Ask HN: Is it just me or has the quality of links on HN improved significantly? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it just me or has the quality of links on HN improved significantly?

30 pointssidcool24 comments

.. Especially the front page! I can't get enough reading the insightful articles and viewing the videos. If the content had indeed improved, what changed? What measures contributed to it?

EDIT: I mean the quality of tech/startups content. I usually ignore political posts.

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I'd say it has definitely decreased significantly.

There's way more marketing posts and "tech news" which are nothing but barely informative opinion pieces around something. Quite a lack of quality content compared to years before.

I agree. I haven't checked the front page much. Feel free to flag if it doesn't meet the requirements, as per guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "

Unfortunately, barely informative opinion pieces isn't in that list.

Yes, I've also found that it has. The most likely reason is that either someone (mods) is vetting them to ensure that the high quality posts stay up, or maybe the community itself is doing the good thing by upvoting the good quality posts and downvoting the bad ones. Or maybe, its a combination of both!

Posts can't be downvoted. They can only be upvoted, ignored, or flagged.

And everything on the front page gets there by being upvoted by readers.

Everything on the front page stays there by being upvoted [1], but there's also the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), which is a different way to get a few minutes on the front page.

[1] except the job ads of course

I think you can downvote after getting 500 karma.

Not posts. Only comments can be downvoted. Posts can only be flagged.

No, I haven't noticed improvement, but my model of improvement may not necessarily be one that we share. I see a more thought-diverse community as an improvement. We learn from those who don't share the same views as us. Hacker News hasn't offered the opportunity for that to happen. I see valuable dissenting opinions buried at the bottom of the comments section all the time. This is for a variety of reasons, not just the opinions of the community. Two categorical reasons include architecture and design. Hacker News is designed to facilitate group-think. The timing of comment submissions and lack of nuance in the voting mechanism make it especially problematic for promoting thought diversity.

I think you're arguing that the platform should help with finding thought-diverse comments, but how should it decide for you?

If you want those comments, you scroll down. It seems the problem is that those comments aren't being prominently featured at the top. Should they?

Also, I see plenty of comments that I disagree with being voted to the top. The key aspect is that they are well-thought comments, very polite and bring interesting information. I usually upvote those comments myself.

In summary, I don't think the platform can fix its users.

I think the more meta and wide ranging the subject matter, the better, because there's something for every user of HN to comment on, and oh do users love to snipe on specific sections of an article. Meta content is like crack for users. Narrowly constrained articles seem to be ignored.

Given that I'm a data engineer I have a bias towards this, but I love how many SQL articles have been posted lately.

The site still feels more inclined toward political discussion than it used to be. There were the occasional explosions like when Chelsea Manning was arrested and when Schwartz committed suicide, but the site used to feel more technical... at least to me. I have no hard data.

I would love to see demographic data on users and how they have changed over time as well.

Yep, I totally agree. I actually dislike the content these days and have been much less engaged than in the past. But that's the way it goes. It doesn't surprise me that some people like it a lot better.

More political for sure. And more nytimes, Bloomberg links that I am likely to have already read either directly or through other channels.

And seriously, do we really need another link talking about how awesome Rust is?

The Rust phenomenon isn't unique. It happened with every other major breakthrough technology ever since Hacker News has achieved critical mass. We are going to be bombarded with whatever is leading change. New endeavors that aren't leading change fizzle out of existence from the front page.

You’re right - I wrote that in jest. I was first to complain but I truly do like the content that makes it to hacker news and the way in which it is ranked. I would say 9 times of 10, I’m surprised to see what’s on the front page because it’s definitely not the mix of information I normally consume. It’s cool to see what people are doing and think about new frameworks like rust and clojure and even erlang.

Remember the insane flurry of Erlang posts some while back? That had to be a record for flooding about one language.

> The site still feels more inclined toward political discussion than it used to be

People have been saying that for 10 years or more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367

A bunch more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869

Yes ten years ago is about when I first sensed a change and I figured others had pointed it out. I’ve been a lurker from almost the beginning. I still really appreciate this community even if it has changed. Change is normal.

I see it the other way around. Not changing for over 10 years (in this respect) is extraordinarily stable. When people complain about the site getting too political lately, by "lately" they do not mean a decade. Such perceptions of deterioration are distorted by things like recency bias and nostalgia bias.

The events you mention were from 2010 and 2013. I don't think it was all that different before 2008, either—the toddlerhood if not infancy of this place—because the site was governed by pg's tastes and those didn't change. It's just that there needs to be a bootstrapping period before the usual complaining about how X is worse than it used to be. I'm being oversensitive though!

I wouldnt mind if the discussion didn't instantly devolve into garbage with posts being downvoted with no discussion, or straight up name calling.

That being said, the mod teams seems to do a good job of cleaning thing up when they get too out of hand

The proper spelling of his name is Swartz.

No, I disagree.

True that!

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