Comment by dang
1 day ago
This perception has been around for almost as long as HN itself:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23920281 (July 2020)
I don't know of any good way to objectively measure this. I do know that there's a strong bias to believe that things were better in the past, which is why "things have always been getting worse" is such a great line. How people perceive these things is strongly conditioned by how they're feeling about the things in general.
Found an older one, from 2011 :D
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=259276
The birth of HN is lost in the mists of time, but our best guess is it happened about 3 months before it started going downhill.
2008 is good! Now I want to know what was the first comment saying HN was going downhill.
A few years ago I did a thorough search for "HN is turning into Reddit" posts so I could link them at the bottom of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=225134 - June 2008 (10 comments) (<-- wow, we allowed titles that long?)
How do you separate (1) HN is going downhill, from (2) the world is going downhill, from (3) people always think things are going downhill? It seems hopelessly undecideable. (And yet, being human, I do think that HN is going somewhat downhill. Relative to the world though? not sure)
HN has always had sucky bits, just like human nature. Everyone who thinks it's going downhill is just one of today's 10,000 [1] to discover some sucky corner of human nature.
I'd say the world has gone downhill much faster and is making HN look good in comparison.
[1] https://xkcd.com/1053
1 reply →
And the "people in the past said things were worse, so therefore it's impossible for things to ever actually be worse" line is just as old.
All living things are constantly dying.
One way to think about it is that for a new idea/site/community/business/government/etc to gain adoption, it must be significantly better than what came before. It comes in far above the mean, because every new idea etc that doesn't come in way above the mean dies out and never gains adoption. The rest of its life is just long, slow regression to the mean. For the most part, it continually gets worse, simply because statistically, when you are much better than average the only way to go is down. Eventually, it drops below the mean and some other better replacement takes over from it.
So people can absolutely be right when they say that everything is always getting worse! The fact of existence in the first place means that they started off much better than average - after all, the vast majority of potential configurations of atoms/molecules/cells/DNA/ideas/firms/people do not exist, and we happen to have the particular arrangement that was selected for. And then constituent parts move around in random motion, entropy takes its toll, and we read this as things decaying. Somewhat literally, this is what it means to decay.
The way to avoid this is to be constantly swapping out subsystems that aren't working for you with subsystems that are.
You do a great job not curating content. If people are complaining about the plethora of JS frameworks years ago or "everything is AI" these days, its a reflection of what people are discussing online.
Now I'm waiting for these ideas to collide and once the hoopla about AI hits a lull, everyone's going to go re-invent parsing the DOM, again and we'll see lots of new AI generated JS frameworks.
I agree about the bias to believe the past was better than it actually was. I think it's called rosy retrospection, like when people are nostalgic for their high school days even though they were bullied and had no friends. Maybe HN isn't getting worse, it's just that the negative parts are more recent and noticeable.
pg had his 'pending comments'[0] a long time ago.
I think you work so hard for everyone here. Maybe it's a kind of cultural gardening.
[0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
I appreciate the gardening metaphor - it's one of my favorites too!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32771735
“Thinks have always been getting worse” remind me of entropy and arrow of time :)
When we look when logged-in at https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew (the input pipeline for all ShowHN) at any given time now more than half the page is either dead or flagged (I did the experiment now and it was 18/30 flagged or dead), then the rest of the page (100%) were AI related or claude generated.
Show HN, being used by people to share the cool things they create was an important part of creating of a community, aka always having people which would find interest in what you share.
It was a channel to push novel unpolished ideas to the world. It was one differentiating thing from other places where self-promoting is usually forbidden. Here it was welcoming people to take a more active role and create things.
Now it's just screaming into the void, the only feedback you get are email spam from LLM companies trying to push their solution to help you promote your content.
Sharing projects is also just feeding your competitors and killing the potential of your ideas, now that a clone is less than a prompt away.
I don't know who still look at this page, but then if you want to get past it you now probably need to turn to the dark side with some form of cheating, which is also conveniently easier than before to have bots spam about your product everywhere on the internet.
Show HN are now becoming the reverse, instead of feeling heard, it's even more isolating than before because when you put some effort and if even in the niche market where it's suppose to gather attention it doesn't, so you think you are not welcomed here, don't come back and look elsewhere.
If people would read the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and not post generated text with their Show HNs, they'd do a lot better. The community is clear about not wanting to read that.
I'm not one to fetishicize the past, but to be honest there has been quite a bad turn lately.
COVID, Trump's second election, Musk turning into the Bond villain he was cut out to be, Altman's good guy mask melting down slowly, the AI bubble sucking up all the money and making developers anxious about their future.
One shouldn't wonder why the mood is gloomier.
At least we have Mark Rober still out there working for the greater good, but I think it starts to transpire that things are starting to weigh on him too.