Comment by yaseer
1 day ago
The death of HN has been lamented since at least 2007 (in addition to the cliche that it's turning into Reddit, mentioned in the guidelines).
So far, it hasn't died nor turned into Reddit.
1 day ago
The death of HN has been lamented since at least 2007 (in addition to the cliche that it's turning into Reddit, mentioned in the guidelines).
So far, it hasn't died nor turned into Reddit.
The political posts have definitely increased and the front page is increasingly filled with negative sentiment posts that leaves one angered and not filled with a positive light. For years I didn’t flag anything. Now I’m daily flagging political posts.
> filled with negative sentiment posts that leaves one angered and not filled with a positive light
You mean the negative sentiments that you get when people uncover how big tech/monopolies/government really works ? I guess you would rather read la-la-land stories about the entrepreneurial aces of the 2010s when techies and the general populace were still gullible for that.
Negativity doesn't have to fill every space, even if you can find negativity everywhere. Maybe what HN has implicitly (and maybe explicitly) nurtured is intellectual curiosity for the sake of intellectual curiosity, which, in mi opinion es very orthogonal to negativity (even if it's intellectual adjacent).
I understand that maybe this is not what everyone wants (or understands) from HN, but I do sympathize with the other comment: after visiting HN I'd rather be happy and curious that angered and curious
Yes. That’s not what I want to read on hn. You can go to Reddit or many other places for that and fill yourself with anger all you want. I personally do not want that for me and if hn continues the way it’s headed then I’ll block it like I did Reddit.
3 replies →
As I'm always telling people, the phenomenon you're noticing is that the President of the United States wishes to increase negative sentiment and widen the scope of things which are subject to politics. It's not something that HN or its users get a choice in. If you don't like it, I'm with you, but you're going to have to take it up with him.
What you’re noticing is called fifth generation warfare. Get people to feel bad about their country, government, community, etc.
When it gets to politics or economics there are an increasingly large amount of reddit like socialism comments. It seems ironic given its run by a VC firm.
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Yeah I’m gonna have to go ahead and push back on this. It’s getting worse and trending towards Reddit and using that guideline to tell people to stop talking about it is making things worse. We need to shame and downvote and flag the Reddit-tier posts and comments here.
> So far, it hasn't died nor turned into Reddit.
Depends how you define it. I mean, just because you or the moderators say so doesn't make it true - I've used this site for more than 10 years and I've never seen a higher proportion of political posts nor a higher proportion of blatantly partisan comments on most (not just political) threads.
It isn't like this site would be likely to die in the sense of 0 people visit it, so I'm not sure what you even mean by it dying and have no clue how you'd even measure that. For all you know, most of the commenters are bots - I could be a bot for all you know. But the quality of discourse has definitely become less tech-focused since I first started coming here, and as a Reddit user from early on it very much reminds me of that. Reddit in the beginning was basically to Digg what HN is to Reddit today, and the trajectory is - subjectively to me at least - very similar. What started out as a nerdy tech space slowly over time has and is morphing into political bullshit that never would have made the front page 10 years ago.
Having said that, there's no doubt all these sites have astroturfing issues, and tech in particular tends to have very vociferous users as a rule.
> What started out as a nerdy tech space slowly over time has and is morphing into political bullshit that never would have made the front page 10 years ago.
Don't you see how we're propagating the problem here? It would be easy for someone who wants a nerdy tech space to read and discuss the contents of the source article, describing how a new technology might change the experimental process for quantum computing research. Instead we're engaging in political meta-commentary, under an OP comment speculating that "[t]his site might be dying" because they don't like hearing about the company who published it.