Also, about half of the comments are "(China/America/government in general) is evil, because (some superficial observation already known by 99% of visitors here and not directly relevant to the current situation)", or some form of generic refutation.

I'm also frequently guilty of the same thing, but this is getting out of hand...

I'm also drawn in by it, really need to actively remind myself to step back.

Not long ago there was a massive r/space thread with thousands of top comments about govt funding + puns and hidden down the bottom after clicking "more" was a JPL engineer who worked directly on the project linked with incredibly insightful commentary on the inner workings of the satellite. These things should be valued more and not hidden from the world.

Social media websites all suffer from a phenomenon of being flooded low quality content the moment they become popular.

Reddit's content quality dropped significantly the moment they deployed their mobile app, though it had been on a downward decline for a while.

I've seen HN being discussed at length on Reddit as a better alternative for "adylts", but now we see the same slow decline here.

The important questions are...

1. How can social media sites control quality of submitters.

2. What is the next site everyone over 30 is moving to and how do we stop all these teenagers from following us? /s

the key to sanity while on Reddit is to stay on the non-default & topic/your area of interest specific subs.

> How can social media sites control quality of submitters.

I'd like to see how a system where downvotes have reasons given works? Slashdot tries for upvotes.

Currently you might be downvoted for being offtopic, but you might just think it's because someone disagrees politically.

It would be an interesting overlay to create for HN

Make downvotes and upvotes an economy. You can't downvote what you don't have to spend. You can't post if your bankrupt of points.

Idea might need fine tuning.

Metafilter has maintained reasonably high levels of discussion and civility. Part of this is active mods, the other part is that an account costs some money to open.

I’d pay for HN

How much?

It’s worth at least as much as the New York Times, which is $8 a month

Metafilter has no threads and no comment voting (as far as I can see).

It's not really the same sort of experience.

It's more like a message board - which is too inefficient. Time ordered comments makes for poor content.

Not surprisingly, not everyone is an expert on Rust, but everyone is an expert on shit happening on the other side of the planet. /s

At least the technical discussions (aside from Google evil, Apple walled garden, new Microsoft/same old Microsoft, etc. etc.) are on average higher quality than elsewhere.

“Some superficial observation” well I think this is where you miss it. The state of the US is so bad in the eyes of many outsiders that yes many see it simply as China/America government bad. I mean since Snowden it is very clear that the American government is actively spying on everyone not just foreigners but basically everyone. That sounds bad and is definitely hostile if you are an American but not unexpected as a foreigner however. Next we have recent examples of China and the US detaining certain populations. That looks like a massive human rights violation in both countries. Also the state of American politics looks very corrupt from an outsiders perspective. Daily accusation of a corrupt government that the media obviously wants portrayed as an incompetent failure of a leader and the people to scared or powerless to change it demonstrating the political system is a sham. It was even in the news recently other heads of states at NATO laughing at the President. I can not picture that happening with any other President. The world has “gone to shit” for a lot of people and these superficial issues are not so superficial to others and their voice is growing louder every year with the ever decaying state of affairs.

The same with posts on Bay Area Housing Prices, UBI, PHP, "The Terribleness of Google" and many more.

All these subjects just repeat the same old arguments but just give a new set of people the opportunity to repeat them.

This has been how HN has always been, it's not more redditified on these subjects now than it was before.

I wouldn't clump all of those together in the same bucket of this phenomenon. Housing and UBI are both highly political. PHP is a tech-related technical topic.

And personally I would clump the Google one as an actual "movement" that is awakening which needs critical mass to actually move forward. Not only that, but there is an element of powerlessness when it comes to such a topic and repeating things helps solidify and project the opinions to a greater audience. I.e. I feel those behaviors need to be known so I'll repeat them wherever I can.

To use another analogy: We've been doing a global search and we've found a reasonably good local-optima and now we need to explore the local search space for everything we can find on the topic. If not to find a perfect solution but at least to enumerate every single piece of info and nuance we can find.

Reddit has a solution to this problem, and HN should steal it: randomize top-level comment order. This keeps the highest ranked comment from becoming a top-heavy attractor for all further discussion. I agree this is a real problem for discourse on HN these days!

Maybe an option, but I like that the top comment is usually above the average quality for that thread. Maybe something like a multi-arm bandit could work, where the nth top comment 'slot' on the page has an 80% chance of being the nth most upvoted comment, and a 20% chance of being a randomly selected comment?

Hopefully dang sees this ^

Think I've seen this in a few subs as default? Randomised comments for each unique client, even with some weighting perhaps might bring some balance back.

Reddit's "best" filter isn't their "top" filter and does exactly what the parent says, explanation[0] ; it does this by default unless the sub moderators choose to default to a different view.

0: https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sortin...

I mean HN still doesn’t have proper replies and notifications so I’m not holding my breath

OK. So here is the real news: Shanghai Composite index plunges 8.7% as market reopens https://www.news10.com/news/shanghai-composite-index-plunges...

So the $174B isn't working?

For reference, the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index, which opened earlier and also where many mainland Chinese companies are listed, was at ~ 29,000 points on 17th Jan, and now it is at ~26000, which is a drop of ~ 10%.

Shanghai Composite, which only opened today, was ~ 3000 points on 17th Jan and now dropped to ~ 2700

So it's mostly aligned in that sense.

The Hang Seng Index is at least not dropping further (slight up as of this morning) so the liquidity news is at least 1 positive factor helping the market.

The discussion I’m seeing seems to have a healthy amount of variety of opinion.

Why is quantity alone a sign of unhealthy discourse?

Other people probably find their (differing) general comments relevant even if you don’t. Let them talk it out. Tell them why you think they are off topic or off their rockers; or don’t participate. It’s your choice.

Nothing here seems particularly “broken” however.

I’ve been suggesting the comment collapse idea for a while? Where can we put up a PR for this? Collapsing comments for HN’s comment scale is damn near required at this point.

FWIW, this site seems very well run to me. The mods seem to have very deeply considered positions on community management.

Not even from a community management standpoint, but more so just from a UX standpoint. As a HN reader, I don't just wanna read the top 5 or so parents (which is all I can read without scrolling for 2 mins, _especially_ on mobile). I want to read all the parents, and have the option to go into the thread should I so chose. Just me though

You can help counter this effect by making thoughtful toplevel comments. They do get upvoted and seen.

It's not like Reddit. Your comment starts at the top, and falls after some time. Thoughtful content rises.

(Incidentally, messing with this formula is one reason why I was so vocal in the past.)