I don't think that's all of it. The Internet used to be these networks that we could, through tools, arrange to be around us. We'd have our e-mail network and our Usenet network and our IRC network, and we have ways to view all those things that aggregated among different e-mail servers and different USENET groups and different IRC channels, and gave us a view around How We We Engaging With The Content (e-mail for one-to-one or one-to-many longform discussion, USENET for many-to-many longform discussion, IRC for short-form discussion, both one-to-one and many-to-many). Now, instead of forming the center of our own Internet experience, there's these silos -- Twitter, Facebook, Slack -- and we form a network around the silo instead of our networks having us at the center.

Now, having large number of people makes many of the features of these silos more desirable, they're not unrelated. But if you could find a way to scale up the "me-centric" view of the web to modern needs, then everyone -- early adopters and the mass audience -- would both benefit, I think.

It seems to me the way connections are built on the Internet is different now. It used to be for example that 90% of the people I knew online I didn't know in person. These days that percentage might be inversed.

Not saying it's the only factor, but when connections are built via real-life relationships instead of communities of interest and then sprinkled with automated personalized content aggregation perhaps you end up with an environment where everyone seems to live in their own bubble of information overload.

> But if you could find a way to scale up the "me-centric" view of the web to modern needs, then everyone -- early adopters and the mass audience -- would both benefit, I think.

Even assuming there were adequate mindshare to develop and maintain such an effort-- let's even just pick a modern day USENET-- how are you going to pay the bills?

USENET still exists, and someone pays the bills. Ditto for IRC. People still use them.

Though RSS is kinda dying, I'll give the author that.

Go read old IRC logs, it's pretty "meh". You can join mailing lists where there mostly "old schoolers", which is also pretty "meh". The people or the conversations where never that exciting. It was all about the context of being exposed to something emerging. You were chatting with people from the other side of the world while most people had barely read a foreign newspaper. I'm sure one could have similar experiences today, but it's unlikely to be in a text interface among adults with $3000 laptops.

I'd argue it was only "meh" in the same way the average verbal conversation is to a dispassionate listener. For those now able to exchange ideas on a favorite topic with people who were previously inaccessible, it was great. And not because it was emerging, but for the experience and capability itself.

I'd still argue that those experiences and that capability had 'merit' because it was emerging. If you go and try and manufacture hardware in China you can have those same meaningful mundane conversations. Because that's something emerging so there's scarcity of information, everyone is to some extent a beginner and there's therefor incentive to share information. So I don't think it's the people or the conversations, but the environment.

Sounds like more a reflection of you and your conversations than IRC as a medium.

Judging by your comment I don't seem to be missing out on much in terms of conversation.

Possibly. But at least there wasn't one million of them and they weren't out of context. Don't like a thread? Don't read it, mark it as mute. Won't see it again.

The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities. That's why HN is great (and other small communities). It's intrinsically hostile to the wider internet simply by virtue of the subject and the format of its content.

The issue is when the unwanted folks follow the cool kids around. This happens a lot on Reddit. People will make a subreddit with the type of community they want. Others will join. Eventually people will complain that the quality has deteriorated. Then the cool kids will start a new one and migrate there. Rinse. Repeat... ad infinitum.

Edit: I don't know if there's a general name for this phenomenon, but I believe it is related to network decay. [0]

[0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay

Reddit really 'dug' (see what I did there) its own grave by aggressively catering to casual users, in order to drive signups and grow the user base. I can't remember exactly what happened at which point, but it all follows the general pattern of appealing to the mass market. E.g. the curation of the frontpage via default subs such as /r/AdviceAnimals that don't really contain meaningful discussion. There's no real need to do this if one is concerned with maintaining an existing community, or the standards of it. As a counterexample, private trackers have been rather good at this, generally by having interviews/invitations for new memberships, or even disabling signups entire. Though these are really the most extreme options.

The other main problem is that like Digg, that there is a powerful cabal of moderators in control of most mainstream subreddits, including those concerned with serious topics like news and politics and they do a lot of "curation" of content by removing stuff, rather than letting the users decide on which links and topics are relevant to discussion (by, ya know... upvoting/downvoting) with chilling effects on those respective subs. That this was allowed to continue, without overhauling and maybe even democratising the moderation system of default subs, was Reddit's choice. I can only suspect that this either (a) plays into the hands of advertisers directly via corporate censorship or (b) indirectly, by relegating content from users who fall outside of the "mass-market" demographic to niche subreddits or other websites.

Curation of shitty content is also built right into the algorithm.

They'll hide behind "But people are voting for this mindless content" but that's not the full picture. A vote after 5 seconds is actually weighted higher than a vote after 5 minutes.

It's specifically because Reddit the company is against too much engaging content. They want people to smirk, chuckle, acknowledge, and move on. Engaging content means fewer pages viewed, which means fewer ad views.

A vote after 5 seconds is weighted, or acts as if weighted?

If that's built into the algorithm, that's one thing. If the social effect of early moderation is amplified, well, that's still a problem (and a major one), but ... of a different sort.

Citations requested.

The first graph linked below shows "hotness" as a function of time with upvotes held constant. The equations are above the linked section. Compounding this effect, there is a feedback loop where hotter elements are more likely to be seen and voted, which increases hotness logarithmically.

So no, the algorithm doesn't intentionally punish dense material. But it does happen incidentally.

https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algo...

Right. Reddit definitely doesn't favour quality.

The name I've heard for this is "Eternal September":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Yeah, that was posted elsewhere in the thread. I thought of it as a name specific to Usenet, as Network Decay is specific to television networks. I was hoping for a general term.

I don't think the term is specific to Usenet at all. It's genesis is in Usenet, but I've heard it used many, many times to refer to the general phenomenon that the original Eternal September was a specific instance of.

It's fine to say that, but this phenomenon is even older than the Internet. Think of the hip bar that gains a sudden influx of customers following a New York Times story. Yogi Berra remarked on this phenomenon with one of his famous quotes "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded!"

Another idea related to the general phenomenon is gentrification: the cool artist colony suddenly overwhelmed with yuppies who drive up the rent, forcing the artists to move out.

Is there not a general term for this whole phenomenon?

I call it wankerisation. That is, a place, location or destination has become overwhelmed with wankers.

"I don't go to that bar anymore, it's too wankerised."

"I don't visit Facebook anymore, it's become wankerised."

"The neighbourhood is too wankerised, I can't afford to live there."

For communities and interests, I usually call it simply "getting mainstream", and the invaders "general population".

Eternal September afflicted mailing lists, too.

It happened a lot before Reddit too. Forums always used to have this cycle of starting out appealing to more mature audiences before getting flooded with casual users and spammers and many people then moving elsewhere.

Heck, in the world of webmaster forums, the ease in which they got filled with spammers and low quality content meant that the same people usually ended up being members of dozens of different forums and moving to a new site every month or two.

Other possible factors:

Is the monkeysphere is the root cause of the endless bifurcation of communities, culture? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

John Dvorak once opined that social networks stop being cool when that coworker you secretly hated tries to connect.

Of course, pushing the other way, is the power law distribution of attention. The best explanation I've read for our current winner takes all economy. http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...

Appeal to the masses. It's a very pervasive concept.

See Hannah Arendt's "The Crisis in Culture" (by way of ... Reddit):

https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/50umjw/hannah_a...

http://www.celinecondorelli.edu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_...

There's the "evaporative cooling effect":

http://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumble...

I see these as mechanisms based on Gresham's Law, though that's based on a longer argument.

I believe "cool kids" is primarily used as sarcasm.

Yes, but there have been an increasing trend in "reddit style" comments on news.ycombinator.com . Myself and other users have noticed, called people out, downvoted etc for the lousy comments.

But the realities of the threading style & upvote democracy is that lowest common denominator spreads easily.

Related discussion in same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14699133

It always sucks to have your insightful (in your own eyes at least) comments downvoted, just because there's a group of people who disagree with it. It's a downvote democracy, but not a true democracy because it only takes a minority to vote that way. I don't even have access to this downvote feature, I guess I don't have enough karma.

If something is unfairly downvoted, wait a while and someone else will usually upvote it again.

But it's also worth remembering they're just internet points, there's no real value. Keep contributing good stuff & you'll eventually get past the 500 karma mark. After that it's just a vanity number.

You do have access to the upvote button,so your vote can cancel out an unfair downvote.

Comments that get downvotes also don't get upvotes, so it's not just the small group who can downvotes who are causing the comments to be gray, it's also the large group who could upvotes but who chose not to do so.

Yeah, this too.

I was more lamenting the lousy comments eg. puns, comments that add nothing etc. These are possible with 0second old accounts.

Right, downvoting gets enabled when you hit 500 points, or so I remember.

Out of curiosity, could you explain what you mean by more Reddit style comments?

Because I don't think I've seen too many low effort comments here recently, or at least not much more than there were in the past.

And while political threads get a bit out of control, my experience there is that the most volatile, disruptive posts tend to get downvoted to hell before they can cause too much of an issue. So even if a certain percentage of alt-right/SJW type content is a bit more common than it was before, it tends to get rightfully buried under hundreds more thoughtful ones.

There's a lot more joke comments than there used to be even 2-3 years ago. I would date the shift to dang taking over and asking everyone to be nicer - before that HN was more caustic and the noise comments were shut down more quickly.

Comments that are only jokes, with nested replies that are word-plays are continuations of jokes. Good for a quick laugh occasionally but I prefer not to see that on HN (puns + groupthink meme jokes are not what I come to HN for).

Here, 2/4 comments on this new post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14709907

jff 9 minutes ago [-]

If anyone else is using uBlock Origin, at least for me the page displayed completely blank until I disabled uBlock temporarily.

Nice one.

reply

sluggg 10 minutes ago [-]

what if I want two? I can't have two third thumbs

reply

piyh 44 minutes ago [-]

When I was a kid, I dreamed of having a functional third arm, this seems like the first step in that direction.

reply

googlryas 25 minutes ago [-]

This is what my ex-gf would call my manhood. Guess why we aren't dating any more...

Example of "Reddit style comments" would be low effort jokes. Some subreddits are addressing this by using a convention where you can mark submissions with a "[serious]" tag, forbidding such replies (if there are any, they will usually be removed by the subreddit's moderators).

On HN, quite a few of them seem to get heavily downvoted (sometimes enough to mark them as dead, meaning you won't see them unless you explicitly opt in to see them).

Different subs vary. But the effect, overall, is discouraging.

Groupthink is another significant problem, particularly on topics which tend to gravitate toward ideology. Many economics subs operate this way.

>That's why HN is great (and other small communities)

SimilarWeb says HN gets approximately 20M visits a month:

https://www.similarweb.com/website/news.ycombinator.com

Also Wall Street showed up, aka VCs, the suits, or the slick money guys.

This is probably the best and most truthful rebuttal to all the "the internet was better back in my day" posts that I've seen.

It's true but it's not a rebuttal. It's an explanation.

It's only an explanation if you accept that the internet was better back in the day. And I was there, too, and I don't buy it :)

"The eternal September"...

Which, as it happens, predates the arrival of 56k modems by several years. The author may in fact be one of those who arrived afterwards.

Which all goes to show that people, in general, believe the best time was when they arrived/discovered/attended whatever. In other words, "pull the ladder up after I get to the top."

This is true to a degree (reminds me of the old MAD Magazine adage that "MAD was at its best whenever you first started reading it"), though I feel communities usually have a localised version of Eternal September as well. At least if they get popular.

Eternal September on Usenet would hence be different from Eternal September on Reddit, Facebook or Hacker News.

Indeed. I wasn't on the internet in September 1993. Actually my first modem was a 28.8k around 1994/1995, but I can remember one of my most productive internet eras when I had a 56k around 1997.

Eternal September was September 1993... That's like, 2400 baud days

9600 baud modems had just arrived in 1993.

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1993/hr159.html

I was using a 1200 baud, via SLIRP[1]. In 1994 (I think?) remember cycling into University with a box of 10 1.44M floppy disks to copy Slackware 0.1 so I could install it at home.

The bandwidth of a box of floppy disks on a bicycle was higher.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp

No, but we can advocate for tech world equivalent of user/dev apartheid. Equal people, seperated, segregated internets, so we can milk the cow, while still enjoying salad.

If only it where not for those meddling open devs, distributing all the nice things among the clueless.