[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.