| There have been 5 major threads about PHP 8 in the last few months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24866190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24235440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24320024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24150731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23955197 A couple of those are more technically specific (to JITs and named arguments) but the vast majority are just the usual comments about PHP in general. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that there gets to be too much of it. This is a harder problem than it seems, because popular projects always get generic discussion (btw if you hate something that's still a kind of popularity!) and the alpha and beta releases always get posted and frequently get upvoted for the same (popularity) reason. There's a longer explanation about this here if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23071428. We downweight generic subthreads when they get stuck at the top of the page, but only sporadically, since it requires manual monitoring. (Btw, emailing hn@ycombinator.com when you notice a generic top subthread in any discussion is always super appreciated! Downweighting those is probably the biggest single thing we can do to improve thread quality.) As for why generic discussion is worse: it's repetitive and contains less information. More on that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... |
This particular post might want to get a reprieve – not because the discussion is interesting, but because the news itself – PHP 8.0.0 being released – is reasonably important.