts the repost with:

"Aaah, feels like a good time for me to recycle an oldie but goodie from #245 here: ...."

If I was listening to the radio and I heard Milli Vanilli say something about dusting off a blast from the past my reaction would probably be to change the channel, not turn up the volume.

> If I was listening to the radio and I heard Milli Vanilli say something about dusting off a blast from the past my reaction would probably be to change the channel, not turn up the volume.

Indeed, what I take you to be saying is was what I meant; not necessarily that HN now has less taste for long-form comments, but rather that people are less likely to read, and therefore to upvote, a comment that is prefaced with a statement that it is a duplicate.

(I agree that what you have highlighted is an important sense in which the comments are not identical.)

Got it. The whole complaint was intellectually bankrupt. Even if the comments were identical I don't understand why they would be expected to score the same way.

Well, I've also noticed the effect where when I write a short (2-3 paragraph) comment, it's instantly ranked at the top of the comments for the article with 1 point, while when I write a long (8-10 paragraph) comment, it's instantly ranked at the bottom of the comments for the article with 1 point.

That's interesting, although, if it is more than just chance, it seems like it would say more about pg's attitudes towards desireable comments than about those of the broader community.

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