The Decline of Reddit, Hacker News, and the United States | Hacker News Reader

The Decline of Reddit, Hacker News, and the United States

danielmiessler.com

15 pointsdanielrm2615 comments

The United States is now full of people who haven’t read a book since high school, think Jesus is coming back soon, don’t believe in evolution, and don’t know the name of their congressional representatives. And Hacker News is becoming more like Reddit every day.

As opposed to, say, 1885, when everyone read books, nobody thought Jesus was coming back soon, everyone believed in evolution, and everyone knew who their congressional representatives were (although maybe not their Senators, who they couldn't elect).

Point being, it's easy to idealize or even mythologize the past.

In French: "la nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était", sthg like "Nostalgia is not anymore what it used to be"

"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be" in English, usually attributed to writer Peter De Vries.

In 1885, this set of beliefs would have been normal across western countries. In 2010, it is an anomaly which is specific to the US and sets it apart from other first-world nations. In that sense, it is worth mentioning.

It's not like people in other countries who believe in evolution do so for good reasons. They think they're supposed to believe in evolution, so they find reasons to do so.

Let's see if we can find some numbers & measure this. Anyone know where to find:

* Literacy rate over time * Religion over time (how do you measure that? number of Anglican baptisms?) * Acceptance of evolution over time?

Would be interesting to compare this between countries as well.

I read this post with great interest, since I am developing a social news site that I hope will solve the same problems that you refer to.

My twist on the model is twofold:

One, like Twitter, we rely extensively on "following" -- you don't have to see the "poison" in the ecosystem if you don't want to. It is ultimately very hard (without censoring, as you point out) to keep low quality content out of the stream -- at least this way, you don't have to see it.

The second approach is to implement edit ability -- group edit ability, like in a wiki. This will allow those who are interested in the upkeep of the community can go ahead and fix the problems that they see before them, instead of using ineffectual "bury" and "downvote" mechanisms.

In this way, the community can go ahead and nurture that excellence that attracted them to the community in the first place.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the project, since I approached it knowing full well the lessons of eternal september -- and as a lover of what reddit used to be, I went about trying to fix what I saw were the issues in the site.

Check it out: http://quippd.com/

    Next cool thing > Hacker News > Reddit > Digg > Youtube comments > /b/

These sites are all slowly turning into their right-hand side neighbor. I suppose /b/ will always be /b/.

Linkbait title, but I agree with the sentiment. It's the same phenomenon that occurs in the real world. Artists, entrepreneurs and other creatives create interesting cultural centers in low-rent areas, which leads to "trendiness" and gentrification, which leads to a yuppie influx which eventually kills off the vibe, drives up the rent and pushes the artists and entrepreneurs to another part of town.

Having said that, I'm not sure what you can do about it without creating a walled garden.

I have a slightly different take on the cause for this phenomena - I called it a pond theory because it reminded me of ripples in a pond. Essentially, a small, founding group have a lot in common, though each individual has diverse interests.

The community expands, and while new ripples will continue to have things in common with the centre, they will increasingly have interests that are more diverse than other new members on the other side of the pond.

Eventually the community grows too large, there are too many interests for the original core to remain strong, and (like the ripples in a pond) the energy dissipates and the group fails.

[1] Thoughts - http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/197-my-pond-theory-or-wh...

[2] Possible Solutions - http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/199-my-pond-theory-or-ho...

And for the record, I don't think HN is already too much like Reddit / Digg / Slashdot / Whatever.

You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/lyrics/graduation.htm

Change happens. Accept it and move on. There are worse fates than getting popular - anyone remember kuro5hin?

Compare:

http://news.ycombinator.com

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

As of now, out of 30 posts each, they differed in only 7 articles (77% similarity):

Classic has:

  Simplicity vs. Choice
  Introducing the BankSimple Engineering Team
  First Clojure conference
  FB vs Foursquare
  Don’t let jQuery’s $(document).ready() ..
  Did Germany experience industrial boom in 19th ..
  C++ Compilation Speed

New has:

  A smartphone retrospective
  Do you understand HTTP Caching?
  Google Suggests changing your name ..
  JITB
  Notes on Writing Good Commit Messages (
  Product to Platform - My Start-up's Summer Journey
  What different sorting algorithms sound like

This is a good benchmark, but not perfect, since people can only upvote what they already see.

Try bringing some schizophrenia to the site: show the "classic" version to the "classic" crowd by default for some time and see if the two versions will diverge more.

Subjectively I feel programming articles are getting rarer on HN.

Social organization should be harder to solve than finding dark energy and higgs bosons. It's a massively complex problem.

Walled gardens grow stale, progressive communities fall apart. That's the natural order of things. The best thing to do is make this process smoother. Have those magic members of the community leave earlier by starting new and better communities at a faster pace.

Maybe you don't need to rewrite backends every time. Just modernize the look, add some features like autofollow based on friend follow graph and see if it works. Maybe just split the community into smaller groups, that occasionally trickle out into a central group, something that Digg 4 is attempting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com