1. Raw nastyness has gone up. Profanity, insults, and sarcasm in disagreement. HN was super civil 2-3 years ago. Now it's still far more civil than anywhere else, but gently declining.

2. Stupid arguments that agreed with the dominant view of a thread used to be left alone or even get downvoted. Now I see sometimes where a reasoned critique is at 1 point, but a response going, "How could you even think that? Everyone knows that isn't true" - proof by assertion type stuff - get voted up.

3. Also, very lately there's been a marked increase in the class warfare/social justice/inequality vibe filtering in. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on your views, but it was less like that a few years ago.

My perception is that a fair number of "join us now and share the software, you'll be free" type hackers are not really enthusiastic about the whole startup culture of angel investors and "profitable exits". There has often been an anti-establishment character to hacker culture, and sometimes it takes on an anti-capitalist tone. I see a lot of people mention Reddit and Digg as cautionary examples, but isn't Slashdot really the first and foremost case study?

For the first year or so I read HN, I didn't make an account because I didn't think I had anything to contribute that would help startup entrepreneurs make money. As the perspectives expressed on the site began to become more diverse, I started to feel like I might have something to contribute. I suppose that makes me part of the problem, at least in terms of diluting the solution's purity. I certainly try to avoid precipitating conflict, but I also see a certain amount of conflict as inevitable unless HN does something like split into a separate ycombinator related startup focused board and a general programming/technology area.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

But I'm not sure it is related to this '08 article (I joined about half a year after it "aired" BTW, so have no data point on how HN was before that).

I think a lot of the stuff you highlight has happened in the last year - and accelerated in the last 6 months. Views are appearing to be less informed and commenting lot less jovial.

We do seem to be getting more content on politics and religion now too (more than there used to be).

(r.e. civility; I totally agree - I distinctly remember getting into a disagreement in my first month here and it was about the most polite argument I ever had :D Pretty sure we both converted each other in the end!)

Which, if you ask me, is a subclass of a larger problem: people with agendas. The bonnet-dwelling bee is, as always, the most destructive parasite of all.

In the good ol' days, discussions about politics were strictly banned, and this ban was pretty heavily enforced. Comments of the form "!HN" would be modded up. But then folks got bored with the meta-discussion about whether or not a given story was HN-worthy, so pg added a line to the guidelines:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

which seems to have killed off the meta-discussion but also resulted in a bunch of rather political stories and discussions showing up.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection

I've been reading HN for just over a year now and I think the qualities always been top notch, which is why I'm still around; but's only natural to fear HN succumbing to the same fate that other sites in a similar domain have.

HN won't last forever. Reddit was great when it started, then they achieved the growth they were looking for and it got diluted a bit. PG started what would become HN, and the early adopters migrated. As reddit becomes less useful for tech and programming news, or as a way to find cool new sites, more people will migrate over here. Then some people will get pissed at the requisite drop in quality, and will start a new place.

All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

If anyone here proves that he is not a good actor, he will be ruthlessly pruned from the site. This happens to dozens of people every week. This is all handled behind the scenes by pg and the editors.

That's the real reason this site has lasted as long as it has: pg and co are willing to be extremely ruthless about weeding out bad actors. That's the big difference. Other sites were more interested in growth, so they weren't as free to get rid of badly-behaved members.

This idea that news.yc is doomed to follow in the path of all other discussion sites that came before it: no, it is not. Not so long as pg is willing to keep pruning bad actors.

People who followed PG's essays from the early days were pretty plugged in to tech startup culture, and the early community was focused around that. They were people who had a startup, or were contemplating doing one. Generally, they were smart, ambitious and technically astute.

Over time, those traits regress to the mean, as people come upon the site based on more and more random hearsay, wade in and contribute. If they are marginally less smart or astute, they still aren't bad actors; but the group's average declines, and asymptotically approaches the population mean.

And this more diverse population isn't as homogeneous. That affects the kinds of stories and comments that get voted up. It's only natural that stories and comments which appeal to the lowest common denominator will attract the most votes; it's that in the past, the lowest common denominator had a higher value, owing to the homogeneity.

Well, Peter, HN can't stay a kid forever.

A really good example of this is this blog post: http://scobleizer.com/2010/12/22/an-industry-challenge-build...

translation: it was cool when I started going, but now that all you "little people" are coming, it sucks.