Comment by ninkendo
5 days ago
Maybe it's time to pack it in? I don't just mean you, I mean that maybe this site has kinda run its course.
The tech scene isn't the small, tight-knit thing it used to be. This site is now enormous. Discussion quality seems to have sort of "regressed to the mean"... the larger HN gets and the more people join the discussion, it starts to resemble the median social media site more and more. At some point it sorta loses its purpose.
I'm still addicted to HN, but I've gone through times where I've set my password to a UUID and time-lock encrypted it to lock myself out, because posting here has gotten worse and worse and worse for my mental health (and there's no way to delete your account here... I've emailed you about it in the past and never got a response.) On some level I hate HN now. TBH if this site was gone tomorrow, I'd most definitely be better off for it in the long run, and I'm sure I'm not alone here.
Thanks for all the work you've put in over the years though. This site has held out longer than most, and for a time, was one of the best places on the internet for discussion of any kind, let alone tech. It deserves a place in history for that alone.
I don't think the "tech scene" was ever the small, tight-knit thing it used to be.
I'm not sure whether HN comments have gotten worse in general - these things fluctuate a lot, over long stretches, and the fundamentals are more or less the same over time.
Despite my emotional statement, I'm not really thinking of packing it in. HN obviously does more good than harm, even though it's popular for people to say the opposite (and even part of the game to say it).
If you want to delete your account you can just set your noprocrast to some absurdly large number like 99999999.