[rogers12]

Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. The Eternal September effect has been getting stronger ever since it's first been observed.

[rtpg]

There's a gap between public fora and the blogosphere though.

Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore.

Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example.

There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.

[enugu]

It's not just that the social media is filled with low on substance posts with excess anger and snark, but this incentivizes everyone to be more forceful - as otherwise the louder voices can dominate the discussion. So, it's not just a quality of people issue but also an emergent dynamic which encourages tribalism instead of substantive posts. The same people can make reasonable posts in other contexts

This need not be a unsolvable problem, and that one has to retreat places like HN relying on a single moderator(good, but doesn't scale).

One can also rely on timelines/feeds being based on Distributed moderation - A user selects moderators or custom-algorithms who they find valuable. The moderation can be along different dimensions like accuracy, interest, or aligned with some political view.

There could a moderator whose style is to purely check the soundness of the reasoning without taking any position on the issue itself. This can lead to improved standards of discussion.

A key issue is how to reduce the energy required to moderate - typically a moderator evaluates the quality and rely on networks of other moderators each handling smaller domains.

Current discourse encourages users to sort into strongly polarized groups, whereas more nuanced feeds in social media can lead to coalitions which don't neatly align with the standard fault lines. Platforms like Polis actively encourage common points of agreement across different groups.

[throwaway14356]

I had a hilarious time deleting comments from people who don't believe the topic is real. Specifically hard to believe stuff made the experience funny. People got really mad in private messages. As if it is a god given right to complain about others talking about something so elaborately that the conversation dies.

All scaling issues solved.

If you want to talk about the garden gnome liberation front you must believe they need to be rescued.

[whatshisface]

>It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience.

"Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:"

...

26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars.

27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <---

28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either.

...

[rogers12]

This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.

You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.

[yen223]

For those who don't know, you can click the "past" link in the toolbar, and see for yourself what HN was like on any given past day, and judge for yourself whether the quality has declined

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2008-08-24

[gyomu]

There's an interesting phenomenon where any time a long time HN user says that discussion quality has been declining (something many have reported), a moderator will essentially say that people have been claiming that for as long as they've been moderating, but that it does not match their observations.

I've always found that contradiction interesting (and puzzling).

[kelnos]

My theory is that it's two things:

1. People change. My HN account is 15 years old, and my interests and ambitions and tolerances are not the same as they were in 2009, when I was 28 years old and in a very different place in my life. When you interact with something for many many years, even if that thing stays exactly the same, you change, and think differently about it.

2. The site changes, too, of course. They aren't necessarily bad changes (and often I would say they're good changes!), but people sometimes associate change with negative feelings, especially with something they have an emotional attachment to or at least have been a part of for a long time.

Mind you, I don't think discussion quality has been declining here. In many ways I think it has been improving, or at the very least staying the same under a barrage of new users, higher scale, and low-effort LLM-generated comments.

[jart]

I also joined HN in 2009 and I agree with you. HN isn't perfect but it's about as respectful and intelligent of an organic community as it gets on the public web. When I do analytics on my blog, an upvote on HN is worth 10 on Reddit. Manipulative paywalled media pieces usually stay off the front page. I love how when I read news about a famous CEO like Matt Mullenweg, I can see him commenting here like the rest of us. I also think we're very fortunate to have dang running things.

[plorkyeran]

In 2010 I found the average HN comment far more insightful and likely to be true than I do in 2024. I am fairly certain that this is almost entirely due to me changing, and not the content of the site. At a very basic level my views on the concept of a VC funded startup is so very different now from what it was in 2010 that I would certainly interpret all of those discussions very differently now.

When Google takes me to a very old discussion on HN I am usually surprised by how similar they are to threads from today, even if some of the specific viewpoints in vogue are different.

[kelnos]

I disagree. Quality has certainly varied over the years, but HN is still miles above Reddit. I'm not a heavy Reddit user, but every time someone or something links me to Reddit for something I might find interesting, the comments are mostly garbage. The same tired memes and jokes, over and over and over, tons of low-effort comments, not much substantial, curiosity-piquing discussion.

Sure, maybe there are some subs that are better, but I doubt I'd be convinced to spend more time on Reddit and less on HN. Certainly there are useful places on Reddit; I've gotten a lot of mileage out of searching for product reviews or general customer support questions on Reddit, but that's kinda a "single purpose" visit, not something for general curiosity.

I feel like there are some long-time HNers (your account was only created two years ago, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've changed accounts or have just been a super long time lurker) feel like quality has gone down; that's almost a meme of its own. Hell, the HN guidelines even has a blurb about how tired it is to suggest HN is turning into Reddit.

But I think it's a lot more accurate to say that quality ebbs and flows, and varies between articles and topics. And yes, sometimes the focus of the site (based on what submissions get voted to the front page, and what kind of discussion happens) shifts in ways that make my interest wane a bit, though always only temporarily. But that's not the same thing as quality.

[typewithrhythm]

I'm speculating, but I think the big difference is the barrier to downvoting something here is greater.

If you say something controversial over at Reddit there is a substantial chance you get piled on and labelled a troll, unpopular positions cannot be expressed without the risk of no longer being able to participate.

Anything you suspect will generate something other than a bland, mildly positive response is too risky to express.

[johnfn]

> It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.

This seems untrue? Of course I like HN, but from the perspective of a typical person, HN is an ugly, hard-to-use website with "news" that caters to a small fraction of the population and is likely quite uninteresting to the rest. I think this is why it manages to stay roughly the way that it is - that and extremely thorough and strict moderation to keep it that way.

[GavinGruesome]

Fluids can't be fragile.

[ddulaney]

As the guidelines [0] state:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me.

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

[Dylan16807]

Context.

That's a rule for jumping into a conversation and making petty putdowns.

It doesn't mean "if someone says HN has never been better, you're not allowed to disagree".

[philwelch]

My HN account is older than either of yours, so I don’t think I can be dismissed as a “semi-noob”. rogers12 is mostly correct, sad to say. dang has done a good job slowing the decline (and I actually noticed an uptick in quality when he first took over) but HN is past its peak.

[kelnos]

My account is a few weeks older than yours, and my opinion is pretty much the exact opposite of yours.

I still get a ton of value out of HN, even after over 15 years. I visit multiple times a day, and genuinely enjoy reading articles and comments, and joining the comment threads myself. It's not perfect; there's certainly annoying crap, bad-faith posters, trolls, spam, LLM-generated junk, etc. But (with the exception of the LLM-generated junk) none of that is new since I first started hanging out here. Overall the quality of discussion (like this one!) is still quite high, and there isn't another news/interest/discussion site on the internet where I spend anywhere near as much time, even after 15+ years.

(I'm not going to argue about whether or not it has "peaked", since that's not a particularly useful measure. If quality is a scale from 0-100, and we already hit 100 but are now hovering around 80, stably, then who cares if the peak is in the past? The quality is still fine.)

[tptacek]

When was its peak, what would you say characterized that peak, and what are some clear indicators of the decline?

[philwelch]

This is a good question that probably deserves more thought and effort than I can apply to it. I would say that when HN was at its peak, the overall vibe of the commentary reflected the perspective of people who people who built things, while the overall vibe today reflects the perspective of people who like to go online and bitch about things.

There’s a famous email exchange—I’m sure you’re familiar with it—where someone writes to Steve Jobs complaining about a bunch of things Apple was doing, and they go back and forth a few times, and Steve Jobs finally gets annoyed and writes back, "By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations?" HN these days is absolutely full of people who don’t seem to do anything but criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations.

I’m not saying that HN never had unfair criticisms in the good old days—the “middlebrow dismissal” has been a trope here for a very long time—but we didn’t use to have entire threads filled with nothing but middlebrow dismissals. And we also had tons of people criticizing Apple, but then again most of them were complaining that Apple was actively interfering with their attempts to create things (e.g. the uproar over arbitrary and unfair App Store moderation policies).

The clearest indicators of decline to me have been the signs of evaporative cooling. Maybe I’m falling into a different common fallacy by saying this, but I do think HN was a lot better when the old regulars—yourself included—were more active. I don’t exactly blame you guys, but it is an indicator.

[FreakLegion]

It feels like some threshold was crossed in early 2023. That's when I noticed it, at least, in the long, crazed threads on the SVB bank run and murder of Bob Lee. There've been a lot more of those low-quality discussions since, but the good parts of HN are still here, too.

[MichaelZuo]

That doesn’t seem to be the claim, just that the average quality is trending downwards just like reddit.

It’ll probably never converge because reddit is getting worse at an even faster rate.

[Uehreka]

Quoting the HN guidelines at people is a semi-noob practice, as old as the hills.

[mrob]

I think you're underestimating how effectively the old-fashioned text-based design repels users who would lower the quality of the site. (Although as Usenet proves, high-quality moderation is also necessary.)

[Nihilartikel]

Weeellll. Not every forum has a dang. Just saying.

[immibis]

Almost every one does.

[kelnos]

Most are nowhere near as thoughtful and effective as he is, though.

[dangerwill]

Given that hn is the forum of yc, I think we should not feel comfortable with it's trajectory even if dang does a great job moderating. Garry Tan is in the ceo chair here and he is currently advocating for a purge of the homeless, democrats, and "anti-tech" people from San Francisco. A Republican who is too ashamed to admit being a Republican (preferring Grey vs Blue or the network state concept) , who drunkenly tweets death threats at his political opponents is not trustworthy.

[Arubis]

HN’s association with YC has felt looser every year for over a decade at this point. If not for the Jobs link, the subtle username colors, and the domain, it’d almost be forgettable.

[kelnos]

I'm not sure how much things have changed, but when HN was semi-spun-off into its own autonomous unit inside YC, dang was given the option to change reporting structure so he'd report directly to the board (and not CEO) if he ever thought that was a better arrangement. If he hasn't done so, then I trust that he hasn't felt he's needed to, and that YC's leadership hasn't meddled in HN's operations.

And if he has pulled that trigger, I expect things are still fine, else he'd leave and go elsewhere.

[dangerwill]

Oh I did not know that this had happened. That actually does resolve a fair bit of my worry. Thanks!!

[bartread]

Yeah, but this sounds more like social media than the blogosphere.

Blogs were always effort to set up and maintain, even if you were just going with one of the hosted platforms rather than self-hosting.

And comment spam was certainly an issue but, firstly, systems for dealing with that became pretty good. And then, outside of major news sites - I'm thinking particularly here of BBC's HYS, but the same applies to other news sites - and other sites with very broad interest bases, you didn't tend to get loads of nasty or toxic comments on blogs. Plus, the moderation tools were - as previously mentioned - pretty decent. A lot of the bigger news websites did close comments, but I'm not so aware of this being an issue with blogs which were often more focussed around a particular community or interest anyway... just publicly available.

I don't think the quantity of people online in itself had anything to do with the "death" of the blogosphere. It's just that most of those people don't read or write blogs. And it's become harder to find blogs and other long tail content because search results are now so heavily skewed towards paid results and commercial entities who invest huge amounts in SEO.

FWIW I also think you're probably going a bit far with the moral pronouncements on those 7 billion people: neither you nor I have any real idea what the vast majority of them are actually like as human beings. Moreover, I'd suggest that writing off most people as "[not] very good" or branding a critical mass of them as "spectacularly awful" - and especially when you're speaking from a position of ignorance - is exactly the kind of rhetoric that's landed us with this grim tribal culture that permeates large areas of online - and offline - life.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.

[lenderton]

My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site).

When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc.

Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography.

I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users.

When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization.

In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat.

I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.

[MichaelZuo]

Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app.

Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok

[julianeon]

Bluesky and Mastodon, for the average user, are G rated compared to the avalanche of smut on Twitter/X.

[tbrownaw]

> avalanche of smut on Twitter/X

I haven't seen this.

Maybe you only run into that sort of thing if you go looking for that sort of thing?

[julianeon]

Even if you accept this at face value (I don’t) note the problem: on Bluesky and Mastodon, you have to look for racy content and then follow it on purpose. It must be a deliberate, intentional choice. For the average user, my experience has been that Bluesky and Mastodon are, if anything, too tame and boring.

Whereas Twitter/X is pushing for whatever brings engagement, damn the consequences.

[add-sub-mul-div]

The top replies to any big viral tweet are Onlyfans models and other spammers.

[tbrownaw]

I usually have to expand the "more replies" and often also the "probably spam" sections to see those.

[aaronbrethorst]

It’s incredibly hard to avoid graphic images of dead children if you even lightly engage with political content on Xitter

[add-sub-mul-div]

> It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy

No. It was profitable in 2019. Under the old ownership it could have easily become profitable again by correcting the overhiring and not pissing off advertisers.

[kelnos]

> It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy

I don't think that's a foregone conclusion.

> when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it

And because it's private now, we have no idea what its financial situation is. My expectation is that they're much worse off financially since Musk's acquisition, even after shedding most of the staff.

A lot of people I know predicted Twitter would be completely shut down within a year of Musk's acquisition. I wasn't quite so quick to agree, but I think we're still going to get there eventually unless Musk drastically changes course.

[AlexandrB]

> A lot of people I know predicted Twitter would be completely shut down within a year of Musk's acquisition.

As one of those people, I'm definitely eating crow. Three things happened that bode well for Twitter's future:

1. Musk has attracted a loyal core of true believers that think he has saved free speech with the Twitter purchase.

2. The Overton window of online discussion has started moving right. In particular, companies are becoming less interested in toeing a left ideological line with their ad spending.

3. A bunch of people who hate X and hate Musk and his politics stayed on Twitter! To me this is most surprising of all, but perhaps shouldn't be because many of these same people posted to Twitter in the past while simultaneously calling it things like "the hellsite"[1].

I'm no longer sure we'll ever "get there" other than if a new paradigm marginalizes all of social media the way social media marginalized blogging.

[1] https://samkriss.substack.com/p/welcome-to-hell

[lenderton]

The blast of "For You" inauthenticity that hits a fresh X/Twitter account is about equaled by the astroturf fiesta that hits a fresh Instagram Threads account. The underlying modus operandi of the apps are the same, regardless of political declension.

Difference between the two is that beneath the surface Twitter is a functional social environment, while Threads is certainly not.

[LightBug1]

Proud to be one of those that ditched "the hellsite", and it remains ditched. One of the best moves I've ever made.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

Regarding your 3rd point, this is the same behavior we see when people say they're leaving the country if X candidate wins an election. They never leave, because change is hard and they're addicted to the attention they get when they complain.

[lstodd]

Being in internets from before there were internets... I just cannot believe what I read nowadays.

This tldr I reply to is especially pathetic. If your beliefs are so fragile, if someone's post can crush them then you must, MUST question yourself, not some irrelevant JSON sitting who knows where.

Otherwise you do not deserve any respect or attention. You do not even have a right to be listened to.

This thing is called self-respect. If you do not have it then you are nothing. It follows .. well 4chan follows. For some time I and many others thought that this mocking taken to extreme would tell people basic truths. Alas. Still we had some fun

[bhouston]

I think that AI generated personas who push an ideological direction on anonymous forums are more of a threat that just stupid people.

Eg: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-int...