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Comment by bryan0 | Hacker News Reader

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I do think the quality has gone down over my seven-ish years on HN, but that could be me just remembering "the good ol' days". Still so much better than Reddit though. It's not close. Reddit has a much lower quality set of posts and comments on average across technical subreddits.

I remember the Ivermectin/Hydroxychloroquine fights where people were gaslighting others for some unknown reason. People sharing dubious studies, with questionable results.

Meanwhile many of those people had a secondary agenda to keep the FDA from releasing the covid vaccine. America's Frontline Doctors (the group) promoted drugs over vaccines, etc.

Granted there was a lot of fear in the air back then. But this site is not immune from toxicity.

Yeah COVID really showed the darker side of HN. It was madness and still sticks out in my mind. Any question that didn't toe the line was shouted down from all sides. Don't forget Youtube was even censoring content then. It was a mess.

I’ve been reading that same line for 15-20 years now.

Yeah, maybe I'm just getting older. Not sure how you would measure it, but maybe it would be % of posts with "nuanced" discussions. It feels like HN was gone way downhill in this regard, but who knows.

Or perhaps your tastes have improved!

This is technically explicitly a rule violation. Yes, yes we've been hearing it for years but it is much more true in the past 2-3 years than anytime in the past imo.

Frankly, it's a shame that the only high quality discussion I can find is on gross platforms like 'the everything app' or more obscure forums.

It’s just reversion to the mean / Eternal September. I use blocklists to manage my consumption of the site and the experience is much nicer.

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