Ask HN: General Mood of the Community

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30193946

by t-writescode • 4 years ago

177 197 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Has anyone else noticed that HN feels a lot more angry all around lately? There seems to be little peace or excitement in people's comments. It feels mostly like people attacking each other or attacking something.

I know the pandemic has been hard; but, we've got to fight to keep our peace through this and not attack others during this time, where we can.

gus_massa2• 4 years ago

Avoid the posts with more than 100 comments.

Try to go to https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and find interesting small post. I like when they have like 10 comments, but sometimes they have no comments and you can have a nice conversation with the author or someone of the community of HN that is an expert in the subject. [Note: Most of the post in "newest" are not interesting. You must check it for a while until you find one.]

ghoul2• 4 years ago

Huh. My algorithm, exactly!

I quit slashdot when basically every story started hitting 100+ comments. When 100+ comment stories were maybe once-a-day thing, slashdot was an outstanding board.

I have noticed the rule applies very widely, including on subreddits.

electroly• 4 years ago

Consider also https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew which is new Show HNs. It's not on the top bar so it's easy to miss. There are fewer articles but the signal to noise is higher and they all have an eager author waiting for a comment.

no-s• 4 years ago

I read /new and /comments first. I also search to see if there’s anything new in topics I’m interested in.

t-writescode5• 4 years ago

Honestly, this may be worth doing for a little while to see how it goes. Usually, I'll go and skim the big topics that make it to the front page, or the first few pages. "New" might be a better place to go.

greenyoda3• 4 years ago

Also, upvoting good articles in /newest is important - if nobody looks at them and upvotes them, they'll quickly fade into oblivion. By upvoting new articles, you have a disproportionate impact on what makes it to the front page.

wrycoder2• 4 years ago

I'm often surprised to find that upvoting a post on new that's an hour old and with maybe two votes was enough to resurrect it.

wrycoder2• 4 years ago

I find on those that a liberal use of "[-]" and "next" make it possible to mine the slag for the good stuff.

h2odragon• 4 years ago

On the contrary, I see more rote apologia and formal protestations of faith and conformity than there used to be. The tone of commenters here encompass a wider range perhaps than other forums; we've got some excellent communicators with empathy and all that good stuff, and then some less social folks like me that hope to at least amuse if we cant actually communicate, and often fail to do even that.

I'd also submit that it's far more normal now than say 5 years ago for just the bare disagreement of what I said above to be perceived, by some, as me attacking you, the author of the OP. Which would be an erroneous conclusion as far as I'm concerned.

paulpauper3• 4 years ago

Covid has contributed to this I would think

anthony_romeo• 4 years ago

IMO The tone of HN comments is teetering over the edge of decorum, similar to the atmosphere of Reddit prior to every new nadir of commentary there.

I'm not going to look through rose-tinted glasses and suggest "things were better in the good ol' days". Contrarian reactions to top posts are the bread-and-butter of a healthy message board.

However, to me it feels like the quality of these contrarian takes have gone down. People seem far more 'committed' to pushing their positions to incense others with overgeneralizing karma-clickbait. This causes the dialectic to become more of a debate instead of a deliberation, and to me the latter is far more useful and engaging.

With that said, I also know that my tastes change as I get older, so this could truly be my own delusion.

toomuchtodo2• 4 years ago

Curiosity has its bounds. Some topics, arguably, are the equivalent of discussing the temperature and color of the fire as the house burns.

I too am getting older, and while I don’t feel I’m becoming galvanized per se, I think my tolerance for those not acting in good faith has rapidly approached zero. If the data speaks and the counterparty opposes facts, there is no way to have a productive discussion. An example from my own experience would be when talking to someone about climate change, which they don’t believe in because “God will make sure it all works out”. There is no value in engaging in those situations, and similar anecdotes can be found here. Belief systems and mental models can be rigid.

cableshaft3• 4 years ago

Here you can replace 'God' with technology and that's pretty much what you'll see here. Unwavering belief that technology will be their salvation from climate change.

AnimalMuppet2• 4 years ago

I think my tolerance for those not acting in good faith has rapidly approached zero.

That may be the difference. A few years ago, more of the contrarian takes were in good faith, with real thought behind them. You could learn something new from them, even if you didn't completely agree with them. That also meant that, when you were confronted with a contrarian take, you were more likely to expect that it was made in good faith. This led to a different feel for the whole site.

Now it seems that more of the contrarian (and even mainstream) takes are just repeating talking points. They are, in CapitalistCartr's words, "a set of recordings", so they're no point trying to have a discussion.

I don't know how to get back to where HN was five years ago. I can feel the difference, and I prefer the old version.

#OldManYellsAtClouds, I guess...

codeduck• 4 years ago

Time becomes more valuable as we get older.

jdkjs• 4 years ago

I waste as little time as possible writing contrarian comments here because I know they will get flagged immediately and nobody will get to read them.

sometimeshuman• 4 years ago

This is a concern. In exploring any space we risk getting stuck at a local maximum. But this may occur when one holds on to their current ideas too strongly and immediately rejects ideas that go downhill so to speak. Flagging does seem overused on HN lately. It would be interesting to know many HN active users there have been over the years and perhaps that is the reason flagging occurs more frequently. For the record I have had various HN accounts for almost a decade and last month was the first time I was ever flagged.

pjerem• 4 years ago

In my experience, just adding politeness to a contrarian comment avoids the downvotes.

I had some downvoted comments but I think it never happened when I was politely disagreeing before making my point.

I think people (and I include myself) are more easily "triggerable" nowadays.

I also think we can fix this by taking the habit to write like we are attacking the point and not the person.

One easy way to do this is to overuse the "I" subject, even if it is to write and not just throw your facts. There is no real difference between « you are wrong because » and « I think you missed [that point] because » but the later is, automatically, more respectful.

skeeter2020• 4 years ago

There are a lot of dimensions changing here, so it's hard to figure out if it's the audience, the content, the comments, the environment in which HN exists or you. Probably some of each but tough to determine which is the first-order cause.

samlevine• 4 years ago

Posting a contrarian take can get you fired.

There is little point in peaking out from whatever novel thing you're interested in and discussing it when there are people who get their fun out of ruining lives.

This selects for people who post boring but inflammatory takes, and encourages heterodox thinkers who are trying to gain followings to meld their views to their audience.

sillysaurusx• 4 years ago

It’s illusory. The feeling is as old as the hills.

If you want to see some real aggressive behavior, look at HN during its first year. I was shocked. My rose tinted glasses made year one look a lot nicer than it was.

t-writescode5• 4 years ago

It can be both real and "less than ye olden times".

Perhaps everyone is always combative and I'm just sensitive to it lately.

jacquesm2• 4 years ago

That is logical though: that's before there were any guidelines or moderation. Once those were in place it became a lot nicer.

kerneloftruth• 4 years ago

10 years ago, I would think to myself "Man, it feels like we're headed for a civil war"; but, I didn't say anything as I wrote it off to being too focused on the present-term context. I compared the times to the 1960s, when there was a lot of unrest and division. 5 years ago, though, things seemed even worse, and I began wondering out loud if we're headed for civil war.

Now, I think we're closer than ever to a real split. Covid has exacerbated it all. People are self-sorting in terms of migrations from blue states to red states, and from cities to suburbs and rural areas.

This summer, and the elections in November, could be flashpoints of something larger and worse -- I hope we can hold it together.

As for HN toxicity -- beware items whose number of comments exceeds the votes for the article itself; it's a rough metric for how big the flames are.

coding123• 4 years ago

The thing that gets scarier about that - is that in the past I am guessing a "civil war" was probably not possible because you don't know what side anyone is really on. Everyone from every political background lives everywhere. Your neighbors.

But what happens when half of everyone wears a mask and the other half does not?

newsbinator• 4 years ago

Not sure about the political and USA-centric part of this, but "People are self-sorting" really hits hard.

I feel like people on Reddit, and to a lesser extent on HN, are trying now, more than ever before, to label and sort themselves into "us" and "them".

Commenting on a post didn't used to require as a compulsory first step announcing which "us" you belong to.

In a nutshell:

us = rational and fact-based

them = irrational and emotion-based

All sides think they're "us" and that other sides are "them".

fouc• 4 years ago

I doubt there's been any significant change in mood. Truly negative stuff gets downvoted or flagged. I think it's mostly going to come down to your perception of things, unless you've been unlucky and happened to read all the wrong comments.

Karunamon• 4 years ago

Please don't confuse negativity with incivility. I'm also noticing a lot more comments that wouldn't look out of place on a Wikipedia talk page for some controversial topic; i.e. not directly insulting, but dripping with scorn and just barely toeing the line of not being flag bait.

MattGaiser• 4 years ago

I have noticed this with startup discussion, although I cannot really blame people.

A lot of it seems to be formerly excited about startups people screwed over by bad management in one way or another who now are happy to hang out at FAANG and focus on money.

I get it. My last employer made a lot of their employees want to join large companies and focus on stuffing their pockets rather than caring about any higher goal.

errantmind3• 4 years ago

The general type of person on HN is more rigid-minded than a decade ago. They are less interested in exploring new ideas and more about the status quo. None of these people actually believe this about themselves, but it is obvious when reading through the comments. These people also tend to get increasingly bitter over time, which fuels a lack of curiosity and a shallow, dismissive attitude. I find these people to be lame and look to escape them whenever possible.

tablespoon3• 4 years ago

The general type of person on HN is more rigid-minded than a decade ago. They are less interested in exploring new ideas and more about the status quo. None of these people actually believe this about themselves, but it is obvious when reading through the comments.

Examples? Sometimes interest in particular types of "new" ideas is just naivete, and seeing those "new" ideas fail or not live up to the hype can lead to a new appreciation of certain aspects of the status quo.

gpm2• 4 years ago

I've certainly become more interested in the status quo in the last 5 years, so I guess I can offer myself up as a sort of example. (Though I do believe that about myself, and I'm not sure it actually translates to being less interested in exploring new ideas either...)

Maybe a bit of it is just me getting older, but I think most of it is observing that a lot of things are actively getting worse, and thus prioritizing "stopping the bleeding". A concrete example of this would be Biden as a politician, 5 years ago I would have hated him as useless (not improving things) and mildly corrupt, now I don't mind him as useless (not making things worse) and only mildly corrupt - with the unfortunate reality that that is the best option the US had.

PS. Let's try and keep this thread from becoming a debate about Biden and politicians, he's a useful example but not the point, I don't expect everyone to agree with my assessment.

Turing_Machine• 4 years ago

In the "old days" people were mostly talking about doing startups, or doing creative geeky stuff. There's still a lot of that, of course, which is why I'm still here, but there's definitely a lot more "How do I game this metric to get hired by a FAANG?"

Getting hired by a FAANG is the antithesis of doing a startup, or doing some original research, or even working on a clever hack just for the joy of it.

errantmind3• 4 years ago

If we are continuing with the generalization about this 'type' of person, you can point to just about any controversial topic posted here. The mental gymnastics these people use is as old as history. They take edge-cases and statistical anomalies and use those to generalize about entire groups/categories. Other people jump onto these shallow 'statements of fact' and continue to expand the generalization until the conclusions are as absolute and as wide as possible. These wide conclusions appeal to rigid minds as they have wide bases and are airtight, with no room for context nor nuance.

This is just one example of how this type reacts to particular issues, the full impact is pervasive throughout the whole site.

Yes, I know there is an irony in me generalizing about this type of person, but I'm unsure how else to talk about it.

weeblewobble• 4 years ago

Open web, decentralization, privacy/tracking, advertising in general, right to repair, walled gardens, Google shutting down projects. Just off the top of my head, these are a bunch of topics on which HN threads take the form of advocacy rather than discussion or curiosity.

abecedarius• 4 years ago

Same impression, and it's why I spend less time here. Haven't yet lost the habit of checking daily.

gwbas1c2• 4 years ago

I wonder if it's just a symptom of Hacker News getting more popular?

My theory is that, as a site grows, the quality of comments goes down. Perhaps it's because the site is harder to moderate when more people are on it? Perhaps it's because the attention drives in the loonies?

Personally, I really like how Hacker News is moderated. (Thanks Dang!)

mateo1• 4 years ago

I agree with the generally good moderation and I'd like to see more of the low effort comments being removed. I have been noticing more juvenile jokes and puns lately.

djbusby• 4 years ago

I believe it is our duty to downvote.

denton-scratch2• 4 years ago

I'm afraid I like puns and cheap jokes; I know they violate content guidelines, and I don't mind being downvoted. I hope my jokes aren't juvenile, though.

Downvoting and flagging is good; but unless you're downvoting something that's just a vacuous quip, then I think the downvoter should usually make a comment.

oramit• 4 years ago

You and a few others have commented on popularity but do we have numbers for this? Is HN more busy than it used to be?

AnimalMuppet2• 4 years ago

I think that, as the site grows bigger, it becomes more worthwhile to post here with an agenda, because you can influence more people. So as a large-scale trend, posts went from more thoughtful and having-a-discussion to more dogmatic and oratorical.

dusted• 4 years ago

I've only been active since 2019, I wouldn't say the tone has changed much, maybe there are waves, maybe it's just the ebb and tide of who are active when, which is outside-influenced by peoples general lives. Sometimes several of the more negative people will happen to be in a more active period at the same time..

That said, I think the tone on HN is fairly good, people are not sugarcoating things, they're not veiling their views with courtesy, and they're generally presenting arguments for consideration, and if insults are made, they're usually insults of ideas, not people.

So maybe I'm just in the "negative asshole camp" but I think it's very refreshing to have conversations on HN, because my views are often challenged, and I am forced to reconsider and adjust, while at the same time, I feel that my own points are being considered, rather than automatically discarded as is often the case in mainstream social media, where discussions are not had to find understanding or truth, but to "win".

denton-scratch2• 4 years ago

That said, I think the tone on HN is fairly good

I agree.

I've been visiting HN for years, but I'm pretty new as a commenter. AFAICS the tone is rather nicely controlled by the mods (hi, dang!) and the community. I'm glad it's a place where people can say what they think, in fairly direct terms; I'm also glad that people are expected to think before they say.

Whether conversations here are more polarized than in the past, I can't say. But societies have become more polarized lately; people are angrier, there's a lot more othering going on.

It helps a lot that HN generally disapproves of political debates.

ethbr03• 4 years ago

There are always going to be people who confuse "I disagree with you" with "You're wrong."

Generally, HN trends towards the former, and that's one of the things I love about it! You can make a good point and I can disagree with you!

One of the most counter-intuitive tenets of forum community management is the only winning move is not to engage with bad behavior.

A downvote + not replying to a poorly behaving commenter is orders of magnitude more powerful and instructive than any reply.

(And also, the distinction between "downvote because I disagree" & "downvote because you're breaking forum norms." We're at our best when we promote healthy debate, and disincentivize bad behavior, instead of "bad thoughts.")

ovao• 4 years ago

I've only been active since 2019, I wouldn't say the tone has changed much...

Largely agreed. If the idea that the pandemic and the greater isolation that tends to come from remote work are contributing to more negativity in the things people write (which is a reasonable supposition), then you'd probably also expect a more negative take from the things people read. What was once innocuous might now read as not-so-innocuous. In other words, is whatever issue there is just a perception issue?

Overall, I don't think HN's tone or content quality has changed much. dang & Co. are steering this ship just as well as ever in my opinion (thanks dang!)

ziggus• 4 years ago

Are you sure you're not just experiencing a bit of Baader–Meinhof?

travisporter• 4 years ago

Since covid started, I've been consciously avoiding the comments of anything political or covid-related, and I've not noticed any change in tone or constructive criticism. Dunning-Kruger i guess?

As an aside, I also stop reading after "I think it's funny..." or "Interesting that..." because it's usually something very passive-aggressive

nicbou• 4 years ago

I haven't noticed such a change. The comments are generally polite, even if often critical.

asciimov• 4 years ago

I think two things happen as online communities grow.

1. People, consciously or not, start forming their comments with upvotes in mind.

2. People realize that positive comments don't generate as much discussion as neutral or negative comments. Less discussion, less upvotes.

joshstrange• 4 years ago

These are both rough and one I've fallen prey to them more than once. It's really shitty to write out a long, well thought out, positive comment and then it get buried and there be no discussion (I care more about discussion than points but points beget more discussion usually). Then I'll pop off in a 1-2 sentence comment and it will rise near the top and have lots of discussion. It's frustrating that effort isn't always rewarded and it sometimes feels like it's better to optimize for points just to get your idea/concept across.

isaiahg• 4 years ago

The next stage is when everyone realizes the most upvotes go to whoever can come up with the best one-line zinger and the comment sections become improv night.

marklubi• 4 years ago

The site has slowly been turned to mostly clickbait headlines, and outrage comments. It's not just turned that way lately though, it's taken several years.

Things used to be hopeful and encouraging around here. It's not that way anymore.

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

Angry and low-effort comments became more common at the beginning of the pandemic. I can't find it now, but I recall dang (HN moderator) even commented on the shift.

I think as remote work has become more common, many engineers are reaching to social media sites like HN to fill the void left by previous in-person office banter. The good comments are still there, but it feels like more work than ever to find them among the noise. I've also noticed an increase in the number of familiar HN screen names that pop up with the same angry perspectives on every thread of certain hot topics (Facebook, economics, cloud hosting).

This effect isn't exclusive to HN. The signal-to-noise ratio of the public forums and Slacks/Discords I frequent has also taken a dive since the start of COVID.

t-writescode5• 4 years ago

Part of my hope with this post is for people to see that all of us are a part of this general descent into sadness (and anger), to hopefully help pull us out of it - or at least help pull some of us out of it.

tootie• 4 years ago

There's been a lot more political debates and especially irrational American right opinions on Covid issues. A lot of posts that seem to zealously push for things like lab leak theories or Ivermectin/Hydroxychloroquine studies. There's room for rational discourse, but there's a lot of seemingly emotional pleas and conspiracy thinking.

friendlydog• 4 years ago

It could be the storm stage of Form, Storm, Norm, Perform.

nathanaldensr2• 4 years ago

Hacker News is not a singular person; however, there is a small but extremely vocal minority that insists on picking fights, yelling about "Republicans" (ambiguous collective), calling people names (anti-vaxxer, Nazi, fascist, etc.) with impunity. The thing is, the vitriol only works if you let it. Some people are angry, like being angry, and want to be angry all the time. The reasons they're angry change with the political winds, but the underlying current of energy remains.

I don't think most people on HN are angry. You're just affected more by angry comments than rational, calm ones. It's an emotional bias. This is why it's important to not use social media for the vast majority of one's time; angry people have a way of creating more angry people around them.

TameAntelope• 4 years ago

Nearly every time I feel this way, it's not a trend I'm noticing, but something within myself that's coloring my interactions.

So you are possibly more angry when interacting with HN lately, or are interpreting more things that aren't angry as angry.

Take a few weeks away from HN entirely. It can become addicting, it's often good to seek time apart from any source of anger in your life.

sergiotapia• 4 years ago

been here since 2012, i haven't noticed any particular changes in the discourse now vs back then. this post you just made, in like a recurring thing. someone is always asking this.

same with the "I remade a frontend for HN" someone always posts one. hell, i even made one a long time ago haha

jshaqaw• 4 years ago

Not limited to Hacker News. Other forums I participate in have seen parallel shifts downward in civility. Some of it is generational. For better or worse younger generations often see strident online discourse as totally different than how you would treat a person irl. Older folks have less of a sense of separate worlds there.

In general anonymous commenting was cool for a while but seems to be leading to negative results most places. I’m ready to engage with forums limited to verified real people ex specific situations where personal safety might be at risk (and I’m not in any of those myself now or in the past).

rocqua• 4 years ago

I hope the even younger people reverse this trend of treating online as different. They have grown up with social media, and know that digital communication has a real life impact. I could imagine them growing up with healthier norms about on-line behavior than my generation.

lokalfarm• 4 years ago

Your comment brought to mind this story written by the late, great John Perry Barlow: https://www.eff.org/pages/crime-and-puzzlement

My impression is that the young generations are growing up in an environment where the lines between their "digital life" and "real life" are almost completely blurred. Whether it is socializing with their peers, dating, going to school, or getting a job - so much of "being online" nowadays involves people being groomed as both the consumer and the product. It did not feel that way to me in the 90's and early 2000's, although that might not quite fit the definition of "older folks."

LesZedCB2• 4 years ago

my mood is generally more sour, tired, and insanely bored. mostly due to climate anxiety. pandemic fatigue is there still too, but not as much.

but we can't talk about climate shit because people either 1) don't wanna be depressed, 2) aren't willing to accept the rules of the New Climate Regime, 3) are concern trolls, 4) stuck in old, outdated political lines.

so it's just a slow motion death march into the future. fuck.

notpachet• 4 years ago

May I interest you in some completely unallegorical entertainment[1] in these trying times?

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11286314/

LesZedCB2• 4 years ago

haha yep i really loved that movie. the fact the media hated it so much is just perfect. played right into it.

LoveGracePeace• 4 years ago

In the US, it feels like the years under the Carter administration, malaise, high gas prices, inflation. These things weigh heavily on everyone's minds regardless where they stand on matters of society like politics or religion. Strong leadership yields positive and negative results, hopefully the balance is positive. Weak leadership yields malaise, which is worse than negative results, it's regressive.

germinalphrase• 4 years ago

To me at least, it feels like we have completely lost the thread on what “strong” versus “weak” leadership even entails when it comes to political leaders.

alangibson5• 4 years ago

My feeling is that mood-souring is universal, if unevenly distributed, across all communities. Part of it is lockdown, part is growing political divisions, and so on.

It's interesting that this post hits the front page on the same day that Facebook announces (admits to?) its first user drop. Everyone is just getting sick of being social online. From here on out, content is king.

In 10 years we'll look at the Facebook news feed as being the necessary intermediate step between Web 2.0 and whatever TikTok becomes.

jaxn• 4 years ago

And fatigue. I think the entire world is just tired.

alangibson5• 4 years ago

Indeed. This comes up all the time in American political discussion. People on the left say that we're a worn out, declining empire. People on the right say we're falling apart due to the left.

No matter your orientation, it's pretty clear that Neoliberalism, aka The Washington Concensus, is on its last legs. We're all just sort of hanging around waiting for the paradigm shift to start.

maerF0x03• 4 years ago

I think also a lot of the world is negative minded towards the challenges they're facing. Mindset/framing makes a very big difference in how challenges are interpreted and how they stress the system.

I would suggest there is a very general decrease in gratitude, humility, and an increase in entitlement.

stiiv• 4 years ago

I've been a lurker on HN for about a decade. This is literally the first comment that I have posted.

Part of the reason is: while I am thoughtful, reasonably well-informed individual, I never felt up to the task of putting in enough effort to create an HN-worthy comment. This was inspired almost entirely by the _quality_ of the kinds of comments that I saw over the years -- at least for the kinds of posts that drew my attention.

- Many (most?) of the comments were made by experts - They often included disclaimers, especially when the poster considered themselves an amateur - They often included sources and links - They were conspicuously respectful and humane - Meta-comments were productive, and typically stopped propagation of nastiness before it could take root

Often enough, comments would truly enrich the original post, and I was truly grateful for them.

This was a stark contrast with the subreddits that I frequented. (I gave up on reddit a few years when they changed the default format to be more attention-greedy.)

From what I've seen, HN has become increasingly noisy -- at times, it's angry -- but overall, it just feels loud and crowded.

For that reason, I've basically stopped reading comments at all, even if there is high-quality content in there. It is a damn shame.

mettamage• 4 years ago

overall, it just feels loud and crowded.

I think this is part of the real reason. More people have been coming there since I joined (2015 I think?). The submissions were also more technical then, a bit more, not much more.

conductr• 4 years ago

I've been around much longer and things are always changing. What I've seen, probably in the timeframe since COVID, is that people used to drop a comment and rarely revisit any of the children comments. The child comments used to be mostly positive and potentially additive if only a pat on the back. Now, more so than before, I see the top level commenter coming back to defend themselves in GGP level comments. The children to their comment is likely to point out something they missed, why they disagree, point out broken functionality, critique or otherwise add a hint of negativity to the comments.

There's two parts. 1) the negativity is increasing a bit 2) the commenter came back and chose to defend/counter themselves. #1 alone typically has sorted itself out in the past, negativity got downvoted fairly heavy to the point where I think folks probably self censored themselves. The community and mods have managed this type of thing fairly well. The #2 part seems to me a relatively recent development. I'd blame it on the WFH flexibility giving everyone more real-time usage of the site and that facilitates debate/arguments.

That's my totally made up hypothesis on this. I still don't think I'd characterize the level of discourse as problematic. The fact we're discussing politics and world topics more often as a community it's natural for us to disagree more.

city41• 4 years ago

You joined May 31, 2015, it's on your profile page.

FWIW, I have found HN comments and submissions tend to ebb and flow. There are times when I feel the quality goes downhill, but then 3, 6, maybe 12 months later it seems like things get back on track. I'm unsure of the cause, possibly dang and co. are tweaking knobs in the background?

scruple2• 4 years ago

Of course it's perpetually September for ~~Delphi~~ HN users, isn't it? [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

agumonkey• 4 years ago

The submission side is curious to me. I struggle to find stuff to submit these days.

systemvoltage• 4 years ago

I resonate with your views. I’ve not been around that long but I often visit old threads to get a perspective.

For those looking for an example to drive this home, look no further than the most hot button thread on HN when President Trump was elected. Inspect the quality of discussion. We were so much better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12907201

Note: As sad as it sounds, I need to clarify; I have no political position or axe to grind. Just showing how we used to have discourse about difficult topics and I chose an extreme example to convince you.

waffle_ss• 4 years ago

This concurs with my assessment. It's literally in the rules to not say what I'm about to say, but guess what: content-wise, HN threads are essentially Reddit threads at this point (ironically this stupid rule has likely played a hand in helping this become possible).

HN as a community used to heartily employ downvotes on comments that had low signal value. Those days are long gone; now you can make an offhand joke or pun and it will get upvoted to the moon. HN also used to track your ratio of karma per comment, which encouraged you to only comment when you really felt what you had to say was insightful lest you throw off your ratio with a comment that would only get a couple upvotes. Dang or somebody else removed that because they believed it was holding people back from participating (and it was, but it served a good purpose IMO).

HN has long required a karma threshold to downvote, but IMO they should've hid the upvote behind an even higher karma requirement. Without that, what has happened when waves of new users sign up, is they upvote garbage comments (likely from other new accounts), and over time this becomes normalized to be the community voice. Leading to the low signal quality we have today.

time_to_smile• 4 years ago

Hacker News has an extreme problem with cognitive dissonance as the collapse of industrial society becomes harder and harder to ignore. Pandemic is just a mild symptom of this, the increasing impact of climate change is a much more severe one.

The trouble is that tech and the startup community in general derive much of their meaning from the idea that "tomorrow will be better". Nearly all programmers that I know, got into the field because of what they dream it could be tomorrow. There is an implicitly understanding that the things we build today are just the foundation for a brighter future.

In a more practical, less ideological sense, the entire startup/VC ecosystem depends on tomorrow being better and brighter since everything we are doing is leveraged against the future, literally. If the future were to be worse than today, that would ultimately fall apart.

However, as the signs that the future is dimming become more apparent, the vast majority of the HN community are forced into a position of existential angst that they are not prepared for.

This leads to a general increase in hostility about any topic related to a changing world. People will lose their minds in discussions about remote work (especially people who want to return to "normal", discussion of pandemic is filled with people who don't want to vaccinate or wear masks as a means of denying the pandemic is happening, climate change articles are filled with denial comments almost immediately, and very offend flagged off the home page very quickly.

Many members of this community are under extreme stress and anxiety because a reality they don't want to see continues to creep in. The result of this an angrier more agressive, more scared community.

throwaway220322• 4 years ago

What does coronavirus have to do with "the collapse of society"?

It's a mild virus that still hasn't even done in 0.3% of my country (by contrast, almost 3% of my lifespan has passed in the time period) and it's rapidly approaching a complete non issue.

Comparing it to climate change is dangerous because climate change is actually an existential issue for humanity in a way that just another virus is not.

We've had viruses before, we will have them again.

I find it kind of bizarre that people even refer to coronavirus as "the pandemic", ignoring all other illnesses.

paulpauper3• 4 years ago

How is industrial society collapsing? Ford motors is seeing record high earnings. What evidence is there of such a colipase You mean social unrest?

zwieback• 4 years ago

Been on here since 2009 and it's always felt the same: vaguely rude but overall quite productive. However, I know better than to click on the comments section for a certain type of article.

notduncansmith• 4 years ago

Hah, that is a great description.

I would agree that more people seem to break the general decorum in the past few years than I’ve seen since I joined in 2013.

I can tell that I’ve become a little more bitter. I’ve been commenting much less, too. Spending time off of Twitter has helped immensely with my mood and quality of social interactions (I used Twitter for a spell back in the 10’s, mostly didn’t use it, then got back on in ‘19). My media diet generally seems to impact my mood to a great degree so by limiting my recreational media to HN + Geminispace + books + music (and TV/movies with family) I am much happier. I still use the Web for tasks, and having to block ads everywhere is a bummer but better than looking at them.

I suspect many other HN users are also subscribed to other forms of social media, like Twitter, that are overstimulating our amygdalas and giving us too much chaos to process while making progress in our own lives. These companies can’t keep growing in engagement without more people spending more time consuming stress-inducing content.

Hopefully the current mental health trend is more than a fad, we will see people start to take care of themselves, and maybe start to swing back the other way. I’m very excited about Gemini, actually, since the format and its current population encourage a calmer consumption experience. I hope more people check it out!

lnkl• 4 years ago

Geminispace looks fun, could you recommend some sites to visit?

tummybug• 4 years ago

This is most evident in any post that mentions cryptocurrency or anything in anyway related.

foxfluff• 4 years ago

I've left a few accounts behind over the years due to frustration with the community. So I'd say it's always had its problems. It's very hard to quantify whether there's been an overall change in any direction. Feels about the same as always to me.

k__• 4 years ago

Could be, HN gets more angry if a topic HN dislikes gets more hype in the media.

causi• 4 years ago

I've observed less flagging but more downvote brigading. In my own comments I've noticed they tend to pick up a lot of votes in the first hour but by the next day they'll be in the negatives.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

Always important to remember how time works in a lot of cases like that. People in your time zone may agree with you, but once the other side of the world wakes up, they may be offended (or vice versa.)

lstodd• 4 years ago

You say it yourself --- "but, we've got to fight to ..." basically not fight.

No, we don't, it's that simple.

EDIT: If you have to fight in order to not fight, you have already lost the fight to not fight. Cute, ain't it?

The situation is somewhat reflected in the phrase from the Trainspotting: "I choose not to choose ~whatever~. I choose something else".

basisword• 4 years ago

I haven’t noticed much of a change recently (last 1-2 years). I’ve been active for over a decade though and the mood has changed considerably since the “old days”. I feel like making money, building companies, and capitalism in general are frowned upon in the comments. 10 years ago that was very much celebrated here. The mood seems to mirror general society and I can’t figure out if that’s because many more people are on HN now (and therefore it’s more representative) or because the whole startup boom has passed, the OG Web 2.0 companies are now behemoths and the excitement is gone. People seem way more cynical and negative.

dashundchen• 4 years ago

Can't say if it's an increase over previous years but I do notice a lot of culture war posts. Topics are usually an endless repetition of cancel-culture/COVID/gender/trans debates that just devolve into flamewars. I watch "new" and notice it's frequently the same users who insist on bringing it up.

The comments have nothing novel to discuss, just endless rehashing of the same battles over and over. Guidelines warn against using the site to wage ideological battles, so I usually just flag and move on.

the_only_law• 4 years ago

There’s a proclivity recently to justify these posts as “on-topic” by citing the most vague guidelines. I’ve seen the following quotes used more than a few times to justify those threads

Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

0xbadcafebee• 4 years ago

You can't really tell if HN is getting angrier or not, because you're just going off of your selective memory. All humans store and retrieve memories according to specific biases. This leads people to think that the past was better and that we're worse off now than we were before. Only by careful analysis do we find out that actually the present is much better than it's ever been.

It's more likely that the community never changed, but that you are changing. You may have become more sensitive over time, and now feel that anger more viscerally, and assume that this new feeling must be the community changing rather than yourself.

I know I've gotten both softer and harder over time. I can feel my reactions getting stronger, but I also try to shut up when I feel I'm about to react strongly. I've gotten a little better at making my words more diplomatic. But I'm really just as angry as I've always been :-)

solatic• 4 years ago

The culture of the HN comment section has pretty much always been deeply contrarian. "Why are you building something so complicated when you can do X which is so much simpler?"

Obligatory reference to the infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

The day HN stops helping me see the opposing viewpoint will be a sad day indeed. With that said, there is clear distinction between opposition and opprobrium, and yes, sometimes there's the latter here... but I don't feel it as much.

AlwaysRock• 4 years ago

I've been on since mid 2015, and it feels about the same as it always has? There are a lot of curmudgeons in the world. They seem to be prevalent in tech. They seem to be drawn toward forums where they can be a curmudgeon and at worst they get down voted.

This is all my opinion but apart from dang doing some type of pull to see if more comments have been reported I don't know how you can get anything other than anecdotal responses here.

When I run into a curmudgeon and don't want to deal with them, I just move on.

PaulHoule• 4 years ago

[flagged]

poorjohnmacafee• 4 years ago

Certainly SV (and consequently YC) in recent years has become perhaps the most politicized it's ever been, along with many other parts of the US.

Many top comments here often have overt political bias on a range of topics, including the pandemic. I find it irritating, I'm sure others do too. As a result I spend much less (20% ish) the amount of time on HN that I used to say 8-3 years ago.

throwaway220322• 4 years ago

Prior to 2020 I worked as a software developer in an office.

Post-2020 it looks as if I never will again because my job has gone and been replaced with something else.

It doesn't surprise me that Hacker News is different - _being a hacker is different_.

It's now been seperated apart from other jobs in society even more - you can look at charts and see that software has basically gone all in on WFH where other office-based jobs have been much more measured.

motohagiography• 4 years ago

There's a lot going on the background, and HN is a respite from it. To even identify the tension and articulate it is to make a partisan provocation that will cascade into a flame war and remove value from the site and the experience. Sustaining that level of meta and abstraction is a heavy intellectual lift that almost everyone is capable of but it takes more energy than a reaction, so asking everyone to make it is probably unreasonable.

What a difficult spot to be in to preserve an internal sense of normal when everything outside it is changing so quickly. I am not neutral at all, and am radical probably in every direction, and nor am I somehow above any of it, but even with the all underlying tension from world events I won't address directly, I don't think any of us will regret any effort we make individually to preserve the relative calm in places like this for its own sake.

hodgesrm• 4 years ago

I have noticed a couple of things lately about Hacker News that go to mood.

1. There seem to be more political topics appearing, for example around handling of COVID or effects of social networks on society. The best comments on these topics ferret out a priori assumptions or find real data to illuminate tradeoffs. But they tend to be drowned out by more shallow comments. I think that's in part because these issues are hard to discuss in a dispassionate way and most of us are simply not very good at it. I'm firmly in this camp, unfortunately.

2. HN commentary seems more predictable than it did a few years ago. For example, you post something about how a big company has changed licensing of software you'll likely get a fairly predictable (and long) discussion about the evils of capitalism. I don't think this is a real change. Some HN readers have a more binary view of the world than others and it has always been this way. I think I just notice it more.

I still think HN has some of the best commentary available on the web. For all the silly arguments we have (and that I have contributed to eagerly), you still get those gems where somebody who truly understands an issue deeply weighs in and tells it like it is. They have helped me understand countless articles that I would never have understood on my own. I love those comments and hope they never go away.

Ocerge• 4 years ago

Hard agree with comment sections being predictable. Based on the headline, you can deduce the greyed out, the top voted, and high engagement comments. Reddit has been this way for a long time as well, and it’s just so damn boring. I’m not sure if it’s just the fact that I’ve been around these platforms too long or if everything is so charged that it’s impossible to have anything else happen in this kind of environment.

swalsh• 4 years ago

I'm going to be honest, since discovering Web3, i've been super happy. There's so much potential to mine I just haven't been able to stop thinking about it. The vast landscape of opportunity makes me so happy to wake up and build. I haven't felt like this since 2010.

biztos• 4 years ago

I’m sorry your experience has been negative, and I realize people are more on edge almost everywhere than they were three years ago.

I haven’t noticed much change at HN, but then I tend to skim over the reactionary bits, and when I myself fail to be constructive I reliably get the karma hit I deserve.

One topic on which I have noticed a lot of outright hostility is “crypto” — but part of why I come to HN is for the deep experience of many of its members, and that includes calling out intellectual dishonesty, so I don’t exactly weep for the 0.01% of Cryptolandia (including mine of course!) that is Legit.

It looks to me like HN is still working as designed, in good and bad ways, and the good far outweighs the bad for my use case. I also think it would compare favorably to its competitors, but HN has become my /. so much that I don’t really check other industry aggregators/forums.

thrower1232• 4 years ago

I'm less interested in most of the topics that make the front-page these days. Covid, crypto, NFTs, security exploits, Tesla news, privacy, Apple products, scientific papers about health - none of this stuff is very interesting to me, and it's making up a bigger and bigger portion of what shows up. I flag most of those stories, and hide all of them. Therefore my front-page is maybe a subset of the top-100 stories, and they really tail off in activity once you get into stories that aren't on the normal front-page.

There's still some stuff I find cool, but I have to sift pretty hard, e.g.

Rust Wolf3D port - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30182565

Radix Sort - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30135440

Well... I went back two weeks in my upvoted submissions and that's about all I found, actually...

greenyoda3• 4 years ago

Covid, crypto, NFTs, security exploits, Tesla news, privacy, Apple products, scientific papers about health - none of this stuff is very interesting to me
I flag most of those stories

Please don't flag stories just because you don't find them interesting. Flagging is intended for stories that violate site guidelines (off-topic, spam, uncivil comments, duplicate posts, etc.). A story about privacy or a scientific paper is not likely to be off-topic.

The HN Guidelines say: "If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."[1] The guidelines don't say that you should flag articles that you find uninteresting.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

thrower1232• 4 years ago

off-topic, spam, uncivil comments, duplicate posts,

They are all of these things, as I've defined them. I'm going to take what few actions I can take to try to make this site useful to me, and direct it, little as I can, in the direction I'd like to see it go.

Largely, these are topics that turn into flaming tire-fires in the comments immediately, with people rehashing the same tired arguments that get thrown out here day after day, year after year. It's tiresome, and I don't want to see it.

codegeek• 4 years ago

Pandemic has been really hard. I am a very social person who likes working with other people around me. I have been semi-depressed and now it is just way too long. So yea, it frikin sucks and I hate it. Not to mention I am a bootstrapped solo founder so loneliness is anyway a part of things for me. We are social animals by design (degree can vary).

I am angry (mostly at myself). Some of it due to the Pandemic itself. Some of it due to my inability to do better because of it and not in spite of it. I donno. It is hard. I try to be respectful online as much as possible but may be it shows sometimes.

ksec• 4 years ago

HN becomes mainstream. It used to be those in the media would hide HN and stop direct linking. But then you cant hide it when decent information are coming out of it. I now have the habit of checking account's date, there has been lots of new account since 2018. My old account was 2010, and even then I waited two years before I registered because I was worry I will dilute down the overall quality. These days people seems to jump straight in.

We used to have very strict rules with jokes and puns, and try to limit it to the bare minimum. But those are on the rise as well.

Politics and Tech. There has never been an era where the two are so intertwined. Our everyday life has become digital. It is hard to ignore Google, Facebook, Amazon or Apple. And just like every aspect of politics, it gets ugly in a hurry. And that is just politics on Tech alone, not politics in general.

And unlike Engineering or Science, where we can discuss to death and get a decent consensus or conclusion. Such thing is rare in politics, especially on an online discussion forums.

Unpopular opinion, balance views and contrarian takes are harder to come by. And because it HN has becomes mainstream, these tends to get squashed and downvoted more than previous era.

mrfusion• 4 years ago

This is a good conversation to have. I’ve been noticing it too.

Part of it is the general culture where disagreements aren’t allowed anymore. Anyone who doesn’t agree with you is a bad person. I blame the media trying to divide us.

andrewljohnson• 4 years ago

Someone should run sentiment analysis on all the comments over time and see if there's anything changing.

badrabbit• 4 years ago

I am sorry but I have not seen that. Are there example threads you can point to? This is the one place where I see reasonable arguments. Of course, like reddit if you say anything controversial reason is out the window and I have seen CCP ..."advocates" (to avoid inflamatory language) on controversial threads but a well thought out and reasoned comment I make gets a healthy response and when I fail to do so, not so much.

I really have to question this sentiment and wonder if confirmation bias and bandwaggon effect are at play here. I was commenting the other day how HN makes it hard to convey emotion to begin with due to pure-text and no-emoji or text-speak etiquette. Some people may consider a strong disagreement angry but in reality there is nothing more healthier for a group than for people to be comfortable to voice their disagreement strongly(but respectfully).

I don't buy the angry part unless there is also disrespect in there somewhere.

bun_at_work• 4 years ago

Some things on HN seem to have become more polarizing over the years I've been browsing this forum. Some examples include blockchain (and all related technologies) and anything related to Elon Musk. Both are tech-related, so frequently appear, but the conversation around both has become more polarizing, and I think we see that on HN.

In most threads involving those topics you find skeptics arguing with proponents. In general, this discussion is what we want on HN, however, due to the polarization, it comes off as more angry/intolerant/reductionist/etc.

That's my 2c.

tenpoundhammer• 4 years ago

I think there are more people, so there are many more problems. Policing, downvoting, and removing low-value content is generally done by a small number of people. The number of issues has increased faster than the number of people helping to solve them. Dang does excellent work, but it takes a certain percentage of the community to keep things in check.

Edit fixed spelling mistake

peruvian2• 4 years ago

People come to forums to blow off steam, complain, and get their opinion out.

cuspy• 4 years ago

My opinion is that we are seeing a mass depoliticization across many if not all communities. Paradoxically, people are becoming less capable of engaging in political discourse, while clinging ever more tightly onto simple pieties and tribalistic lines in the sand. Ironically, this rigidity is perceived as people being "too political", because it manifests as an increase in anger and communication breakdown. In fact it's the opposite of political discourse.

When it comes to the pandemic, the immediate cause for this change, I think people also come out on either side of one basic disappointment. On one side, there are people who feel they've been massively betrayed by their fellow citizens who have not been cooperative or compliant with the recommendations of experts. On the other side, there are those who feel massively betrayed by regulatory institutions and media they feel are untrustworthy and captured by corporate interests, unelected health experts who have made policy misjudgements, and a wealthy class that has profited from the crisis that their institutions have exacerbated.

Although it's possible to recognize truth in both of the above sides, it is not common in the wild. The division is very primitive, having to do with our responsibilities to our fellow citizens, our relationship to authority, fundamental rights over our bodies, and the expectation of transparency in our institutions. You'd think we would be able to start from some shared assumptions and common ground on these issues, but it's almost impossible today to have discussion about it without one or both parties instantly devolving into anger, fatigue, frustration. We've lost the collective ability to even articulate one another's positions about the pandemic response and other basic civic issues, which is, I think, one of the few things that marks political discourse as different from base tribalism.

Given how effective we know "influence campaigns" to be, I don't think it's an accident that we've arrived here, but that's another issue altogether.

TigeriusKirk2• 4 years ago

Maybe people are posting drunk more often now that they're "working from home." I'm half kidding, but it might explain a lot of what you see happening on the internet these days.

dboreham• 4 years ago

Haven't noticed this, but perhaps I avoid the relevant threads.

bjourne• 4 years ago

Hacker News has always been Nitpicker News but it may have been gotten worse lately. If you post something personal there's always someone there to take a cheap shot at you. If I write that I find Haskell difficult and complicated someone will reply that it is because I'm not smart enough and so on. One random example from something I posted two weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29987132

Not that I'm better myself. HN's point system really favors knee-jerk reactions and one-liners: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30074128

BobbyJo3• 4 years ago

I've noticed a trend across the internet at large that I think stems from the increase in junk information:

People have to be suspicious by default when it comes to information they see or hear online. More so over time. This has lead to the need for people to be increasingly defensive of their own views. There are two knock-on effects of this:

It's easy to click 'reply' without actually replying. When someone leaves a comment, they are trying to say something. When someone responds, they aren't necessarily responding to what the person is saying. Subsequently, people talk past each other, both not feeling heard, both increasingly entrenched in the own views because the other person isn't formulating actual replies to their message. If we perceive someone trying to rebut our ideas, but failing miserably to do so, we become really sure those ideas are good.

It's easy for defensiveness to turn into vitriol, because people tend to have conversations on the internet in a very off-the-cuff fashion, which doesn't lend itself to deep, considered, reasoning. It's very easy to miss, and subsequently ignore, holes in our arguments as we make them, and our suspicion prevents us from reconsidering them in the moment.

spirodonfl• 4 years ago

I appreciate your response here. It is much easier to do the equivalent of "blurting out the first thing on your mind" online. In a social situation, you tend to at least put a modicum of thought into what you're saying, even if you're really comfortable. It's such a weird thing because typing out something implicitly includes all the time you like to think about what you're saying whereas if you took ten minutes to respond to everything while you're out with friends... you might look weird.

indymike• 4 years ago

A lot of the discussion here is just mirroring the times we live in. People are confused and scared about COVID, they are flummoxed by the wild west (which is over the top wild) in cryptocurrency/NFT land, and there's a lot of frustration with big tech companies. So, there really is a bit of disillusionment and sometimes the anger is real and justified (e.g. my app was banned after five years from Google Play/iTunes by an AI and there are no humans to help)... HN hasn't lost what makes it a great community: optimism abounds, people are generally encouraging when people take a risk (except that one guy who can't resist being the devil's advocate) lot of optimism, and most importantly, HN isn't a sounding chamber for some political group.

alexashka• 4 years ago

No.

This isn't a community at all by the way, unless you want to broaden the definition to include anyone who chooses to wear socks, a sock wearing community.

brimble• 4 years ago

HN is extremely vulnerable to certain types of trolling (or certain types of bad posts that may be earnestly meant but are indistinguishable from trolling) and these can be coupled with a shitload of passive-aggression before moderators step in (often to censure the person who's finally had enough of that crap). Some of the choices made in the design of the community, like downplaying individual identity so reputations develop less easily (compare with, say, forums that prominently display images or signatures for users that are easy to distinguish at a glance and easier to remember thread-to-thread) and the very decorum-promoting rules themselves make it nearly impossible to do anything about this.

poulsbohemian3• 4 years ago

I'm not convinced it's pandemic related. Over time, the signal to noise ratio of any public group decreases, or else it turns into an oligarchic gated community. I keep a kind of running list of users with whom I've had conflict, and I've come to the conclusion that either:

1) There are a whole lot of bot type accounts here, developed over many years.

2) The "Endless September" effect has brought down the level of discourse.

Wish I could get my hands on a larger data set than what I've been able to collect manually, but I can't help but notice in my casual sampling that there are a large number of user accounts here that have been created within approximately the past 6 years that have very low karma, float in and out over weeks and months (IE: not regular commenters) and who when they do show up, act in deliberately negative and aggressive ways, often posting bursts of comments in short order. It's very bot-like.

The other thing I've noticed is that even the crowd that I can identify as human, has changed considerably over the decade. It seems to me like in the past there were a lot more entrepreneurs and technical people with significant seniority. It feels like the age of the crowd is much younger now, and let's be blunt... there are reasons that stereotypes exist around 20-something techie young (predominantly) men as being arrogant and having few social graces. In this regard, HN has become a reflection of its commenters.

If I could find another place with the diversity of interesting topics found here, I'd go elsewhere. The discourses here is seldom pleasant, and hasn't been for a number of years. It's a step above what Slashdot was back in the day, but not by much.

Mezzie2• 4 years ago

It seems to me like in the past there were a lot more entrepreneurs and technical people with significant seniority. It feels like the age of the crowd is much younger now, and let's be blunt... there are reasons that stereotypes exist around 20-something techie young (predominantly) men as being arrogant and having few social graces. In this regard, HN has become a reflection of its commenters.

It's fascinating because I agree with you on the former but not the latter. I definitely think there's been a demographic shift from the 'original' people who just built their own things because that's what everybody was doing (a space of creativity) to the next generation who is emulating instead of creating. Which is odd.

On the other hand, the 20-something techie men culture was always a problem, speaking as someone who was here in the beginning. I was a 19 year old lesbian when HN was founded, and it was pretty damn hostile. I learned to keep it to myself.

poulsbohemian3• 4 years ago

I hear what you are saying, especially since we lack real quantitative data here and are speaking subjectively about how we perceive a decade+ of discussion... I'm sure you are right that there was always an undertone of young men trying to one-up each other with comments. My gut tells me though that if we go back in time, there were more actual experts commenting, who drowned out or downvoted the people just here to shit post. Maybe not though, as your experiences bear out.

Klonoar• 4 years ago

Your comment hits the nail on the head for me.

Regarding bots, it feels like any time this issue is discussed here it gets pushed down rather quickly. I really think it should be examined harder though. I outright stopped glancing at /new since it often looks like the same accounts trying to push some messaging (e.g vaccine rhetoric, often from some random substack).

Your other point is one I’ve tried to put into words lately. I think I even put it to one friend (a YC founder no less) that “the people who actually wanted to build something left long ago, and often all that feels left is the old crowd that just complains about specific tech repeatedly”.

If I see another discussion repeating the same Linux on the desktop talking points, or the problems with Electron, I’ll scream.

poulsbohemian3• 4 years ago

Yes! I think you nail all of the above, including your numbness to some of the more mundane topics that pop up here regularly. I can't help but notice that there are certain topics that come around frequently - some technical, some not - where it feels very planted. Like someone has an agenda to bring up certain topics in order to get some kind of pulse, IE: if we just talked about that two weeks ago, why is this topic back again?

JacobThreeThree• 4 years ago

1) There are a whole lot of bot type accounts here, developed over many years.

This is the elephant in the room for all internet services that are primarily focused on user generated content. It is my opinion that the majority (>50%) of user generated content online is not made by authentic users, but instead made by astroturf accounts who are paid to generate the content. These same accounts will also be leveraging bots to boost engagement signals etc.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

People around me in real life have been more angry in general, including friends and family.

And the internet is currently experiencing a huge dump in signal / noise rate, with the noise being full of anger, looking for something to complain about, a fight to pick, a clue something wrong has been done. And that's my feeling while I'm not on facebook, instagram, tik tok, don't have a google account and read a lot of technical stuff and blogs. I can't imagine what it is for the regular folk.

I believe this is partially because the media industry is now using internet as it used tv before, and the emotional engagement resulting is the same, only multiplied in speed and intensity.

But also because of the current tensions we have with covid, and the social, political and economical consequences.

And finally because, with all that stuff going on, there is a huge trust crisis in the world. We have been exposed to so much proofs of wrong doing and manipulation attempts lately nobody expect leaders, the medias or institutions to have good intentions nor be competent. PR telling you how good big corporations and their products have been overwhelming everything, including entertainment, news, and sites like HN.

Even the scientific world is washed out with so many bad studies, so much agenda, wrong incentives, bias and conflicts of interests the last line of defense of the intellect is getting attacked. It's not just your mum on facebook. And in a site like HN, this is kinda painful to live through.

So I think it's not far fetch to feel the mood is not at his best.

raintrees• 4 years ago

I noticed a shift years ago, only exacerbated with the recent fears.

jimbob45• 4 years ago

It's 2022 - the year of a US election where the general sentiment is that all seats are up for grabs. IMO it seems to routinely get nasty in here during elections years.

The silver lining is that the nastiness typically narrows its scope to politically-based or politically-adjacent threads and the niche threads get even better. I swear I've never seen better discussion on Nim/Rust/Zig on here than I have in the last year. The guy on here advising us to stick to threads with < 100 comments is a genius.

Stronico• 4 years ago

Maybe I've just gotten better at what I follow/comment on, but the mood feels like it's gotten a bit better over the past few years, more tolerant, more heterdox, less shrill, more interesting, less combative, less "performative", etc. Not perfect, but improving over a few years ago. It does feel like the average age of the commenter has increased though.

winternett• 4 years ago

People are frustrated because their online experience is more frustrating than before. App updates, social media, and even entertainment options are all tightening their grip on revenue streams and profit, which makes online experiences far more frustrating without most people knowing that it's occurring.

Also, opportunity is still being twisted by corporations to prevent employee advancement and growth as "pushback" to economic protests going on right now.

There is also fatigue from our current world-wide pandemic to where people aren't communicating and social as they were prior.

All of these things are manifesting in our daily experiences, and when combined with intentionally limited tools where people can communicate and express themselves and in normally encountering negative discourse online, many people are becoming even more and more aggravated, triggered, and aggressive towards each other as a result online and in real life.

Our user experiences are a major issue now that we rely so much on software and now that they have almost all been corrupted by monetization, inundated by advertisements, and limited because they've scaled too far to truly be useful to us as individuals.

It may sound like doom and gloom, but that worry goes away if you turn the tech off and go outside and talk to real people without all of the feckless apps and overpriced hardware involved.

We need to stop letting corporations and individuals over-run the Internet for financial gain and bring tech back down to earth so that everyone can thrive, not just the wealthy and popular few.

Neil44• 4 years ago

Maybe it’s time for an Erlang purge.

koonsolo• 4 years ago

I really hate the cryptocurrency discussions here.

We finally have internet money. No bankers or governments creating this, but nerds and algorithms creating currency and a whole transaction system, out of nothing. The thing lives 100% on the internet.

And all the complainers on "hacker" news bashing it to the ground. I used to check HN every day, but the "hacker" and "entrepreneur" stuff is getting thinner and thinner.

But hey, I said something positive about cryptocurrency, so do your thing.

edit: I see I'm here since 2010. Maybe 12 years is enough.

RickJWagner• 4 years ago

Not what I've noticed.

I'd say we're at mid-level anger. It slowly builds in an election year, culminating after everyone's self-selected media biases have convinced them they are under attack from their political twins across the aisle.

tomcam• 4 years ago

I don’t sense the extra anger myself.

blooalien• 4 years ago

Compared to other sources I've used for tech (and other interesting) news, the discussions here are positively civilized on average, even when folks disagree. Sure, sometimes some folks (even me) get a bit "cranky" over certain topics, but I generally more often than not see even those sorts of "grumpy old man" comments get responded to with a great deal more civility here than many other places on the web where I could find similarly interesting posts. It's one of the main reasons HN has become one of my favorite sources of news-like content.

Ask HN: General Mood of the Community

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