Thank you for being a diamond in the rough, Dan. Your tireless work keeping Hacker News a safe haven for free thinkers and polite politic is essential during times like these.
I don't think that means what you think:
>a person who is generally of good character but lacks manners, education, or style.
Over the years I have asked many other people about this phrase when it came up in conversation. Most of my acquaintances only knew of the "needle in a haystack" meaning. These people went to Berkeley, Stanford, etc. and worked at FAANG or are doctors/lawyers.
I have wondered if it's a geographic thing — most of these people have spent most of their lives in California. Perhaps the east coast is different?
...which inevitably results in a drop in quality and substance and a rise in partisanship.
HackerNews thrived for a long time by keeping under the radar, but what we really need now is a new mechanic that rewards dispationate analytic content and substance over partisanship meetoo content.
Behavioral guidelines and moderation don't work long term and don't scale.
"A safe haven for free thinkers and polite politic" is very much in the eye of the beholder, methinks.
That's not to say there isn't a decline, just that it's hard to discuss objectively. The dominant factor in such perceptions is randomness; more precisely, the streaks that occur in randomness that feel like they can't possibly be random. That explains why people have been saying the same things in identical language for so long. You could even make one of those guessing-game sites out of such comments. For example: 2010 or 2020?
The community is full of ideologues to the point where the comments are most often just predictable talking points being regurgitated ad nauseum. Everyone talks about the intelligent conversation, and it does happen, but far more times it’s just the same clichés repeated over and over.
(2010, of course, or the question wouldn't have made sense, but you see the point.) A decade is a lifetime in internet dog years, so HN already has survived these concerns long-term. If there is a downward trend, it's a slow one. Some of the things we've done to stave it off (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...) must have done something.
Other old threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144390
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1550898
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367
If I list all the 1990 articles warning about Global Warming, does that somehow mean it's not a real and serious problem?
If people keep seeing signs of apocalypse for 30 years, they always say the same things, the apocalypse never comes, and there's a simple alternative explanation, that weakens the case for apocalypse, no? At a minimum the burden is on 2020 to show how the same perception now is more objective than it was in 2010, or 2008 for that matter, when people were also saying this. The simple explanation is that internet users always perceive things this way.
I strongly (if sometimes hypocritically?) agree. A critical mass of people who acted to preserve that culture was helpful in the past.
What can be done going forward? Do you have any ideas for how to create this mechanic?