You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
I've always found that contradiction interesting (and puzzling).
1. People change. My HN account is 15 years old, and my interests and ambitions and tolerances are not the same as they were in 2009, when I was 28 years old and in a very different place in my life. When you interact with something for many many years, even if that thing stays exactly the same, you change, and think differently about it.
2. The site changes, too, of course. They aren't necessarily bad changes (and often I would say they're good changes!), but people sometimes associate change with negative feelings, especially with something they have an emotional attachment to or at least have been a part of for a long time.
Mind you, I don't think discussion quality has been declining here. In many ways I think it has been improving, or at the very least staying the same under a barrage of new users, higher scale, and low-effort LLM-generated comments.
When Google takes me to a very old discussion on HN I am usually surprised by how similar they are to threads from today, even if some of the specific viewpoints in vogue are different.
Sure, maybe there are some subs that are better, but I doubt I'd be convinced to spend more time on Reddit and less on HN. Certainly there are useful places on Reddit; I've gotten a lot of mileage out of searching for product reviews or general customer support questions on Reddit, but that's kinda a "single purpose" visit, not something for general curiosity.
I feel like there are some long-time HNers (your account was only created two years ago, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've changed accounts or have just been a super long time lurker) feel like quality has gone down; that's almost a meme of its own. Hell, the HN guidelines even has a blurb about how tired it is to suggest HN is turning into Reddit.
But I think it's a lot more accurate to say that quality ebbs and flows, and varies between articles and topics. And yes, sometimes the focus of the site (based on what submissions get voted to the front page, and what kind of discussion happens) shifts in ways that make my interest wane a bit, though always only temporarily. But that's not the same thing as quality.
If you say something controversial over at Reddit there is a substantial chance you get piled on and labelled a troll, unpopular positions cannot be expressed without the risk of no longer being able to participate.
Anything you suspect will generate something other than a bland, mildly positive response is too risky to express.
This seems untrue? Of course I like HN, but from the perspective of a typical person, HN is an ugly, hard-to-use website with "news" that caters to a small fraction of the population and is likely quite uninteresting to the rest. I think this is why it manages to stay roughly the way that it is - that and extremely thorough and strict moderation to keep it that way.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me.
It’ll probably never converge because reddit is getting worse at an even faster rate.
There’s a famous email exchange—I’m sure you’re familiar with it—where someone writes to Steve Jobs complaining about a bunch of things Apple was doing, and they go back and forth a few times, and Steve Jobs finally gets annoyed and writes back, "By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations?" HN these days is absolutely full of people who don’t seem to do anything but criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations.
I’m not saying that HN never had unfair criticisms in the good old days—the “middlebrow dismissal” has been a trope here for a very long time—but we didn’t use to have entire threads filled with nothing but middlebrow dismissals. And we also had tons of people criticizing Apple, but then again most of them were complaining that Apple was actively interfering with their attempts to create things (e.g. the uproar over arbitrary and unfair App Store moderation policies).
The clearest indicators of decline to me have been the signs of evaporative cooling. Maybe I’m falling into a different common fallacy by saying this, but I do think HN was a lot better when the old regulars—yourself included—were more active. I don’t exactly blame you guys, but it is an indicator.
I still get a ton of value out of HN, even after over 15 years. I visit multiple times a day, and genuinely enjoy reading articles and comments, and joining the comment threads myself. It's not perfect; there's certainly annoying crap, bad-faith posters, trolls, spam, LLM-generated junk, etc. But (with the exception of the LLM-generated junk) none of that is new since I first started hanging out here. Overall the quality of discussion (like this one!) is still quite high, and there isn't another news/interest/discussion site on the internet where I spend anywhere near as much time, even after 15+ years.
(I'm not going to argue about whether or not it has "peaked", since that's not a particularly useful measure. If quality is a scale from 0-100, and we already hit 100 but are now hovering around 80, stably, then who cares if the peak is in the past? The quality is still fine.)
That's a rule for jumping into a conversation and making petty putdowns.
It doesn't mean "if someone says HN has never been better, you're not allowed to disagree".