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Comment by tomkit | Hacker News Reader

I'm breaking a 4 yr HN commenting-hiatus to post this: it's a bit disappointing to see how the quality of HN comments has deteriorated over the years. Virtually all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber. This is a plead to the HN moderators to continue to iterate on your product to improve the quality of the comments.

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Maybe this is also an opportunity to correct some of the untruths you've observed instead of simply complaining about their purported existence?

Be the improved comment quality you wish to see in the world.

Welcome back!

One of the worst parts of open source is when someone who has been happily getting value out of your free product for 4 years opens an issue to complain about how quality has gone downhill, and you need to fix a few things.

I don't think this is fair. The mods want the site to be successful and the parent is pointing out something that should be a cause for concern for them. No one wants HN to turn into the next Slashdot.

Surely the mods are able to figure out what the site needs better than any regular user, by virtue of their continued monitoring?

It's somewhat more likely but I wouldn't say "surely" at all. There are a lot of other factors.

But a bug report that says "Your program seems to have gotten slower over the past four years and I feel like it's crashing more often. Please fix it" isn't very useful. A couple of concrete examples of specific problems with some suggestions on what should have been done in those cases would have made the post much more informative.

It's human tendency to glorify the past and undermine the present",

I vehemently disagree with the statement that HN is declining in quality. concluding that HN is declining is like concluding that we live in a chaotic world, while globally violence is at an all time low [1] . Or undermining Dale Steyn in comparison to Malcolm Marshall or Dennis Lillee [2]. Cricket and Football fans would laugh at comparisons of Kohli with Tendulkar or Neymar with Ronaldinho while records speak otherwise [3] [4]. Aren't we falling prey to the same cognitive bias here.

[1] : http://www.slate.com/.../the_world_is_not_falling_apart... [2] : http://www.espncricinfo.com/mag.../content/story/603756.html [3] : http://www.hindustantimes.com/.../story... [4] : http://www.goal.com/.../neymar-matches-ronaldinhos...

Literally every forum I have ever been on, when it gets old enough, complains about declining quality and new users. There was a big discussion about this on a popular IRC I used to hang out on. And I spent the weekend setting up a bot to replay messages from 4 years ago in real time. And the general opinion was that the quality wasn't any higher back then.

Same thing with a default subreddit I moderated. We got endless complaints about declining quality. Using web archive to go a few years back, and the quality was just the same or worse!

All the time I read old discussion threads on HN. Either through the search feature or the "past" button. And I really don't see any difference between the old HN and the current one.

If anything it's slighty improved. I think many of the complaints discussed 4 years ago here aren't relevant any more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373 When was the last time you saw a "_____ in js" post? Honestly I miss those a bit.

Ideally I'd love to do statistics and see if stuff like average comment length or political words have increased over time. Maybe I'll try that sometime.

There was a lot fewer users four years ago so perhaps some people felt a stronger connection with those early users.

If you think the posted sensational anecdotes are not factual, then you're accusing the userbase of being a bunch of liars. Maybe the product isn't as good as you think?

On a more constructive note, why don't you raise the angle that you think is worth discussing? The allegations are pretty straightforward and Uber looks to be admitting to the mistake, hence the payout. Maybe the posted Bloomberg link should be changed to Quartz, which has a more substantial story with more to discuss than the settled payments: https://qz.com/989040/uber-is-paying-back-tens-of-millions-o...

Or you could also try to add to the discussion and enumerate those facts and sentiments that you feel are being overlooked in the discussion.

It's amusing that you have chosen to break your own self-imposed moratorium on participating in order to wag your finger and criticize everyone else while not contributing anything meaningful yourself.

It sounds like you might live in your own self-righteous echo chamber honestly.

I think the use of "product" here is a bit of a stretch, and what "moderators" are you pleading to? AFAIK it's only dang, and I'm not sure what we can expect him to do when the criticism levelled at him is "the comments aren't as good as I remember"

Also worth remembering is that when companies as polarising as Uber are in the news, there's gonna be heated discussion with lots of strong opinions and anecdata. No amount of moderation can avoid that

Moderation in all things, especially moderation.

I believe dang isn't the only one. Isn't sctb (just from the top of my head) a mod as well?

> Virtually all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber.

Point them out here, if you disagree. How do I prove to you that I spoke with a Lyft driver who prefers other car service apps over Uber? I am not going to prove it. Take it as a fact, or don't.

Let people post what they want to say. We don't need everyone to write like a professional critic or columnist. This is not a competition for Best Comment. I like sharing my thoughts with people regardless of how much content I can fill my comment with. You like to keep yourself mute from commentary, that's okay. If you think you are hearing echoes, perhaps there is truth to this? Or perhaps we should conjecture a conspiracy theory that a competitor is running a destroy-uber campaign here on this thread, like they planned a bunch of accounts weeks or months ago. Yeah there are a lot of fake online identities out there (esp during election time). Shall we continue with this conspiracy theory?

Let's move on with our life, we have bigger things to worry about than an echo chamber on HN.

I think that's a reputation Uber has built for themselves. I've seen a couple of commenters here who consistently used to denounce every Lyft article and praise Uber without disclosing they worked there.

i've only recently joined the hn community, and i'm interested by this thought because i find the comments generally inquisitive, regardless of how much someone has posted. upon further research of when the golden age of hn may have been, i found an article talking about whether or not app developers should listen to hn (i'm not linking it because it wasn't particularly enlightening). it lead to the hn comments in reply to the advent of dropbox, where i notice the same structure you're describing here, ten years ago. i suppose i just wish you would provide links to what you're describing as the 'height of hn' if you're describing how it has 'deteriorated over the years' it seems pretty amazing that a conversation like this takes place in the comments section to Uber ?

Isn't your own observation also a post based on anecdotes?

I have a suspicion that moderation is at least partly responsible for the current state.

The FAQ continues to list the "HN becoming more like reddit" comments (which I'd classify this comment as, considering even in a vaccuum both exhibit regression-to-the-mean based quality deterioration, so it's familiar) as a newcomer misconception, so either the mods here are in denial (worse) or lazy enough to not care (better, but still not great).

I'd take an update to the FAQ as at least acknowledgement of issues here, but tbh I don't care much either. Once you have some feeds up for the voices you do like having weigh in the standard content curation set doesn't matter as much.

rosy retrospection bias.

>all the comments I'm seeing here are sensationalist sentiments/anecdotes, backed with no facts, reverberated in an echo chamber.

You must be new here.

His account appears to have been created more than a decade ago.

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