Comment by aaronbrethorst
12 years ago
I agree completely. I've been on HN for almost six years now (sidenote: wow!), and I'm in the top 40 users on the site by karma. And, despite the exhortations to not think that the site is becoming Reddit, the community is absolutely changing for the worse.
There are a few things that I've noticed that I never used to see:
* More politics. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm a crazy flaming liberal, and I still don't want to see things like the Ayn Rand story that popped up earlier today, even though I agree with it. I have plenty of sites I can go to to get political news and discussion. I've traditionally liked the fact that HN isn't one of them.
* All Edward Snowden/NSA all the time. Yeah, ok, I get it. It's a big story and a big deal. But, at this point, there's nothing new to talk about. I see what amount to the same comments posted day in and day out on these threads. And it's really boring.
* Incredibly racist comments. On a number of occasions lately, I've seen people post comments that are totally unacceptable in civilized discourse. e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6005314
As a result of these, I've seriously considered abandoning HN, and likely will just like I did with Slashdot years ago. I really don't want to, and I know it can never 'go back to the way it was,' but the overall level of civility needs to change dramatically (and this is the responsibility of everyone in this community. Call people on it when you see it and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable).
Maybe there needs to be a new section of the website entitled "Aaron never has to click on this link" (or just "Politics"), where we can sequester (ha) everything politics-related.
Anyway, to sum it up: the community has absolutely changed, and generally for the worse. And it's our responsibility to fix it, but we'll also need some help from pg.
I think I pinpointed the exact moment HN's decline started. It was when my inane, rage induced comments about the NSA were getting upvoted.
Let's not ban politics, let's just drastically lower the amount of noise in political threads.
Interestingly, the toxic nature of political debate was what lead to the creation of subreddits - r/politics was the first!
I think Joel Spolsky's was the first - https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z12osn5g1lnmyrxv223...
The underlying problem is one of reflection and restraint. Many comments and posts are made very quickly to get the "frist post" or count coup in some other way.
There is a lot more to discuss about the Snowden/NSA brouhaha. It's just not regurgitation of existing bits of information that have already been posted hundreds of times. We burn out on the repetition and get annoyed.
What is relevant, and in my eyes disappointing, is that there has been little deep discourse on the topic. Every article starts at the basic "OMFG" and doesn't take a broader view of new developments.
There is some incentive that is driving the decline of quality content and interaction on the site. Whether it is attention, karma, or whatever, site members have responded with a focus on shallow quantity.
For example, there hasn't been a deep discussion on why privacy is a right. There've been a few comments, such as Schneier's "What's your salary?" that evoke the fear of having privacy violated, but people who are afraid of negative stimulus will override their fear for a more meaningful or important goal. Why is what the NSA doing bad, from basic philosophical principles, and what will the impact be on business, technology, and society in the coming years?
Solving the problem is not simple or trivial, but I'm sure Paul has given many approaches significant thought. It's difficult to implement them without changing the essential simplicity of the site.
There is the Reddit path of subreddits and the various "this thread moved to IYFCategory" forums. I'm not sure that helps. However, there is a natural clustering of some of these topics. While a "politics" cluster is too broad, some shorter-lived and more specialized clusters, such as Snowden/Angular/whatever grouping, would afford discussion among those interested, encapsulate the babble storm, yet give an indication of activity so that individuals can determine their own level of involvement. "I see you're posting a link to a story about Edward Snowden. I'm adding it to the Snowdenball."
Another approach is to limit karma. The people who post karma-bait will top out very quickly and either lose interest, or focus less on the score they have accumulated. It could just be another exponential function of up votes. 1:1 when getting started, then decrease the karma adjustment of each vote over time. Then one has positive and negative feedback, especially among "newer" accounts, and less of a desire even to look at the number past 2,000 or some arbitrary figure.
It's a tough problem. We can self-regulate by avoiding the xkcd 386 impulse. Stop giving votes to shallow thought. Stop posting one-line replies that are obvious and superficial.
I'm a newer member and even in the two years I've been here, I've noticed a change. I think part of the problem is that it's too easy to create disposable accounts. Do you think that adding some sort of accountability system when signing up would help?
What are the decent alternatives? Or else, let's try to make this into something better, by flagging instead of commenting, and downvoting racist, sexist, bigoted crap instead of feeding the trolls.
If you're fine with more general topics and about a day's delay in "breaking" internet news (re: stuff that doesn't matter), I've found MetaFilter to be good. The pay wall filters out bottom-barrel trolls and the community is mostly nice enough to shame bigoted and extremist bullshit.
I've become a fan of the micro-paywall. A one-time fee of $5-10 is an amazingly powerful filter.
Metafilter, as you said, is one example. Another is the Ruby Rogues Parley mailing list (now Discourse site). I can only imagine what a HN with similar filtering-of-the-noise would be like.
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I think it'd be interesting if any account less than a year old had their comments put into the 'pending' state pg has been talking to.
Sites that don't let in new users are as bad as sites that that themselves go completely to pot.
It's possible to have civil political discourse, but it takes a lot of effort, much more than maintaining the entire rest of a site. You can't do it by tweaking things here and there, you need active moderators who can maintain cool heads themselves about topics they are passionate about.
I don't think it's worth HN spending that effort, and what's more important it doesn't look like HN wants to spend that effort.
If you want a swimming pool, you have to maintain it. If you can't, fill it in. HN should either invest a lot more maintenance on political posts, or take a very very heavy ax to them.
newscomers will stop comming because they wont fell welcome, and that space is not really democratic..
this will eventually degrade to more elitism, like (now just people with a big karma)
HN is like a collective mind.. more pop ot gots, more of the average mind it will represent.. its something i fell about facebook too.. with the first open-minded friends, it was a good environment.. than.. the thing get popular, and your news feed look like a toillet flush..
i think whats bother some, its what attract others.. for me particularly i dont mind some political biased posts.. more than i do for the startup mentality stuff..
but then both of them get they fair share of the HN front page.. i think people here at HN do a very good review of things that are important, also for the moment, for the modern times.. live in broaders and bigger communities is this.. the average collective IQ gets lower.. but it make sense to say: "i dont want to grow anymore if thats whats grows means?"
should we kick off the average and make they fell unwelcome?
maybe i am the average, how can i possible know that?