Ask HN: What's your impression of signal vs. noise on HN over time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your impression of signal vs. noise on HN over time?

I've been around under throwaway accounts since 2010. I'll leave my impression for later to reduce bias.

As regular reader of /new with showdead=yes enabled in my profile (to see anything auto-flagged by algorithms) I estimate I upvote 1-2 submissions per page, a page is 30 entries I think. Some submissions are automated, some users submit every blog post of their company, there's some outright generic spam. I'm rarely unhappy what I see on the frontpage and https://news.ycombinator.com/best pretty much aligns with the kind of news and discussions I'm coming here for.

I would say that prior to the pandemic, the site was fairly strict about policing off topic, particularly political posts. Coinciding with the pandemic, I find that the technical focus of this site has been diluted.

As I recall, there was an external campaign to politicize this site and I guess to some extend it appears as that has been at least partially successful to me.

External campaign? Where did that come from? Is there something you could point to? (sorry for being that guy)

Well, I can assure you it was a thing, but I would rather not necro old posts to support my casual observation. I also particularly don't want to call out specific evidence as it shines a light on the apparent political persuasion of these efforts and the absolute last thing I want to to furthered muddle this site in political content.

So if you have not observed a radical uptick in political/health posts in the last two years, I tip my hat to you. Perhaps I see more of it because I tend to look at "new" rather than the "popular" news.

The was a call-to-action on https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/thedonald-win/ (the site no longer works, thus a hopefully neutral description what the website was about) to register HN accounts. My browser history says 2021-01-12 page title "Trump's going to need his keyboard warriors now more than ever"

There wasn't an usual uptick or long-term effect from that call I think. January 2021 was already crazy enough on social media including HN.

Maybe there's a need for a second front page, for off topic discussions. I like to read HNers's perspective on non tech matters. But it's valuable because HNers are mostly tech oriented people. If they weren't it'd be just like another reddit. So I'd like for this site to remain heavily tech focused and at the same time I enjoy reading more political discussions. I don't know if the two can coexist.

Despite a lot of bad stuff, HN does comparatively good job of allowing free thought without descending into some kind of ideological or troll cesspool like most "free speech" oriented forums. It's definitely not perfect but at least contrarian opinions exist alongside regurgitated mainstream stuff, vs say reddit (with which I have little familiarity, so maybe there are niche subreddits but I see lots of places that basically say you can't post anything that doesn't conform to groupthink) or big tech that just censors things that go against their agenda.

HN is much more balanced, if still imperfect.

Been here since 2008. I think article quality is fine, but there's less expertise in the comments. I miss the really high quality comments from patio11 and tokenadult.

That's what I think as well. It seems like there are mechanics and truck drivers commenting now when there used to be quants and physicists. The quality of expertise seems to be diluting and driving away subject-matter experts. I swear it's a feedback loop.

What's noise and what's signal depends on the reader. HN is a big tent. Lots of room for people with different priorities.

That's Reddit's function. No focus = jack of all trades, master of none.

I think it is pretty good.

A few years back the gender activists were complaining about their posts being flagged. Today it is the right wing special snowflakes who complain that we don’t want to take their dog pills, anti-vax spam, and how wounded they are because somebody downvoted a comment. (E.g. we have to not just receive their spam but we have to affirm it.)

I am sure they feel more anguish than they cause us.

Way too many comments.

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