Eternal September

I think we can differentiate between rules that are in place to uphold a certain standard, and those that stop change from happening at all.

The latter is guarantee for obsolence. The former a way to allow change, but not have that change affect the core of the community.

E.g. at HN, deep conversations are core. So it makes sense to protect that with rules on friendlyness, effort and topics.

But it's always a thin line and a spectrum. Something many (software) communities or community-leaders have a hard time with. So they go for absolutism. And often don't allow any change.

The worst reason for (not) doing something is "we've always done it this way". Yet in many (software and FLOSS) communities that is exactly what is upheld. Keeping out new influences but also keeping out fresh members, ideas and users.

He never suggested that the influx of newbies should change the existing culture, precisely the opposite. The existing culture doesn't do a good enough job of helping onboard the newbies in a gentle way that integrates them. Instead, there's just indifference to this process.

When I first joined, pg himself replied directly to me telling me to do better or post less lol

There also is rigerous downvoting and flagging of anything not fitting the general standard.

I agree, he does a great job. But the last couple of years I've noticed a couple of worrying trends.

First, there has been a huge surge in activity. Back in the day, 50-100 comments on a post felt like a big thread. Now we regularly see threads that are 500+ comments, sometimes even more (the recent one on the xz back door has 1,700 comments). Because of how HN paginates long threads, this encourages new commenters to reply to the top comment rather than adding new top-level comments. (In some threads, the entire first page is just the top comment and its replies.) In short, I'm not sure HN can sustain that many comments in terms of the reading and discussion experience. As a possible improvement, I'd like to see big threads having some way of "aging out" older sub threads and promote new comments. But at that scale, how do you even follow a discussion? HN doesn't have a "highlight new comments since last visit", for example.

Secondly, there's been a significant uptick in lower-quality, low-effort comments. The regulars (some of whom are so active that I don't fully understand how they can be productive in their day job) are still keeping the quality high, and HN is still often the best place to get commentary that is superior to the article being commented on. But the quality drop is still noticeable, and I see an increase in comments that are low effort (memes, jokes, "lol", "this tbh" etc.), promote conspiracies, and so on. I suspect that with time, it's going to be increasingly harder to control the influx from other sites like Reddit without even more diligent supervision.

I think that while the signal/noise ratio on the internet is much lower when I joined as a wee person in the 1980s, we are simply not prepared for the poisoning of the commons that is coming.

The people who began circling wagons in the late 1990s creating invite-only “smart friends” stealth communities will turn out to have been bang on the money.

It’s probably not too late to start - but which platforms other than private email lists and RocketChat exist for the endless hunker-down?

Interesting how you look at Eternal September from the newb's angle. As if "making them feel bad" (or unwelcome?) is the main problem of ES.

I never looked at it that way. Always looked at it from the disgruntled Unix beard view that I have entrenched myself in. "get off my lawn".

While also lamenting how new generations keep reinventing solutions that "we" have proven to not work decades ago. Or reinventing solutions to problems that have long been solved.

When the solution is not to shout "get off my lawn" harder, but to go out there, with empathy, and help the newer generations find their way around in the history and practices of ICT and CompSci so they too can reach out to that experience and knowledge when confronted with a problem (rather than blindingly running towards a cliff that "we" the seniors fell off several times already)

If you're referring to the sharp drop at the end of the graph, no. It's an artifact of the api change making it much harder to capture comments. We can verify this by how the comments/day rank didn't budge, because it happened on literally every sub simultaneously. If you're referring to the gradual dip from its peak, I have no idea.

(anecdata for n=1:) Everyone I personally know who contributed meaningfully to subs I was active in has moved on to other sites. What used to be places sprawling with activity are still places sprawling with activity… but it’s mostly reduced to reposts and posturing and especially posting photos of the thing you bought (I guess consumers can’t do much more). This has been a trend before the blackouts but it feels like those mark the point where it all broke down.

Many of us who were writing all the decent comments there left after they made clear they want it to be another bland nothing of a website during the blackouts. A hundred dull image macros a day aren't worth wading through for the few nuggets of decent content, so loads more left or majorly cut back. Some communities such as javascript are now dead.