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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

I second this, and it tends to be a sitewide issue. HN has really changed over the past 5+ years: went from healthy or interesting skepticism to reddit-style snarkiness and shitposting.

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From the guidelines [1]:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

(With that last sentence linking to 9 examples in [1].)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You don't think it's changed? You've been here about as long as we have. At some point you can't rely on it being a noob illusion if a place actually does change. The guideline is not a magic incantation that prevents it from never becoming false. Snarky replies used to be routinely downvoted swiftly, now they are not.

I don't, Meta discussions like this have happened since forever on HN. And attempting to curb them is a good thing.

OPs "comment" on what should be correct behavior on HN is now the top comment and surpasses by far the few people that he is critiquing. And hence our discussion now is all about this meta thing, which means we are not talking about the article.

that is not new

I mean, I can scroll through the hacker news history to 2016 when I started reading, and the comment quality and submission quality is much higher IMO.

As I've said before, there's a reason why my entire social group of programmers (and a lot of programmers I've met from outside it) refers to this pejoratively as The Orange Site.

Might be weird-colored glasses, but I've been here slightly longer and no, I don't think it changed much either.

(Or it could be that I changed along with it, so I don't notice.)

It definitely feels much more homogeneous than it did 10+ years ago. I notice now that in discussions on for example women's rights we exclusively have men talking about how they perceive women to be affected, but "back in my day" it was not uncommon for actual women to share their perspectives. HN has become such a cold house for anyone outside the preferred demographic that they seem to have almost entirely left.

The downvoting here (as well as comment scoring) is probably my least liked thing about the site. It exacerbates the already prominent issue of hivemind and seems to actively lower the quality of discussion. People seem to mostly vote based on emotional reaction. On paper, a downvote just doubles the value of a vote. Meanwhile the graying of comments that never deserved to be downvoted to begin with is infuriating and seems to mostly stifle interesting conversation.

Personally, I advocate for abolishing the downvote and the scoring and switching to randomized comment order.

I'd argue ranking comments per se isn't the issue, it's whether the culture is preserved that encourages useful application of the voting system. Whether any community can preserve their desired culture is arguably the most important factor and it's what the grandparent post is essentially referring to.

On HN the main goal of upranking is if one comment is more interesting/informative than another (or as a group test to see how robust its argument is if the voter has no experience to judge directly). Downranking ime isn't meant to be the method used shift the order of comments but rather to discourage a post that doesn't fit the HN culture/guidelines. OTOH most popular gamified discussion systems don't discourage use of reactionary downvoting, which can creep into other posting cultures.

The problem the grandparent post raises is if signals that voting users would ordinarily use to shape the continued posting culture (eg: downranking comments that don't fit in tone/substance) aren't used like they were intended to be and if the guidelines discourage meta discussion then there isn't any other avenue to inform users what the desired culture should be in practice.

Certainly one can post non-meta comments showing what type of comments one would like (and thankfully for most strictly tech topics here it's still reasonable) but if the culture shifts enough among the silent voting users then the concern is this erodes the quality of discussion as the signals for what is wanted/not wanted get skewed.

Ah yes, wise words from the inflammatory DOGE poster who’s getting flagged and downvoted.

I’m not arguing either side. Just saying that the meta discussion is a discussion that the guidelines try to discourage.

IOW, it’s not really relevant to the article, so it’s not promoting curious, interesting discussion.

So both this discussion as well as the snarky comments you’re arguing against are both not following the guidelines of trying to keep discussion curious and interesting.

There’s always been some of that but it does feel like it’s getting worse. I think there’s a general shift in how people approach Skinner-ized apps and social media, where a couple of generations have been trained to prioritize a number going up, but also something about how politics became both post-factual and unavoidable even in communities which used to avoid it, all of which has driven a lot of former contributors away.

I’m not sure how to rebalance things - and certainly won’t claim to be perfect about not taking the bait myself – but it seems to be slowly starving a lot of communities which don’t have some in-person anchoring.

> Skinner-ized

What does this mean? A quick Google search didn't help me

Arranged like a Skinner box -- something which dispenses reward stimuli for desired behaviours with the aim of maximizing those behaviours.

Interestingly, a Skinner box can be made to dispense rewards randomly after a while, or stop dispensing them entirely -- but the desired behaviour is likely to continue. Think doomscrolling, slot machines, loot boxes, dating apps, etc.

A worthwhile survey of this I was introduced to in my undergrad: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/ad...

mlekoszek answered very well, so I won’t duplicate their comment but I will note that I used to work with a bunch of neuroscientists and a number of grad students were recruited by tech companies specifically to use their knowledge of human behaviour and addition to boost “engagement” and revenue. There was some talk about ethics but even back then people knew those companies meant it about as much as big tobacco had.

You might read the guidelines, much older than five years, about saying HN has changed, and also saying it's more like reddit.

I don't think I've ever been on a forum that doesn't have comments to that effect regularly.

"It was better a few years ago, it's all going to hell now, we're becoming Reddit/4Chan/Slashdot"

It's the internet forum version of "the youth has gotten lazy, it weren't like this when I were a lad"

I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too late and usenet already sucked then.

In all fairness too, my 17 year old self who knew basically nothing about the world ,really did add absolutely nothing of value to the usenet discussions I participated in besides noise. Of course, at the time I thought the complete opposite.

The thing that amuses me most is at the time there would have been a lot of "pro communism" in my responses on anything society related even though I knew absolutely nothing about communism and even less about economics as a whole.

I think this is just the way semi-anon discussions with big age and generation gaps go.

If you live long enough, you might look back at your understanding now and say the same thing. Maybe what we should learn is not to be so certain about our current knowledge.

> In all fairness too, my 17 year old self who knew basically nothing about the world ,really did add absolutely nothing of value to the usenet discussions I participated in besides noise. Of course, at the time I thought the complete opposite.

Me too!

> I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too late and usenet already sucked then.

BBS were cool(er) :-)

This is refreshing to hear compared to all of the "HN is becoming Reddit, omg!" comments and threads that pop up every couple weeks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380385

From 2008 :)

Unless, of course, it continually has been becoming Reddit, but Reddit has been constantly changing too ;)

That's hardly isolated to this site. COVID did a number on us.

Fwiw, people have been saying this since the site started. Don't worry. There will always be a safe space for rich assholes to divorce themselves from reality and romanticize their exploitation.

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