| My usual response to this complaint of the "decline" of HN is that it is a tactic of older entrenched figures in a community marginalizing the viewpoints of newer members. The second strain I see tends adheres to the timeless tradition of decrying the degradation of the youth in comparison with previous generations, which is as old as the ancient Athenians. "Times change, and men decay." Normally I dismiss them, and for a while even kept a running tally of each time these silly arguments were advanced. However, I can no longer in good conscience attribute the very recent behavior of the front page of HN (over the past ~3 months) with these two explanations: there has been an undeniable degradation of quality, new sources in primarily popular science publications with very click-bait titles, and even anecdotal evidence of undetected voting rings. To me, the real question, is this some artifact of the evolving website leadership (unlikely given the managment of the transition,) has the fundamental purpose and audience undergone another shift (YC companies forum -> General Startup News -> General Technology News.) Or has HN's Eternal September simply finally arrived, where new users are arriving too quickly, and thus cannot become acustomed to HN's norms, resulting in a lowering of quality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September |