| I think we all need to be cautious about such perceptions. It's easy to see this sort of thing and derive a general conclusion of deterioration, but people have been making such pronouncements about HN for well over a decade—basically since the beginning of the site. The way these perceptions tend to work is that we notice a few data points and then jump to a general conclusion. Remember the so-called primitive tribe that supposedly could only count "1, 2, 3, many"? It seems that's basically how all our minds work. The trouble is that a stochastic data feed like HN inevitably generates as many such sequences as you could ask for. It's really the mind that decides which sequence to pick out and deem representative. This leads to false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). (Edit: for example, look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29781019 and how positive the top comments are at the moment. The stochastic feed generates lots of those datapoints too!) What's worse, those feelings have consequences, since they lead to a "why bother" sense of no longer needing to take care of this place or do one's part of build up the culture. If it's all just a shitshow, why not just add more shit? everyone else is, right? Well, no—that's not true at all. This is not to say that the problems you mention aren't real. They are, and it's important to work on them, and we spend a lot of time trying to persuade people to work on them. It's in everyone's interest to do that, so we can achieve at least part of what we all want here, which is to have an interesting internet forum that doesn't suck. We should also all be cautious about seeing other people as the problem ("completely wrecked by nay-sayers and just generally unpleasant people anymore, it seems"). My experience is that if we look honestly at ourselves we find all the same things to be true there too, and that's a more productive place to work. |