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Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. The Hacker News Guidelines say "No the website is not going downhill". But I can point to a shitton of threads from 2018 on often identical topics to threads today, where the quality of debate is quantitatively higher quality than it is today. Most of the people I know in Technology(tm) have not only stopped reading HN, but also derisively refer to it as The Orange Hellsite, because the quality of comments is often consistently worse than Reddit for comparable topics, these days.

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Where have your technology acquaintances gone instead? It seems like the entire Internet is declining in quality.

Mostly they use private discord servers and self-grown communities. Fediverse, IRC, XMPP, etc.

There's a button the the profile page that brings you to the front page on the day you signed up. I just checked it the other way, things really went downhill. There is actually an open source project that banned referrals from HN due to the kind of toxic people they get from here. That's something.

Even the articles are higher quality, to be honest.

>the quality of debate is quantitatively higher quality than it is today.

That is one hell of a claim...

Not really.

Where are people going?

Outside.

> Most of the people I know in Technology(tm) have not only stopped reading HN, but also derisively refer to it as The Orange Hellsite, because the quality of comments is often consistently worse than Reddit for comparable topics, these days.

That's very unlikely. This website has not implemented the features that continuously make Reddit worse as time goes by - self-segregated communities and extensive down voting.

I just went to a random front page thread on /r/homelab (a subreddit I know well) https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1922ddn/since_no_o...

You can read for yourselves and see the difference between that and this.

Here's the same post as this on /r/aviation

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/13k43rj/meet_the_...

For every reddit comment there R, you can find a distinct comment here H, such that H is worse than R.

There's just way more informed expertise on Reddit. The big advantage of HN is that some tech luminaries post here. But the overall quality is much lower than the topic-reddits. It's more like an /r/technology.

Your aviation example is not good, that reddit thread is rife with memes and "in jokes", very little informed discussion that I can see.

Yeah but it is still true that for every R there, there is a distinct H here that is worse.

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