We're lucky in a sense to have a double-contrarian dynamic here.

On Reddit there's only a single-contrarian dynamic, where the contrarian post remains at the top, and is less liable to be questioned than the original article. Sometimes the top-voted, contrarian post has evidently not actually read the article.

Of course in older days of forums there was an infinite-contrarian dynamic, where the arguing back and forth continued forever.

When they left that reply there was a tiny number of `cynical' replies. Replies that most people would just skim right past and look for substance, though there really isn't a lot to discuss about "company announces manufacturing plant" beyond things like tax incentives (which would be a cynical comment). Maybe people could talk about automation if there were details and it was further along, but it isn't. It's just an announcement.

Any assumption that a site frequented by people around the globe should be euphoric about a US manufacturing plant seems flawed.

I don't intend this comment to argue with them or with the assessment, but I've lurked on HN long enough to see the growing tide of early onset pearl clutchers who hit a quiet thread with a trite "Well I've never!" moral righteousness, then enjoying waves and waves of adulation while the target of their disdain are pummeled. What is the dynamic behind that? Shouldn't it have a name, because it is a negative, increasingly common tactic that sidetracks many threads.

Sorry, but I'm not really following you. Certainly there's no assumption that anyone should be euphoric about anything.

You should write a book on moderation.

> Next steps after identifying the problem?

The only step I know that seems viable is the long, slow process of community education. Technical solutions don't really seem like they would help. I suppose we could put up a nag screen when there aren't many comments in a thread, asking people to check whether they're posting from the right place...but we've always tried to avoid that kind of thing, and even if each such step made sense individually they would soon compound into something annoying.

Fortunately, not everyone needs to understand these things, just enough to start feeding back into the system and affecting the culture.

What about a nag screen that only pops up when the post sounds snarky or angry, as determined by a ML/NLP model

I'd need to see such a model doing a good-enough job of identifying snarky / angry comments. The worst case of such a solution is that it's almost good enough but not quite—an uncanny valley type thing—in which case it will just piss people off. And anything less good than that would merely add noise.

Edit: of course, since comments are all public data, anyone who wanted to could work on such a model, and if anyone came up with one that was good enough, that would be significant work and I would very much like to know!

The expensive part is gathering good labels. Who wants to pay someone to tag things as snarky or angry?

We might be willing to pay. It might also be possible to marshal a community effort, if it were organized in the right way. Hmm - there might be something to this idea. The trick would be to set it up so that even if it failed, it would be an interesting failure.

You can get intriguing descriptive statistics (n-gram frequencies, time distributions) from even a relatively small labeling effort, well before you have much predictive value. So, in that sense you'll have something interesting in failure.

If you'd like a hand, please email me. I figure you have access to my hidden email address.

I think it's worse than that. Social media sites suffer from their own popularity as they attract new younger audiences.

I think HN is suffering from its own success with a notable drop is comment / post quality.

The first rule of HN is you don't talk about HN. ... also, if you've found a new forum, please let me know!

The attempt to avoid or at least stave off the traditional decline curve of internet forums is kind of the original idea behind HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I don't think this particular issue is related to new younger audiences, because—by inspection at least—the initial wave of objections isn't noticeably coming from newer users. I haven't specifically analyzed that though.

Complaints about "notable" drops in quality go back all the way to the beginning of HN. Of course it's possible that they're all true, but that would be a lot of notable drops. Or maybe some are true and some aren't, in which case we're fluctuating within a range... or maybe they didn't use to be true but now they are true? That's of course what the person perceiving the "notable drop" always feels—but there are also other explanations for this feeling, such as sample bias and nostalgia bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). It's pretty hard to establish anything objective about it. If I randomly look at past frontpages and past comments, they don't seem consistently better or worse (but see the previous sentence).