I know the pandemic has been hard; but, we've got to fight to keep our peace through this and not attack others during this time, where we can.
That said, I think the tone on HN is fairly good, people are not sugarcoating things, they're not veiling their views with courtesy, and they're generally presenting arguments for consideration, and if insults are made, they're usually insults of ideas, not people.
So maybe I'm just in the "negative asshole camp" but I think it's very refreshing to have conversations on HN, because my views are often challenged, and I am forced to reconsider and adjust, while at the same time, I feel that my own points are being considered, rather than automatically discarded as is often the case in mainstream social media, where discussions are not had to find understanding or truth, but to "win".
I agree.
I've been visiting HN for years, but I'm pretty new as a commenter. AFAICS the tone is rather nicely controlled by the mods (hi, dang!) and the community. I'm glad it's a place where people can say what they think, in fairly direct terms; I'm also glad that people are expected to think before they say.
Whether conversations here are more polarized than in the past, I can't say. But societies have become more polarized lately; people are angrier, there's a lot more othering going on.
It helps a lot that HN generally disapproves of political debates.
Generally, HN trends towards the former, and that's one of the things I love about it! You can make a good point and I can disagree with you!
One of the most counter-intuitive tenets of forum community management is the only winning move is not to engage with bad behavior.
A downvote + not replying to a poorly behaving commenter is orders of magnitude more powerful and instructive than any reply.
(And also, the distinction between "downvote because I disagree" & "downvote because you're breaking forum norms." We're at our best when we promote healthy debate, and disincentivize bad behavior, instead of "bad thoughts.")
Largely agreed. If the idea that the pandemic and the greater isolation that tends to come from remote work are contributing to more negativity in the things people write (which is a reasonable supposition), then you'd probably also expect a more negative take from the things people read. What was once innocuous might now read as not-so-innocuous. In other words, is whatever issue there is just a perception issue?
Overall, I don't think HN's tone or content quality has changed much. dang & Co. are steering this ship just as well as ever in my opinion (thanks dang!)
It's interesting that this post hits the front page on the same day that Facebook announces (admits to?) its first user drop. Everyone is just getting sick of being social online. From here on out, content is king.
In 10 years we'll look at the Facebook news feed as being the necessary intermediate step between Web 2.0 and whatever TikTok becomes.
No matter your orientation, it's pretty clear that Neoliberalism, aka The Washington Concensus, is on its last legs. We're all just sort of hanging around waiting for the paradigm shift to start.
I would suggest there is a very general decrease in gratitude, humility, and an increase in entitlement.
An example of support for success could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCm9Ng0bbEQ (Steven pinker TED talk)
We’ll need something wiping out billions including the rich in order for that to have any traction… by then though - might be too late for society to feel like they should bother. After all - if they can’t feel the effects of their work within their lifetime - is it worth doing? Most would say no.
I think more anti-corruption laws in government could help. I also think what you described was supposed to be the roles of Academia, but we turned them into job training facilities.
I'm not going to look through rose-tinted glasses and suggest "things were better in the good ol' days". Contrarian reactions to top posts are the bread-and-butter of a healthy message board.
However, to me it feels like the quality of these contrarian takes have gone down. People seem far more 'committed' to pushing their positions to incense others with overgeneralizing karma-clickbait. This causes the dialectic to become more of a debate instead of a deliberation, and to me the latter is far more useful and engaging.
With that said, I also know that my tastes change as I get older, so this could truly be my own delusion.
I too am getting older, and while I don’t feel I’m becoming galvanized per se, I think my tolerance for those not acting in good faith has rapidly approached zero. If the data speaks and the counterparty opposes facts, there is no way to have a productive discussion. An example from my own experience would be when talking to someone about climate change, which they don’t believe in because “God will make sure it all works out”. There is no value in engaging in those situations, and similar anecdotes can be found here. Belief systems and mental models can be rigid.
It’s astounding really, and these data points have helped me recalibrate my expectations of fellow humans, as well as my empathy for them.
Gonna need a link to one of those threads full of citations on this claim, because this is not at all my understanding. Even if we had a magic wand that would reduce anthropogenic CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) emissions to zero overnight, we're already far above historic atmospheric CO2 concentrations and will be paying the price.
Edit: since I'm asking for citations, here's mine[1] showing that according to climate models zero CO2 emissions from 2020 onward would have little effect on the global mean temperature through 2100.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17001-1/figures/2
Many people look at the graph in your citation and see it as a picture of success, because the baseline in their mind is RCP8.5. Note that the graph makes a comparison to RCP2.6, which is not a "do nothing" scenario, it's a pretty optimistic and aspirational future.
I have yet to see a scientific case for luxury communism where every Indian peasant gets their own suburban yard.
edit: and I do see a lot of people saying that technology right around the corner will just solve the problem without anyone having to change their lifestyle in the slightest.
"I didn't want to cut down on drinking/CO2/media pollution/etc so I killed myself instead" - which of these is a winning move?
The biggest problem I see with 'technology will solve everything' beliefs (evidence-based beliefs are still beliefs) is that these solutions are almost always in a people and political vacuum. They assume that there will be nothing stopping or slowing it down or even reversing it from happening, from people not wanting wind farms in their back yard[1], to human nature prioritizing short-term issues over long-term threats[2][3] and voting accordingly[4], the inability for a people to enforce change on a global level (even if the US behaves perfectly, how are they going to get China[5] or India[6] to go to zero emissions without going to war with them...we saw this exact problem play out with the Covid pandemic, although the US was one of those bad actors). And politicians themselves have little-to-no incentives to stop climate change[7].
You even got people like Biden, who says "climate change is the number one issue facing humanity"[8], and yet he's caught falling asleep at the COP26 climate summit[9] (which does not help the image of how seriously the US is treating climate change) as well as approving new drilling permits for oil and gas extraction, at a faster rate than even Trump[10]. And lobbyists are able to kill climate change legislation just by putting some cash in the right politician's hands (Manchin in this case)[11].
There's other issues with the actual feasibility of the technology as well, such as we might not have enough materials for all the solar panels and wind turbine we'll need to build[12] (and the actual study they cite here[13]). But that's really a whole separate thing I don't have time to hunt down the articles for right now.
We wouldn't be in this mess in the first place if it weren't for people's actions, and now fans of the technology think everyone is going to magically do a full 180 on their behavior and fall in line for something they can't even see beyond some wildfires and stronger hurricanes, which they dismiss as freak events just as easily and keep their heads in the sand.
If anything it appears to me that we're going to wrong direction as far as the human and political element is concerned. Yes, some things are getting better, but we need massive global systemic change decades ago and that's clearly still not happening today, despite great progress on Solar and Wind affordability and EV cars (as well as other initiatives).
I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue these technological solutions as much as we can, far from it. I just think because of various reasons it's not going to get us to where we need to be, and more work needs to be done on trying to rewrite the brains and incentive-structures of people and politicians or we're almost certainly not going to meet those goals, and that's being glossed over in favor of saying "well, technically it can still be done!"
[1]: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2021-4-fall/feature/nimby-...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=553048...
[3]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190109-the-perils-of-sh...
[4]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/13/the-no-1-esg-issue-for-ameri...
[5]: https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...
[6]: https://www.reuters.com/world/india/exclusive-india-may-buil...
[7]: https://theconversation.com/cop26-why-politicians-have-littl...
[8]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/24/joe-biden-climate-change-is-...
[9]: https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/11/02/joe-biden-doz...
[10]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/01/2...
[11]: https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1065695953/build-back-better-...
[12]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a25576543/re...
[13]: https://www.metabolic.nl/publication/metal-demand-for-renewa...
Internet arguing follows the same logic. If I logically out-fence you by being an asshole, what have I gained? What have we gained?
Whereas if I politely and respectfully describe why eating Irish babies is a solution to overpopulation of the lower classes [0], we all feel better about ourselves, even if you decline to agree with me.
The thing is, from a neutral external perspective, when one side claims "there is no climate change, only God's will" and the other side claims "Climate change is man-made and will escalate to the point of irreversibility if nothing is done", then only one side can back up their argument with verifiable facts. And yet, "listen to both sides!!!"-style arguments result in complete bullshit given the attention of millions of people.
Democratic discourse fundamentally needs facts to debate, not lies, propaganda or un-verifiable anecdotes. People who come to a democratic discourse without facts deserve no time of democratic people. Democracy itself is at war with disinformation from all kind of sources, both foreign (Russian and Chinese propaganda) and domestic (corporate or otherwise financially motivated shills, authoritarian politicians willing to grab power).
I disagree. If 95% of the people come to a discourse with no facts, and we follow this guideline, what kind of democracy is that?
IMO it is our responsibility in a democracy to listen and empathize with others, no matter how wrong they are. It is equally my responsibility to convince others, as it is for others to be convinced by reasonable arguments.
This is all notwithstanding the reality that what constitutes "fact" is not at all clear. In this kind of discourse, I place that word into the "thought-terminating cliche" category. Typically what is heralded as "fact" and "100% true" is much more nuanced with caveats, probabilities, normative assumptions, inferences, etc.
If there's no train of logic, no explanation, no underlying data, why are we pretending the individual is trying to engage in a honest discussion?
There is no arguing the authority of papal edicts with a devout papist, modern civilization long ago learned it was fruitless to try.
If someone trades in ungrounded declarations instead of propositions that one can attempt to "ground", there is no argument made and thus no "sides" to discuss.
Many people like to argue for the sake of arguing and it's a waste of time.
How fundamental? Where would you draw distinction (if at all)? So my brother is an anarchist, he is also a drug abuser that has spent time in jail and is a dangerous person to be around physically.
I have yet to ever see him argue in good faith.
He does not tell 99% of people that this is a what he believes, he just argues in person and online whatever can cause the most turmoil and/or positions that point to everyone being selfish and fundamentally evil, or the situation hopeless and that cruelty and power dynamics are not something that often "is", but something we "ought" to embrace.
In a democratic republic people "can" do a lot of things, just like the individual "can" do all kinds of things without dying or being jailed right away.
That doesn't mean they are healthy or good, that doesn't mean every ungrounded belief that exists needs to be engaged or given equal billing in public discourse. It's noise, not signal and if we are intelligent we will reject it as noise instead of rebroadcasting it. It also doesn't mean we ought to abandoned working towards a "grounded" consensus because rejecting factual evidence is somehow "virtuous" or cynically sophisticated.
Increasingly I see that people seem to argue as if rejecting a pragmatic, propositionally grounded and arguable discourse is something to give up on, or to stop advocating for, and I do question the intent behind that as it seems unsustainable and counter to past, evidentially productive, consensus building.
Seeing these arguments in the wild is to be expected when an increasing percentage of the population express a rejection of democracy itself in polls. On pluralistic open forums people/anarchists/my brother will argue orthogonally about how to "do democracy" while advocating positions that epistemologically undercut attempts at consensus, and they'll do this instead of saying "I reject democracy" because in many circles it's not in vogue _yet_ to say you've rejected democratic governance.
The idea that a majority of people in any country can fundamentally disagree that we live in a shared pragmatic reality, one that can be scrutinized, investigated, argued/communicated about and we will somehow still end up with sustainable democratic outcomes seems improbable, and I question anyone saying grounded arguments aren't that important.
I agree. Wholeheartedly. What falsehoods do you hold that keep you from participating in democracy then? Or are you saying that you, above everyone else, uses facts and logic only?
What have you voted for based on emotion?
Sometimes it feels pretty lonely in the group of people that don't expect the near end of the world. Especially annoying in times when policy is often put forward in times of crisis. I don't mean Covid, the last decade was full of that.
You would think religious people and climate scientists could come together to proclaim that the end is nigh, sometimes you have to start at common positions...
Problem is that the both-sides perspective is more often correct than not. People will identify different facts and different instances of propaganda. Especially if said fact rely on nothing more than perfectly compiled statistics. Good ideas must prevail against opposition.
There is also an argument that states have problems to project power against multi billion $ companies, but the answer should certainly not be propaganda.
How much of this is due not so much to some kind of fundamental similarity between their positions but rather to the virtually complete removal of rhetoric from the typical curriculum? Perhaps people argue like children because their thoughts are childlike, but perhaps they’re merely incompetent rhetoricians.
That's what the facts strongly suggest. Implying that people who use facts in argument are being rhetorical is - rhetorical itself.
"Even if the world manages to limit warming to 1.5C, some long-term impacts of warming already in train are likely to be inevitable and irreversible. These include sea level rises, the melting of Arctic ice, and the warming and acidification of the oceans. Drastic reductions in emissions can stave off worse climate change, according to IPCC scientists, but will not return the world to the more moderate weather patterns of the past."
"Ed Hawkins, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, and a lead author for the IPCC, said: “We are already experiencing climate change, including more frequent and extreme weather events, and for many of these impacts there is no going back.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/09/humans-have-...
And actually, here's this direct from the headline statements in the IPCC report itself:
"Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level."
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...
When I say solutions are on the roadmap, I mean somewhere down the road we'll be able to stop doing the bad things and save ourselves.
That may be the difference. A few years ago, more of the contrarian takes were in good faith, with real thought behind them. You could learn something new from them, even if you didn't completely agree with them. That also meant that, when you were confronted with a contrarian take, you were more likely to expect that it was made in good faith. This led to a different feel for the whole site.
Now it seems that more of the contrarian (and even mainstream) takes are just repeating talking points. They are, in CapitalistCartr's words, "a set of recordings", so they're no point trying to have a discussion.
I don't know how to get back to where HN was five years ago. I can feel the difference, and I prefer the old version.
#OldManYellsAtClouds, I guess...
This is the main thing to me. If someone disagreed with me here 15 years ago (I wish I still remembered the account, but oh well), I would have assumed that they personally saw something wrong in what I was saying and were reacting to it. Even if somebody wanted to pick a fight with me, it was because they, personally, wanted to pick a fight. (Whether with me or just the first person they disagreed with).
Now, someone disagreeing is likely to be knee-jerk reacting to what I said because it tripped across some red or blue team media shibboleth and I didn't say the right things so I must be one of the 'bad people', which is then how people proceed to talk to me. There are certain words, phrases, and topics that the media have turned so completely into litmus tests that they act as triggers to bypass people's critical thinking.
If you want to disagree with me, I want people disagreeing with ME, not the strawman communist or facist they've constructed in their heads.
I had some downvoted comments but I think it never happened when I was politely disagreeing before making my point.
I think people (and I include myself) are more easily "triggerable" nowadays.
I also think we can fix this by taking the habit to write like we are attacking the point and not the person.
One easy way to do this is to overuse the "I" subject, even if it is to write and not just throw your facts. There is no real difference between « you are wrong because » and « I think you missed [that point] because » but the later is, automatically, more respectful.
There is little point in peaking out from whatever novel thing you're interested in and discussing it when there are people who get their fun out of ruining lives.
This selects for people who post boring but inflammatory takes, and encourages heterodox thinkers who are trying to gain followings to meld their views to their audience.
I think as remote work has become more common, many engineers are reaching to social media sites like HN to fill the void left by previous in-person office banter. The good comments are still there, but it feels like more work than ever to find them among the noise. I've also noticed an increase in the number of familiar HN screen names that pop up with the same angry perspectives on every thread of certain hot topics (Facebook, economics, cloud hosting).
This effect isn't exclusive to HN. The signal-to-noise ratio of the public forums and Slacks/Discords I frequent has also taken a dive since the start of COVID.
Part of the reason is: while I am thoughtful, reasonably well-informed individual, I never felt up to the task of putting in enough effort to create an HN-worthy comment. This was inspired almost entirely by the _quality_ of the kinds of comments that I saw over the years -- at least for the kinds of posts that drew my attention.
- Many (most?) of the comments were made by experts - They often included disclaimers, especially when the poster considered themselves an amateur - They often included sources and links - They were conspicuously respectful and humane - Meta-comments were productive, and typically stopped propagation of nastiness before it could take root
Often enough, comments would truly enrich the original post, and I was truly grateful for them.
This was a stark contrast with the subreddits that I frequented. (I gave up on reddit a few years when they changed the default format to be more attention-greedy.)
From what I've seen, HN has become increasingly noisy -- at times, it's angry -- but overall, it just feels loud and crowded.
For that reason, I've basically stopped reading comments at all, even if there is high-quality content in there. It is a damn shame.
I think this is part of the real reason. More people have been coming there since I joined (2015 I think?). The submissions were also more technical then, a bit more, not much more.
There's two parts. 1) the negativity is increasing a bit 2) the commenter came back and chose to defend/counter themselves. #1 alone typically has sorted itself out in the past, negativity got downvoted fairly heavy to the point where I think folks probably self censored themselves. The community and mods have managed this type of thing fairly well. The #2 part seems to me a relatively recent development. I'd blame it on the WFH flexibility giving everyone more real-time usage of the site and that facilitates debate/arguments.
That's my totally made up hypothesis on this. I still don't think I'd characterize the level of discourse as problematic. The fact we're discussing politics and world topics more often as a community it's natural for us to disagree more.
Come to look at their account and they post maybe once every 3 weeks and never respond to a single thing that is a response to their post.
I've even considered making scrapers to find and avoid those kinds of users; but that's just me.
On top of that, HN doesn't notify you when someone replies to your comment... so maybe they just forgot.
I was recently cleaning up some passwords and unused accounts, and found an account I had created in my password manager that I forgot about. I signed in for the first time in about 5-6 years, and the same thread was the top thread from 5-6 years ago. So I get timing things out. But it seems way too short here.
I've noticed this, and am not innocent myself. I suspect many of us have been abusing HN as a cathartic output from the frustrations of reality over the past couple of years, and as a form of escapism from the increased hysteria online in general.
As an example - I recently agreed fairly clearly, with a reply challenging one of my upvoted comments... the commenter then replied with even more aggressive rhetoric - Almost as if the expectation has become that comments must be adversarial and that people are not open to changing their minds, that our only recourse is to publicly ridicule others with more aggressive rhetoric. I don't think the commenter misunderstood even, they simply couldn't change their mode even after convincing their "opponent". Discourse has basically become too adversarial.
FWIW, I have found HN comments and submissions tend to ebb and flow. There are times when I feel the quality goes downhill, but then 3, 6, maybe 12 months later it seems like things get back on track. I'm unsure of the cause, possibly dang and co. are tweaking knobs in the background?
For those looking for an example to drive this home, look no further than the most hot button thread on HN when President Trump was elected. Inspect the quality of discussion. We were so much better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201
Note: As sad as it sounds, I need to clarify; I have no political position or axe to grind. Just showing how we used to have discourse about difficult topics and I chose an extreme example to convince you.
HN as a community used to heartily employ downvotes on comments that had low signal value. Those days are long gone; now you can make an offhand joke or pun and it will get upvoted to the moon. HN also used to track your ratio of karma per comment, which encouraged you to only comment when you really felt what you had to say was insightful lest you throw off your ratio with a comment that would only get a couple upvotes. Dang or somebody else removed that because they believed it was holding people back from participating (and it was, but it served a good purpose IMO).
HN has long required a karma threshold to downvote, but IMO they should've hid the upvote behind an even higher karma requirement. Without that, what has happened when waves of new users sign up, is they upvote garbage comments (likely from other new accounts), and over time this becomes normalized to be the community voice. Leading to the low signal quality we have today.
Try to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and find interesting small post. I like when they have like 10 comments, but sometimes they have no comments and you can have a nice conversation with the author or someone of the community of HN that is an expert in the subject. [Note: Most of the post in "newest" are not interesting. You must check it for a while until you find one.]
I quit slashdot when basically every story started hitting 100+ comments. When 100+ comment stories were maybe once-a-day thing, slashdot was an outstanding board.
I have noticed the rule applies very widely, including on subreddits.
We used to have very strict rules with jokes and puns, and try to limit it to the bare minimum. But those are on the rise as well.
Politics and Tech. There has never been an era where the two are so intertwined. Our everyday life has become digital. It is hard to ignore Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple. And just like every aspect of politics, it gets ugly in a hurry. And that is just politics on Tech alone, not politics in general.
And unlike Engineering or Science, where we can discuss to death and get a decent consensus or conclusion. Such thing is rare in politics, especially on an online discussion forums.
Unpopular opinion, balance views and contrarian takes are harder to come by. And because it HN has becomes mainstream, these tends to get squashed and downvoted more than previous era.
My theory is that, as a site grows, the quality of comments goes down. Perhaps it's because the site is harder to moderate when more people are on it? Perhaps it's because the attention drives in the loonies?
Personally, I really like how Hacker News is moderated. (Thanks Dang!)
Downvoting and flagging is good; but unless you're downvoting something that's just a vacuous quip, then I think the downvoter should usually make a comment.
I would agree that more people seem to break the general decorum in the past few years than I’ve seen since I joined in 2013.
I can tell that I’ve become a little more bitter. I’ve been commenting much less, too. Spending time off of Twitter has helped immensely with my mood and quality of social interactions (I used Twitter for a spell back in the 10’s, mostly didn’t use it, then got back on in ‘19). My media diet generally seems to impact my mood to a great degree so by limiting my recreational media to HN + Geminispace + books + music (and TV/movies with family) I am much happier. I still use the Web for tasks, and having to block ads everywhere is a bummer but better than looking at them.
I suspect many other HN users are also subscribed to other forms of social media, like Twitter, that are overstimulating our amygdalas and giving us too much chaos to process while making progress in our own lives. These companies can’t keep growing in engagement without more people spending more time consuming stress-inducing content.
Hopefully the current mental health trend is more than a fad, we will see people start to take care of themselves, and maybe start to swing back the other way. I’m very excited about Gemini, actually, since the format and its current population encourage a calmer consumption experience. I hope more people check it out!
People have to be suspicious by default when it comes to information they see or hear online. More so over time. This has lead to the need for people to be increasingly defensive of their own views. There are two knock-on effects of this:
It's easy to click 'reply' without actually replying. When someone leaves a comment, they are trying to say something. When someone responds, they aren't necessarily responding to what the person is saying. Subsequently, people talk past each other, both not feeling heard, both increasingly entrenched in the own views because the other person isn't formulating actual replies to their message. If we perceive someone trying to rebut our ideas, but failing miserably to do so, we become really sure those ideas are good.
It's easy for defensiveness to turn into vitriol, because people tend to have conversations on the internet in a very off-the-cuff fashion, which doesn't lend itself to deep, considered, reasoning. It's very easy to miss, and subsequently ignore, holes in our arguments as we make them, and our suspicion prevents us from reconsidering them in the moment.
The comments have nothing novel to discuss, just endless rehashing of the same battles over and over. Guidelines warn against using the site to wage ideological battles, so I usually just flag and move on.
> Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
And the internet is currently experiencing a huge dump in signal / noise rate, with the noise being full of anger, looking for something to complain about, a fight to pick, a clue something wrong has been done. And that's my feeling while I'm not on facebook, instagram, tik tok, don't have a google account and read a lot of technical stuff and blogs. I can't imagine what it is for the regular folk.
I believe this is partially because the media industry is now using internet as it used tv before, and the emotional engagement resulting is the same, only multiplied in speed and intensity.
But also because of the current tensions we have with covid, and the social, political and economical consequences.
And finally because, with all that stuff going on, there is a huge trust crisis in the world. We have been exposed to so much proofs of wrong doing and manipulation attempts lately nobody expect leaders, the medias or institutions to have good intentions nor be competent. PR telling you how good big corporations and their products have been overwhelming everything, including entertainment, news, and sites like HN.
Even the scientific world is washed out with so many bad studies, so much agenda, wrong incentives, bias and conflicts of interests the last line of defense of the intellect is getting attacked. It's not just your mum on facebook. And in a site like HN, this is kinda painful to live through.
So I think it's not far fetch to feel the mood is not at his best.
In general anonymous commenting was cool for a while but seems to be leading to negative results most places. I’m ready to engage with forums limited to verified real people ex specific situations where personal safety might be at risk (and I’m not in any of those myself now or in the past).
My impression is that the young generations are growing up in an environment where the lines between their "digital life" and "real life" are almost completely blurred. Whether it is socializing with their peers, dating, going to school, or getting a job - so much of "being online" nowadays involves people being groomed as both the consumer and the product. It did not feel that way to me in the 90's and early 2000's, although that might not quite fit the definition of "older folks."
There's still some stuff I find cool, but I have to sift pretty hard, e.g.
Rust Wolf3D port - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30182565
Radix Sort - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135440
Well... I went back two weeks in my upvoted submissions and that's about all I found, actually...
> I flag most of those stories
Please don't flag stories just because you don't find them interesting. Flagging is intended for stories that violate site guidelines (off-topic, spam, uncivil comments, duplicate posts, etc.). A story about privacy or a scientific paper is not likely to be off-topic.
The HN Guidelines say: "If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."[1] The guidelines don't say that you should flag articles that you find uninteresting.
They are all of these things, as I've defined them. I'm going to take what few actions I can take to try to make this site useful to me, and direct it, little as I can, in the direction I'd like to see it go.
Largely, these are topics that turn into flaming tire-fires in the comments immediately, with people rehashing the same tired arguments that get thrown out here day after day, year after year. It's tiresome, and I don't want to see it.
It's more likely that the community never changed, but that you are changing. You may have become more sensitive over time, and now feel that anger more viscerally, and assume that this new feeling must be the community changing rather than yourself.
I know I've gotten both softer and harder over time. I can feel my reactions getting stronger, but I also try to shut up when I feel I'm about to react strongly. I've gotten a little better at making my words more diplomatic. But I'm really just as angry as I've always been :-)
1. People, consciously or not, start forming their comments with upvotes in mind.
2. People realize that positive comments don't generate as much discussion as neutral or negative comments. Less discussion, less upvotes.
Not that I'm better myself. HN's point system really favors knee-jerk reactions and one-liners: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30074128
I'd also submit that it's far more normal now than say 5 years ago for just the bare disagreement of what I said above to be perceived, by some, as me attacking you, the author of the OP. Which would be an erroneous conclusion as far as I'm concerned.
Things used to be hopeful and encouraging around here. It's not that way anymore.
1. There seem to be more political topics appearing, for example around handling of COVID or effects of social networks on society. The best comments on these topics ferret out a priori assumptions or find real data to illuminate tradeoffs. But they tend to be drowned out by more shallow comments. I think that's in part because these issues are hard to discuss in a dispassionate way and most of us are simply not very good at it. I'm firmly in this camp, unfortunately.
2. HN commentary seems more predictable than it did a few years ago. For example, you post something about how a big company has changed licensing of software you'll likely get a fairly predictable (and long) discussion about the evils of capitalism. I don't think this is a real change. Some HN readers have a more binary view of the world than others and it has always been this way. I think I just notice it more.
I still think HN has some of the best commentary available on the web. For all the silly arguments we have (and that I have contributed to eagerly), you still get those gems where somebody who truly understands an issue deeply weighs in and tells it like it is. They have helped me understand countless articles that I would never have understood on my own. I love those comments and hope they never go away.
I am angry (mostly at myself). Some of it due to the Pandemic itself. Some of it due to my inability to do better because of it and not in spite of it. I donno. It is hard. I try to be respectful online as much as possible but may be it shows sometimes.
but we can't talk about climate shit because people either 1) don't wanna be depressed, 2) aren't willing to accept the rules of the New Climate Regime, 3) are concern trolls, 4) stuck in old, outdated political lines.
so it's just a slow motion death march into the future. fuck.
When it comes to the pandemic, the immediate cause for this change, I think people also come out on either side of one basic disappointment. On one side, there are people who feel they've been massively betrayed by their fellow citizens who have not been cooperative or compliant with the recommendations of experts. On the other side, there are those who feel massively betrayed by regulatory institutions and media they feel are untrustworthy and captured by corporate interests, unelected health experts who have made policy misjudgements, and a wealthy class that has profited from the crisis that their institutions have exacerbated.
Although it's possible to recognize truth in both of the above sides, it is not common in the wild. The division is very primitive, having to do with our responsibilities to our fellow citizens, our relationship to authority, fundamental rights over our bodies, and the expectation of transparency in our institutions. You'd think we would be able to start from some shared assumptions and common ground on these issues, but it's almost impossible today to have discussion about it without one or both parties instantly devolving into anger, fatigue, frustration. We've lost the collective ability to even articulate one another's positions about the pandemic response and other basic civic issues, which is, I think, one of the few things that marks political discourse as different from base tribalism.
Given how effective we know "influence campaigns" to be, I don't think it's an accident that we've arrived here, but that's another issue altogether.
The silver lining is that the nastiness typically narrows its scope to politically-based or politically-adjacent threads and the niche threads get even better. I swear I've never seen better discussion on Nim/Rust/Zig on here than I have in the last year. The guy on here advising us to stick to threads with < 100 comments is a genius.
Also, opportunity is still being twisted by corporations to prevent employee advancement and growth as "pushback" to economic protests going on right now.
There is also fatigue from our current world-wide pandemic to where people aren't communicating and social as they were prior.
All of these things are manifesting in our daily experiences, and when combined with intentionally limited tools where people can communicate and express themselves and in normally encountering negative discourse online, many people are becoming even more and more aggravated, triggered, and aggressive towards each other as a result online and in real life.
Our user experiences are a major issue now that we rely so much on software and now that they have almost all been corrupted by monetization, inundated by advertisements, and limited because they've scaled too far to truly be useful to us as individuals.
It may sound like doom and gloom, but that worry goes away if you turn the tech off and go outside and talk to real people without all of the feckless apps and overpriced hardware involved.
We need to stop letting corporations and individuals over-run the Internet for financial gain and bring tech back down to earth so that everyone can thrive, not just the wealthy and popular few.
1) There are a whole lot of bot type accounts here, developed over many years.
2) The "Endless September" effect has brought down the level of discourse.
Wish I could get my hands on a larger data set than what I've been able to collect manually, but I can't help but notice in my casual sampling that there are a large number of user accounts here that have been created within approximately the past 6 years that have very low karma, float in and out over weeks and months (IE: not regular commenters) and who when they do show up, act in deliberately negative and aggressive ways, often posting bursts of comments in short order. It's very bot-like.
The other thing I've noticed is that even the crowd that I can identify as human, has changed considerably over the decade. It seems to me like in the past there were a lot more entrepreneurs and technical people with significant seniority. It feels like the age of the crowd is much younger now, and let's be blunt... there are reasons that stereotypes exist around 20-something techie young (predominantly) men as being arrogant and having few social graces. In this regard, HN has become a reflection of its commenters.
If I could find another place with the diversity of interesting topics found here, I'd go elsewhere. The discourses here is seldom pleasant, and hasn't been for a number of years. It's a step above what Slashdot was back in the day, but not by much.
It's fascinating because I agree with you on the former but not the latter. I definitely think there's been a demographic shift from the 'original' people who just built their own things because that's what everybody was doing (a space of creativity) to the next generation who is emulating instead of creating. Which is odd.
On the other hand, the 20-something techie men culture was always a problem, speaking as someone who was here in the beginning. I was a 19 year old lesbian when HN was founded, and it was pretty damn hostile. I learned to keep it to myself.
Regarding bots, it feels like any time this issue is discussed here it gets pushed down rather quickly. I really think it should be examined harder though. I outright stopped glancing at /new since it often looks like the same accounts trying to push some messaging (e.g vaccine rhetoric, often from some random substack).
Your other point is one I’ve tried to put into words lately. I think I even put it to one friend (a YC founder no less) that “the people who actually wanted to build something left long ago, and often all that feels left is the old crowd that just complains about specific tech repeatedly”.
If I see another discussion repeating the same Linux on the desktop talking points, or the problems with Electron, I’ll scream.
This is the elephant in the room for all internet services that are primarily focused on user generated content. It is my opinion that the majority (>50%) of user generated content online is not made by authentic users, but instead made by astroturf accounts who are paid to generate the content. These same accounts will also be leveraging bots to boost engagement signals etc.
Post-2020 it looks as if I never will again because my job has gone and been replaced with something else.
It doesn't surprise me that Hacker News is different - _being a hacker is different_.
It's now been seperated apart from other jobs in society even more - you can look at charts and see that software has basically gone all in on WFH where other office-based jobs have been much more measured.
So you are possibly more angry when interacting with HN lately, or are interpreting more things that aren't angry as angry.
Take a few weeks away from HN entirely. It can become addicting, it's often good to seek time apart from any source of anger in your life.
A lot of it seems to be formerly excited about startups people screwed over by bad management in one way or another who now are happy to hang out at FAANG and focus on money.
I get it. My last employer made a lot of their employees want to join large companies and focus on stuffing their pockets rather than caring about any higher goal.
If you want to see some real aggressive behavior, look at HN during its first year. I was shocked. My rose tinted glasses made year one look a lot nicer than it was.
Perhaps everyone is always combative and I'm just sensitive to it lately.
I really have to question this sentiment and wonder if confirmation bias and bandwaggon effect are at play here. I was commenting the other day how HN makes it hard to convey emotion to begin with due to pure-text and no-emoji or text-speak etiquette. Some people may consider a strong disagreement angry but in reality there is nothing more healthier for a group than for people to be comfortable to voice their disagreement strongly(but respectfully).
I don't buy the angry part unless there is also disrespect in there somewhere.
I haven’t noticed much change at HN, but then I tend to skim over the reactionary bits, and when I myself fail to be constructive I reliably get the karma hit I deserve.
One topic on which I have noticed a lot of outright hostility is “crypto” — but part of why I come to HN is for the deep experience of many of its members, and that includes calling out intellectual dishonesty, so I don’t exactly weep for the 0.01% of Cryptolandia (including mine of course!) that is Legit.
It looks to me like HN is still working as designed, in good and bad ways, and the good far outweighs the bad for my use case. I also think it would compare favorably to its competitors, but HN has become my /. so much that I don’t really check other industry aggregators/forums.
Obligatory reference to the infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
The day HN stops helping me see the opposing viewpoint will be a sad day indeed. With that said, there is clear distinction between opposition and opprobrium, and yes, sometimes there's the latter here... but I don't feel it as much.
This is all my opinion but apart from dang doing some type of pull to see if more comments have been reported I don't know how you can get anything other than anecdotal responses here.
When I run into a curmudgeon and don't want to deal with them, I just move on.
Edit fixed spelling mistake
No, we don't, it's that simple.
EDIT: If you have to fight in order to not fight, you have already lost the fight to not fight. Cute, ain't it?
The situation is somewhat reflected in the phrase from the Trainspotting: "I choose not to choose ~whatever~. I choose something else".
What a difficult spot to be in to preserve an internal sense of normal when everything outside it is changing so quickly. I am not neutral at all, and am radical probably in every direction, and nor am I somehow above any of it, but even with the all underlying tension from world events I won't address directly, I don't think any of us will regret any effort we make individually to preserve the relative calm in places like this for its own sake.
We finally have internet money. No bankers or governments creating this, but nerds and algorithms creating currency and a whole transaction system, out of nothing. The thing lives 100% on the internet.
And all the complainers on "hacker" news bashing it to the ground. I used to check HN every day, but the "hacker" and "entrepreneur" stuff is getting thinner and thinner.
But hey, I said something positive about cryptocurrency, so do your thing.
edit: I see I'm here since 2010. Maybe 12 years is enough.
Many top comments here often have overt political bias on a range of topics, including the pandemic. I find it irritating, I'm sure others do too. As a result I spend much less (20% ish) the amount of time on HN that I used to say 8-3 years ago.
same with the "I remade a frontend for HN" someone always posts one. hell, i even made one a long time ago haha
I'd say we're at mid-level anger. It slowly builds in an election year, culminating after everyone's self-selected media biases have convinced them they are under attack from their political twins across the aisle.
Part of it is the general culture where disagreements aren’t allowed anymore. Anyone who doesn’t agree with you is a bad person. I blame the media trying to divide us.
In most threads involving those topics you find skeptics arguing with proponents. In general, this discussion is what we want on HN, however, due to the polarization, it comes off as more angry/intolerant/reductionist/etc.
That's my 2c.
The trouble is that tech and the startup community in general derive much of their meaning from the idea that "tomorrow will be better". Nearly all programmers that I know, got into the field because of what they dream it could be tomorrow. There is an implicitly understanding that the things we build today are just the foundation for a brighter future.
In a more practical, less ideological sense, the entire startup/VC ecosystem depends on tomorrow being better and brighter since everything we are doing is leveraged against the future, literally. If the future were to be worse than today, that would ultimately fall apart.
However, as the signs that the future is dimming become more apparent, the vast majority of the HN community are forced into a position of existential angst that they are not prepared for.
This leads to a general increase in hostility about any topic related to a changing world. People will lose their minds in discussions about remote work (especially people who want to return to "normal", discussion of pandemic is filled with people who don't want to vaccinate or wear masks as a means of denying the pandemic is happening, climate change articles are filled with denial comments almost immediately, and very offend flagged off the home page very quickly.
Many members of this community are under extreme stress and anxiety because a reality they don't want to see continues to creep in. The result of this an angrier more agressive, more scared community.
It's a mild virus that still hasn't even done in 0.3% of my country (by contrast, almost 3% of my lifespan has passed in the time period) and it's rapidly approaching a complete non issue.
Comparing it to climate change is dangerous because climate change is actually an existential issue for humanity in a way that just another virus is not.
We've had viruses before, we will have them again.
I find it kind of bizarre that people even refer to coronavirus as "the pandemic", ignoring all other illnesses.
As an aside, I also stop reading after "I think it's funny..." or "Interesting that..." because it's usually something very passive-aggressive
Examples? Sometimes interest in particular types of "new" ideas is just naivete, and seeing those "new" ideas fail or not live up to the hype can lead to a new appreciation of certain aspects of the status quo.
Maybe a bit of it is just me getting older, but I think most of it is observing that a lot of things are actively getting worse, and thus prioritizing "stopping the bleeding". A concrete example of this would be Biden as a politician, 5 years ago I would have hated him as useless (not improving things) and mildly corrupt, now I don't mind him as useless (not making things worse) and only mildly corrupt - with the unfortunate reality that that is the best option the US had.
PS. Let's try and keep this thread from becoming a debate about Biden and politicians, he's a useful example but not the point, I don't expect everyone to agree with my assessment.
When you're young, you don't know anything, so you look at every new idea in its purest form.
When you're old, you can't not make comparisons to known history, and so look at every new idea with a shadow gallery of similar ideas. Which probably ultimately skews favor towards conservative approaches (things that look like things that have previously worked) than novel one (things that look like nothing else, or like other things that have failed).
Which is to say, to react to new ideas as though you were young, once you're old, takes effort and self-reflection. It's a valuable skill to cultivate, but it also doesn't happen naturally.
This got me thinking about what exactly I mean by status quo, I don't think it's quite as obvious as it seems at first glance.
One important distinction is status-quo as a goal, vs status-quo as a solution. Status quo as a goal often makes sense - when the current state of affairs isn't that bad and it would be easy for things to get worse, keeping things the same is a good thing. Solutions however rarely make sense, because solutions operate in a changing environment, and keeping doing the same thing is basically pretending you're maintaining the status quo, when you're actually yielding different results.
To use atmospheric CO2 as an example, status quo atmospheric CO2 would be a remarkable achievement. Status quo energy generation obviously fails to achieve that, because the baseline amount of atmospheric CO2 keeps going up.
Another thing to ask is status quo of "what", status quo of atmospheric CO2 would be remarkable, status quo of change in atmospheric CO2 over time wouldn't solve the crisis, though it would be a great improvement over what we have right now. IIRC status quo of the second derivative of atmospheric CO2 over time (i.e. how fast the rate at which we output it changes over time) is about what we currently maintain. It follows that status quo of the third derivative would be a major step backwards.
I think the conclusion I've been coming to over the last few years, is that "status quo of quantities that aren't rates is usually a good default for a goal". For atmospheric CO2 it would be a remarkable achievement. For geopolitical tensions is europe, it's not quite ideal, but we don't actually have a war and I'd be pretty happy if it stayed that way. For diseases, I mean, we aren't all dying, and so on and so forth. That doesn't mean it's always the right goal. If we're in the middle of a major war, we should be seeking a new status quo where we aren't in a war. Given that the new mRNA HIV vaccine actually works the goal should change to "reduce HIV" rather than "maintain the status quo" since that's now possible. It's just that status quo is a starting point for a goal and deviations from it should probably be supported by a solid argument for "we can do better" or "we can't even do that well".
Getting hired by a FAANG is the antithesis of doing a startup, or doing some original research, or even working on a clever hack just for the joy of it.
This is just one example of how this type reacts to particular issues, the full impact is pervasive throughout the whole site.
Yes, I know there is an irony in me generalizing about this type of person, but I'm unsure how else to talk about it.
Some people have the patience and curiosity to develop a more nuanced understanding of a topic and refuse to generalize in discussion, which has the effect of excluding those with a less nuanced understanding of the topic; others generalize faster, possibly for rhetorical purposes and to align with people lacking a more nuanced understanding of the topic. This leads to an amplification of the least nuanced position that the majority of people support. You see this effect in almost any community.
To avoid this, you'd have to devise a way to exclude people who refuse to develop a more nuanced understanding of any given topic (i.e. lack curiosity).
>> Examples?
> If we are continuing with the generalization about this 'type' of person, you can point to just about any controversial topic posted here. The mental gymnastics these people use is as old as history...
> This is just one example of how this type reacts to particular issues, the full impact is pervasive throughout the whole site.
Your reply doesn't actually contain any examples. It's, as you said, just "[you] generalizing about this type of person."
I think I have become more rigid with experience although I don't feel inclined to be sorry for reacting differently to a new version of Blender than to a new NFT scheme. Random example, but I think the idea is clear.
Also I can fully understand and am certainly guilty of being prejudiced against certain ideas depending on the source. An example is Google here. The ad industry is so hostile to user privacy that I cannot really laugh that away if Google proposes something helpful, which they still often do. But ultimately that is a price they have to pay.
Why would discussions about those topics go any other way? The options are well known, and have well-understood pros and cons. It's not surprising that most people have made up their minds.
I mean, do you think it's realistic that thread about, say, Soviet-style central planning to proceed with "discussion or curiosity," like it was some new, fresh idea?
I don't think most people on HN are angry. You're just affected more by angry comments than rational, calm ones. It's an emotional bias. This is why it's important to not use social media for the vast majority of one's time; angry people have a way of creating more angry people around them.
This isn't a community at all by the way, unless you want to broaden the definition to include anyone who chooses to wear socks, a sock wearing community.
Now, I think we're closer than ever to a real split. Covid has exacerbated it all. People are self-sorting in terms of migrations from blue states to red states, and from cities to suburbs and rural areas.
This summer, and the elections in November, could be flashpoints of something larger and worse -- I hope we can hold it together.
As for HN toxicity -- beware items whose number of comments exceeds the votes for the article itself; it's a rough metric for how big the flames are.
But what happens when half of everyone wears a mask and the other half does not?
I feel like people on Reddit, and to a lesser extent on HN, are trying now, more than ever before, to label and sort themselves into "us" and "them".
Commenting on a post didn't used to require as a compulsory first step announcing which "us" you belong to.
In a nutshell:
us = rational and fact-based
them = irrational and emotion-based
All sides think they're "us" and that other sides are "them".