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Comment by cambalache | Hacker News Reader

It is the Redditization of this site.

Superficially, your comment could look like a dismissive over-simplified answer to the question "why are these sort of articles popping up on Hacker News?" But I interpret your statement as a suggestion that there may be value in investigating questions of cultural norms.

I haven't been tracking "submissions that don't seem to belong", so I don't have a position on the parent's claim. But let's say they are right, and there have been increased submissions that don't belong here. And let's say that you are right, that this is caused by 'redditization'. (Based on dang's argument, this may be entirely temporary.) I'm interpreting 'redditization' as a shift in the impressions of a significant subset of the HN user base, such that various reddit-like behaviors are seen as desirable here.

Putting all of this together, your comment suggests to me an actionable strategy. If there is in fact an increase in inappropriate submissions, and if this is due to redditization, then pushing back (via voting, flagging, and feedback via comments) on redditization in all of its forms (not just inappropriate submissions) could shift the culture of HN in such a way that inappropriate submissions become less likely in the future.

Please read the site guidelines to the bottom, and note the fresh links to old things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Just because people have complained about something long ago, and were sometimes wrong, sometimes partly right, doesn't mean that some form of it isn't in progress at the moment, during this pandemic.

Here's the weak link in your chain:

> sometimes partly right

They weren't, because it didn't happen. Now if you put it this way, I'd agree:

Just because people have complained about something long ago, and were wrong, doesn't mean that some form of it isn't in progress at the moment.

But what are the odds? By the same argument, masturbation might still make you go blind. More likely the claim is as mistaken as it used to be.

Edit: I don't mean you personally!

I'm not saying this as a challenge to what you said, but what about the concept of the Eternal September? How does that play into your assertion that the "tale as old as time" is, in fact, false?

Assuming even the most conservative parameters in some kind of diffusion model, one could easily see a solution converge upon the steady state being more disorganized and less coherent than the initial state, feeding into a lower signal to noise ratio.

Well, I can tell you my answer to that, but it's just my answer, and I'm biased and don't really know. Others' answers may be just as good or better. Every HN user has their mental model of the site and these models disagree wildly. Users tend to be passionate about their model, which is more important.

My view is that HN has managed to stave that fate off so far. If so, that's not by accident—it was one of the founding intentions of the site to stave off Eternal September, which was just as well-known an issue amongst internet forum types in 2006 as it is today. You can see this in the second paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html. (Also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)

If that's true, how have we been able to escape entropy? The same way anyone does: by spending a lot of energy. In particular: a lot of worry and hard work, patient engagement with particular users about specific issues, stubborn focus on optimizing for one thing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), the ability to modify the software to adapt to problems, and the fact that growth has been linear over 10 years and that we're not under pressure to make it faster, which is a historical accident of HN being part of YC—sort of a felicitous one-off, like Iceland having a mild climate.

I do think there are trends in an entropic, Septemberesque direction, but there are also counter-trends in more organized directions, with the net result being that the site has changed but not yet become uninteresting. Other things I think are that there's a cap on how good HN can ever get (boo), but that there are gradual things we can do to make it better (yay). They just need to be slow.

>>sometimes partly right

>They weren't, because it didn't happen.

My understanding of some of the redditization claims I have seen was that, during some periods of time, HN was "becoming relatively more like reddit." This is different than claiming "will inevitably and permanently become 'like reddit' " (Where 'like reddit' might mean "suffer certain reddit-like dysfunctions" or simply "be sufficiently similar to reddit by some other criteria.") In the first, reddit is a direction. In the second, reddit is a state.

If someone claims to observe or have observed a trend of redditization, sometimes I become curious and want ask questions like "in what way" and "to what degree" and "did this trend continue unabated, for how long" etc. (Also, can we quantify this, maybe with lexical analysis?)

You seem to argue that HN must become permanently "like reddit" by some standard of similarity in order for a prior suggestion that "HN was becoming more like reddit" to be a valid observation. I disagree. Redditization is a matter of degree, and it might be cyclical in nature, or you and the claimant might be focused on different aspects of reddit culture.

I understand it can be tedious to have ongoing comments from people who lack a larger perspective making similar, repetitive claims of temporary or alleged redditization of HN. But the argument that is made in the site guidelines, and the one you make here, is not a compelling justification for the claim that every one of us is always wrong when we claim or suggest that some form of "redditization" is occurring. (That's how I interpret the comment about "semi noob illusion" and also your comment "They weren't, because it didn't happen.") The redditization influence doesn't need to 'win' in order to be real. A shift in the reddit direction doesn't need to become comprehensive and permanent in order to have occurred.

>But what are the odds?

The odds that HN is currently experiencing some degree, of some form, of redditization is quite high in my opinion. I've seen entire subthreads of reddit-like nonsense in the past two months, with everyone upvoting each other. It remains to be seen the degree to which this wanes in the future.

What is redditization? I'd like to see the people who complain about redditization enhance their criticism with a list of specific qualities they associate with redditization.

For me, redditization may be suspect whenever I see a great deal of highly upvoted comments in most or all of these categories: (a) inane comments, (b) rhetorically rich but otherwise empty comments, (c) snark or trollish sarcasm, and, less often, (d) entire threads of mutually upvoted thematic ironic humor. I'm sure others would list other factors, or other ways of characterizing 'redditization'.

By focusing on specific characteristics, granted, the community could talk about comment quality without mentioning reddit at all. For better or worse, this ignores a real cultural dynamic involving a subset of HN users who have a comfort and familiarity with (and preference for) reddit cultural norms.

It's true that "HN is turning into Reddit" is classed as an Eternal September-style complaint in my mind, and I think also in the minds of most people who make those comments. You're the first person I've heard suggest that it might be a cyclical ebb and flow. The comments we're talking about never have anything that subtle to say.

I think you're underestimating how common this trope is, and how mechanical and vacuous it is. It has been that way for well over 10 years—since before HN was even called "Hacker News" in fact. It got so tedious that pg added that site guideline a decade ago.

Yes, what a weird comment. It is the same type of comment of the people who say scientists have been warning about global warming for more than 20 years now so there is nothing new. So basically, you put that comment in your guidelines and cover yourself for ever and ever of any form of criticism,not matter how mild.

The guideline is not about criticism, it's about a particularly tedious form of repetition. It's a bit like its neighbor, the guideline that asks people not to comment on comment voting in comments.

HN users are not shy about making criticisms, and any HN user who has one can easily find a more substantive way of making theirs. Actually, if a comment showed up that broke that guideline and had something genuinely interesting to say, it wouldn't be a problem—it's just that they never do.

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