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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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.

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.

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