[nreece]

I disagree with that notion.

I've been a contributor on HN for around 5 years and over the period of time I've seen a constant decline in the quality of comments, community support (read some of the 'Show HN' posts) and to an extent even the quality of the stories submitted.

A new improved hacker/startup community can be a serious contender for replacing HN (in its current state), just like Reddit is/was to Digg and others.

[sharkweek]

I'm relatively new to HN (<1year) and the one thing I notice on here is a HEAVY amount of cynicism. Perhaps the tech industry needs that to keep itself in check, but I feel like a lot of argumentative comments can sometimes be REALLY nasty.

I understand that in a competitive, fast paced and big money industry there will be massive egos, but I could sure do without some of the jerks

[tjansen]

Isn't that true of every geek-oriented news site with comments? In every community that reaches a certain size people start complaining that everything was better in the early year(s). There's always a lot of cynicism because that's just geek humor (actually I think HN is far better in that regard than many other sites - I don't know any other major site where you can get so much useful and positive feedback). And on sites with lots of comments you will always find lots of negative comments. That's just the way it is.

[batgaijin]

Well a real problem is the fact that it takes no effort to by cynical. It doesn't take intelligence or facts to be cynical, only doubt under the cover of pragmatism.

[channingwalton]

Nice!

[elliottcarlson]

While this account is only approaching its 2 year anniversary, I was a lurker for a while before that. I do agree there has been some decline, but my biggest complaint about the comments these days are the complaints about the decline of HN. They are all over the place and to me are a bigger annoyance than anything that the actual comments are complaining about (except for the community support comment - that needs improving).

Not meant to single you out - just my opinion on the overall sentiment on HN these days.

[weaksauce]

This account is 4+ years old and I was a lurker as well for a while before creating an account. I too have noticed a distinct decline in the quality of commentary over the years. It's not downvotes that are messing up the community; it's upvotes. The things that get upvoted more lately seem to be short quips or similar scoped posts. Maybe pg needs to experiment with removing the upvote feature from new accounts until they reach a threshold of x karma. If it wasn't for the 10 or 20 prolific posters here this community would be full of people with nothing to say but saying it loudly. I don't know if the removal of points from comments changed the environment for the better but I can only hope that it staved off the decline in community for a bit longer than inaction would have.

Edit: I think it's funny that the title of this post was changed to lobsters from its original title.