Ask HN: Has the quality of posts and comments gone down? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has the quality of posts and comments gone down?

9 pointsgt565k11 comments

I've noticed that both on HN and reddit, over the last few years, the amounts of empty/unsophisticated/uneducated comments and posts has been steadily increasing. The "feed me with a silver spoon" user comments and inquiries that can be answered by 5 minutes of googling and research are becoming so common, that it makes me sad and inclined to quit these platforms.

It appears as the adoption of these platforms grows, the quality goes down to the common denominator of the population involved. Not to sound demeaning, but isn't this the downfall of every social media platform?

These platforms used to be for geeks and niche audiences, but as they grew, they attract everyone, causing the decline of intellectual conversations and thoughts and reducing them to low a quality of value content. People then tend to migrate to other newer platforms for a few years, before the same cycle repeats. This is similar and common among social media platforms like myspace, facebook, instagram, etc as the age of the population grows, newer generations want a segment specific platform.

I don't think it's the laziness. In fact, I go the other way on that one. If you make a post, and you make a claim, then you do the googling, and post the links that you think support the claim. Why? Because there's one of you, and thousands of readers. You could take the five minutes, or you could make your readers take 5 minutes times 1000 people. (And, if you're in an argument, you have the burden of proof if you make the claim.)

Where I think the quality has gone down is in the number of people who are here to argue, not to discuss and learn. People who won't listen even to reasonable counter-arguments, won't change their position, and won't stop arguing, because they're here to win, not to think. But that's kind of the problem with a growing platform, because the more readers you have, the more useful it is to an ideologist to win over the users of your platform.

If you get tenure and teach a course like Physics 101 you will get more and more fluent with the material each time you do it and the undergrads seem a little slower each time.

Yogi Berra said "That place? It's too crowded, nobody goes there anymore!"

One answer is to form an "inner party" from the best 5% out of the "outer party" and repeat the process every 5 years or so. Look at the "Cell structure" used by V. Lenin and his comrades.

I read a similar debate a few years ago regarding subreddits. When "small", they are productive, helpful, encouraging and kind places on the internet. When they grow to a certain size, goddamn chaos and trolls. One person put a theory, when the group is small enough that you recognize the same user names a few times a week, it's a good place. People "know" each other. They're unwilling to jump to conclusions quickly with someone they recognize, same with name call, troll, etc. Things you wouldn't do in real life. But once the community is a bunch of unrecognizable individuals, the flood gates of hell open up upon your little garden.

And there was an HN post about sealioning. Where you pose inane, easy to google answers constantly to troll someone with an opinion you dont like. Then play the tragic innocent trying to have "a conversation". I've been subject to that without realizing it... a phone may or may not have hit a wall at high speeds due to my frustration with my fellow humans.

Questions like this seem analogous to "Why do I see so many bad drivers on the road?"

I used to participate in several "digital nomad" forums. At first only people actively living that life participated. Then came the people who wanted advice getting started. And then the merely aspirational -- high-school students and people stuck in dead-end jobs dreaming about "becoming" digital nomads. And of course the trolls. No amount of work on FAQs or posting guidelines helped, eventually the forums got swamped with people who contributed nothing but noise and repetition.

On Hacker News I see lots of post from people I put in the newb and aspirational category: people with little experience asking questions that have no clear answer ("What language should I use for my side project?"), or seeking general advice to specific questions ("Why can't I get an interview?"). I suppose those all represent steps along the learning process, though I might interpret some of them as laziness, or attention-seeking. I don't know what to do about it, though I do have control over how much of it I read and choose to respond to.

Proposition 1: People are interested in new ideas and new ways of looking at things.

Proposition 2: Some people are more able to come up with good new ideas than others.

Outcome: A place like HN, which is for the discussion of highly intellectual ideas, is inevitably attractive to thinkers. Even people who aren't as bright as those who come up with avante garde ideas are attracted to those ideas and quite legitimately want to discuss them. Their responses follow a learning curve - at first people don't fully understand what they're seeing but as time passes their understanding of new ideas deepens.

Wherever I go, I'm on the lookout for ideas that might change my outlook and deepen my understanding. Such ideas are very rare, but I find that HN is a good place to look for them. I admit that I don't always appreciate an idea for what it really is, from the beginning. :)

> makes me sad and inclined to quit these platforms

Are you being hyperbolic?

Also, don't forget Sturgeon's Law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

My guess is that the patina of freshness has rubbed off for you and you're seeing it how it's been the whole time. But now you have a big enough sample size to make a more comprehensive and accurate judgment.

I’m not sure about the quality of posts but here’s what I believe, people from different backgrounds posts on HN and ask questions from HN community and this makes HN a diverse community and a great place to learn.

Last but not least HN is full of knowledge and I got to learn a-lot from this community and In my opinion no post is low quality you always get to learn something new from each post

Yes

{Ref: this comment}

You stated a gripe/opinion as a question, with no data to back it up. What do you mean by "quality of posts?" It seems you really mean that more people you decide have less sophistication or education (less than whom?) come to dominate reddit and HN over time. Unless you have a sincere solution this post just adds to the noise you complain about.

Although HN and some sub-reddits started for niche and geek audiences, nothing about them made them exclusive to the niche. Nothing about "Hacker News" says niche to me, since "hacker" has a vague and shifting definition. All kinds of stuff gets posted here, much of it having nothing to do with hacking or tech geeks.

I don't know what gt565k meant by "quality of posts". I'm not sure I can define it rigorously, either, but I can feel in experience that the quality of posts is in fact declining.

More likely the number of "low quality" posts increases over time.

Even if I agree that I sense a decline in quality, I don't have a solution. Why doesn't the world work the way I think it should?

I find the HN format very easy to skim and skip, easier than reddit. Regardless of the quality of the posts I can easily ignore those that don't strike me as relevant or interesting.

The more exclusive groups I have participated in often have different problems. The posts may stay more relevant and "high-quality" but the forum turns into showing off and bickering over trivia -- intellectual posturing. I find that more annoying and time-wasting than having to skip over half of HN posts every day because I don't care about Bitcoin or Elon Musk's tweets or some new React technique, nor do I care to look at someone's to-do list side project and comment on which database they should use.

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