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by h4waii 1268 days ago
I'd love to see the stats on the "quality" of comments over time.

Quality is subjective, but I'd put some qualifiers such as:

1. Grammar and spelling 2. Length of comment 3. Relevance to previous comment and subject matter 4. Lifetime of account 5. Posts per account

Obviously these can all be gamed, but might be interesting to see potential trends, because while it's a real trope to mention it, the quality of discourse seems to be falling off a cliff.

1 comments

Here is the top post from exactly 10 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956899

Look at high quality comments such as:

> Why is Stallman still BDFL if he hasn't contributed a meaningful amount of code in years? Let him be the spokesperson so he gets the attention he desperately needs and leave the coding standards to people who code.

>> I wish people would stop parroting that stupid lie. RMS is curently heavily involved in GNU Emacs development and has been for many years. Just check the mailing list sometime.

So I don't think that HN is getting worse, I think its just people who forget that it was bad back then as well.