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by trompetenaccoun
1101 days ago
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There may be other factors too, not just popularity and user numbers. It could be coincidental but over the years HN has not deteriorated in the same way as forums like reddit have. I strongly suspect it's in part to due with moderation as well. The hackernews approach is very straightforward and sensible. They only act if really necessary, otherwise users do the housekeeping themselves by flagging and downvoting anything that doesn't contribute in a useful way. Which works well. Reddit is the complete opposite these days. Censorship (often arbitrary) and banning are out of control. In extreme cases they ban users for making a joke, I've seen that more than once. So when you check old threads and look at the usernames, you'll find quite a few of them don't exist anymore because they were banned. On top of that, each subreddit has their own moderators/dictators that quite literally simply remove anything they don't like. My theory is that a significant portion of persistent trolling is caused by that. Users are or feel treated unfairly, they're bitter about it and then some of them come back with an alt account and disrupt the community. Then there's the animosity between some subreddits too, like you hinted at. A good portion of reddit these days is drama. Since it drives engagement one way or another, the admins are unlikely to crack down on it. |
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If the comments under posts become too active, it is downrated and disappears from the front page which reduces the rates of people commenting on it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089
You'll also note things like "when the comment is too deep the reply link disappears" which creates a bit more friction for carrying on what would likely be unproductive threads.
Things around controversial topics also get downranked (whereas on Reddit hot topics move to the top of the list).
There's a lot of automated tooling in HN that reduces the amount of manual moderation that is needed by making it harder to have posts that contain things that need moderation.