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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

> If your writing “disappears” after a day, why invest the time to write at all

This is a global problem, walled gardens may have made it a bit harder, but it isn't unique to China.

Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere. The link may still be available, sure, but just how many people eventually visit old articles? They are, by and large ignored because people want new content that might be relevant for few days.

Not that it seems to matter - article by themselves mostly expresses fleeting opinions. It's hard to come across a truly philosophical work with long term implications - and even then it gets buried anyhow, regardless of where it is.

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An important problem also in the West is closed services like Discord replacing public web forums (and mailing lists with public archives, and usenet). It’s harder nowadays to discover and get access to communities you’re interested in, and as the article explains it also leads to a decline of longer-form content with long-term value.

Of course, the chat-like interface almost all modern community platforms feature doesn’t help. This again comes from the mobile-first trend, because long-form discussions are difficult on mobile and you can’t fit much more than a chat window on a mobile display.

Public web forums attract trolls, bots, spammers, and all sorts of bad actors. It's ultimately better this way.

In the 90's, the notion of "netizen" as a distinct fun, curious, respectful culture seemed to exist and therefore letting random netizens on your Internet doorstop was fun, even despite trolls and what not.

I honestly believe this culture is an accident - the Cold War ended in the early 90's and that coincided with the rise of home Internet, the vibe was very positive and freewheeling. This vibe ended 9/11/2001.

There's pockets of that culture around still but the hordes of unwashed masses enabled by mobile-internet + Myspace/Facebook age are now dominant, and it's long been past time for netizens to develop their own gatewayed islands.

Public discords are no better for bad actors. You just need active moderation in both cases

I don’t think that’s the causality. Still-existing web forums, mailing lists, places like HN and (to a lesser degree) Reddit show that it is possible to have public forums without them being overrun by spam, bots and trolls, given adequate moderation. This is particularly true for special-interest topics. (The dynamics tend to be a bit different in bike-shedding territory.)

The reason Usenet died is because it didn’t have an easy moderation system, and because web forums were more accessible (no special client software needed). Mailing lists died because people moved from desktop/TUI mail clients to web mail, which didn’t provide good usability for handling mailing lists. Web forums died because they didn’t translate well to mobile and because chat-like platforms appear more accessible to novices.

Mobile plays a major role here. Mobile is more accessible (approachable) than desktop software/hardware, and at the same time is ill-suited to long-form discussions because of the small display and worse typing experience. Platforms want to maximize their audience and therefore tailor their application/functional design to work well on mobile. As a result, their design is ill-suited to long-form discussions.

Largely to blame for the fall of public web forums is moderation. It always boils down to moderation. Moderating forums is not an easy task. I used to be a forum moderator 20 years ago for 2D MMORPG forum, I have difficult time to moderate a forum that have over 20k registered users with over hundred sub-forums. With moderation team, it is still difficult to moderate professionally and clean.

Majority of the moderation are volunteering position, meaning they don't get paid to moderate those sites. Reddit plagued with this issue, there are power mods that moderating 50 or 100 subs. The reason for that because no one else want to moderate the subs since it requires time investment.

Moderation is always and a thorn on their site for many forum/discussion sites. When Elon Musk announced their consideration creating a new social media platform, I always think of how they will manage the moderation part in those platforms? Look at other small social media platform like Truth, Gab, Parler. Common issue with those sites is moderation.

Yea, and most forums would eventually attract a bunch of die-hard but absolutely insufferable users with all the time in the world. Occasionally these folks would be in cahoots with the admin staff and would get to have their transgressions ignored while banning people who dared to disagree with them.

I've seen a handful of these people wreak havoc on huge online communities.

You are not wrong. I was in a game modding & hacking forum and there was a discussion about particular game. There was heated debate between the original poster and the moderator in a thread and then this moderator decided to target and respond hateful political comment against the original poster that are not relevant to the gaming mod topic. It is like the mod had their ego bruised and felt like need to take it out on the original poster. I reported that mod to the admin/owner of the forum and the response I got from them is that everything is fine and it is not against their TOS (while it is...). Which is sad because this mod is well known in this community, it is out of character for this mod to react that way. After that response from admin, I lost all respect for that admin and the mod.

A large part of this is simple relevance. Why would I care about a weather forecast from last year, or election coverage after the election? So much of what’s written has an exportation date of some kind that search algorithms just favor the new.

The other half is older articles are competing with everything ever written. You hardly need 1,000 different Calculus textbooks.

This is even a problem in software. People ignore projects that have not had GitHub commits recently, as if code (which is math) somehow becomes less valid over time.

Yes a "dead" project can be problematic if you need it maintained and don't have the time to DIY, but sometimes something reaches a level of stability where it does not need to be constantly fixed. Something with a lot of users and few commits might be a positive indicator since it might mean there aren't a lot of bugs.

The opposite could also be true. Now that I have experience working on vulnerabilities for enterprise software, I've learned there are constantly updates for mitigating software vulnerabilities that didn't exist a month or even week ago. An old java project may still use a version log4j with that major vulnerability. This may not be a big deal depending on the software, but it is a valid reason to be wary of stale code in some cases.

A lot of software has dependencies that will have changed over time. Likewise a lot of software fails to pin down exact versions of said dependencies. That makes code that hasn't been committed to for a few years relatively likely to be broken.

Older C or C++ projects may be "standalone", but when built with the latest GCC or clang produce lots of warning messages and may be miscompiled courtesy of programmer vs optimiser. Older python programs may refuse to run under python3.

So while code does not rot, the GitHub project is unlikely to contain all the code for the project, and those external dependencies changing has much the same effect as rotting.

A still running CI would be a better indicator that the project works, but failing that, recent commits are the same signal.

This is the one thing I hate about software. I don't want to have to re-learn how to use a re-invented wheel every couple of years. I just want to use robust, time-tested tools to solve problems, like in virtually every other field of engineering.

I'm not under the impression that e.g. pressure vessel design or bridge building follows the same safety rules now as it did 40 or 80 years ago. You might learn the same basics in university, but in practice the rules and tools are also evolving all the time.

So the "robust, time-tested tools to solve problems" also become obsolete in other fields of engineering. I think this is not unlike "compiler warns about more unsafe practices nowadays".

The velocity (aka churn) is a lot higher in software though, for questionable benefit.

Yeah, but people still do it in, say, Rust, where that's not the case.

This is the one thing I dislike about Hacker News. We have a diverse and talented commentariat that loses all interest in a topic after 2-3 days max, with no long-term discourse. Perhaps this is by design - a pressure release valve? But it does feel less of a venue for conversation, and more like running down a platform trying to talk to someone whose train is leaving.

We regularly have [2015] flags on articles, in that regard this place is probably better than 99% of the internet.

After all, an article is to inform the current audience, and debates should not last forever.

It’s the lack of notifications and an inbox showing new replies to your comments. I miss 90% of the replies to my comments until it’s way too late to reply in turn.

> Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere.

A lot of information on Wikipedia is permanently valid and doesn't need to be "couple of days old" fresh. Same for many hobbyist websites from the past

> Internet traffic overwhelmingly goes to fresh content everywhere.

This is why organic search & YouTube are incredible acquisition channels.

Organic search & YouTube are the only channels that will consistently surface and bring visibility to old content.

YouTube & organic search bring thousands (millions?) of companies millions and millions of visitors per month, and 99.99% of brands cannot distribute their existing content more effectively than Google can for them.

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