For me, HN suffers in the comparison to Slashdot, because HN is an example of the arguably overmoderated internet of today. Slashdot had a vibrant culture of troll posting. It wasn’t just dumb one-line slurs or whatever, which no one would want to see. Rather, it was often longform text crafted to a downright literary quality, to the point where many Slashdot regulars would choose to browse their discussion threads at -1 to see those posts. Some of those troll posts ("BSD is dying", etc.) became part of the subculture, it helped create a real feeling of community around shared cultural references.

Yes, on HN one can toggle "showdead", but that is rather hidden away in one's user preferences, so very few people do it. Anyone creating an original troll post might also get a chewing out from dang for trying. In my view, this makes HN more similar to Facebook or Reddit that have very heavy-handed moderation compared to Web 1.0.

On the contrary, I feel that "troll culture" is (along with commercialization) one of the things that has ruined the net. It's basically a form of bullying, and over the years, as bullies do, they've steadily escalated in their trolling.

Harmless pranks from the 4chan crowd morphed into harassment campaigns like Gamergate and Pizzagate, then to 1/6 [edit: the storming of the US Capitol].

Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack because they or their hero got booted off Facebook, Twitter, or some small forum, needs to learn to distinguish between private website operators and the government.

> Anyone disingenuously complaining that their "freedom of speech" is under attack

"Freedom of speech" is a philosophical concept, not a legal principle. You seem to have it confused with the US-specific "First Amendment", which is the one that only applies to the government.

I personally see a big problem with social media banning trans-people (Facebook), or declaring that the whole LGBT crowd is inappropriate (Livejournal, Tumblr). I think it's a problem when scientists sharing Covid-19 information get banned for being ahead of the official CDC/FDA guidance (Twitter)

Maybe the solution isn't legal, but I still think it's bad that we have a massive media apparatus that can wipe out any voices it disagrees with, and which is fairly eager to use that against people like me.

Good points. Scale and centralization make the world of Facebook et. al. a much thornier problem. They've become Too Big To Fail™, with all that entails. Not to mention antitrust issues, but that's a digression in itself.

I see some hope in federated systems, and, for that matter, old-school forums that have survived. Usenet still sputters along, but it's not what it was before spammers ruined it.

I'm sure I don't want to know, but what is 1/6?

Storming the US capitol on January 6th

Definitely agree, HN has been downvoting too much lately and it used to be the case that contrarian views were rarely downvoted, and it was reserved for rude comments or baseless allegations, personal attacks, etc. Today, HN sucks just like any other major discussion board. Conformism is real and downvotes are a tool used to silence and discredit real opinions and insights - although they might be uncomfortable and challenges your long held views - that's exactly the thing that I love about the old internet.

HN is held hostage by people with a particular ideology and conformity, not just political, but across the board.

I agree. I think HN in the perfect combination of the old internet, with the text-only posts, and the web 2.0 way of doing likes and threaded conversations. And, of course, the moderation keeping it all in check. I'm grateful that I can come here every day.

Includes the very worst part of echo chambering though.

Don’t like someone OR their comment? Just do your part with three other people and it’ll be faded, once it’s faded other people will join in hiding the bad man who said the bad thing - and gone!

No more contrarian opinion, we protected other people! Everyone agrees now. How wonderful.

How ironic.

I agree, downvote-based discussions invariably lead to echo chambers / monocultures. See the dumpster fire that are reddit comments.

At least on old-time forums there was no such bullshit (except post count :)).

If you don't have the ability to vote, you can't influence the content in a positive way either. Some comments are pointless, like some tool making the "and my axe" joke for the millionth time.

Reddit lost its way when they started heavily moderating or banning entire subs that didn't fit with their woke US-centric world view, while rape porn was "fine". I closed my account a while back and stopped visiting the site, but unfortunately, there are so many organisations and FOSS projects that use it in an official capacity that it's unavoidable.

In more user-centric (as opposed to content-centric) forums this problem is solved by banning users who repeatedly make low quality posts. One crappy comment here and there is something anyone might make, but the same person posting pointless comments in every thread deserves a ban.

The solution is simple: Use downvotes for rude and disrespectful comments. I am all for moderating a forum for pointless and useless comments. Most downvotes now-a-days are about disagreements. Using downvotes as a tool to push others into conformity is the shittiest part of HN.

I actually have a sort of nice idea about this: make your downvotes' worth be inversely proportional to how many downvotes you give.

A person who gives 100 downvotes per month will have his downvotes count 1/20th as those of a person who downvotes 5 times per month. An incenctive to be really judicious in handing out downvotes and not simply using them to drown out minority opinions.

Only issue here is that you are penalized for activity even if it’s in removing objective garbage. But I like the idea quite a bit. That you take a hit for being a negative ass that downvotes questions you think are beneath you.

Interesting. I think we would still have the issue of 10 people piling up on a comment with downvotes, as judiciously as they can spend the budget.

You can’t crowdsource quality. Comment voting systems only tell you what is popular, not what is high quality. So many sites make this mistake, including HN.

You reminded me of a failed experiment I did a while back with music tags. I still purchase music monthly (Bandcamp when possible), and I always tag music. I have a bunch of multi-value tags including 'instruments' and 'moods'. It works really well with a huge collection. I can quickly find songs similar to the one I'm listening to, or generate playlists.

Anyway, a few years ago I thought I could speed up the tagging process by pulling tags from Last FM and filtering out the shite by only including tags that matched an instrument name or mood. Luckily I backed up before running the script on my whole collection. The data was absolute garbage.

It reminded me of when I went through and ripped my CD collection. I'd estimate that almost a third of the album data was complete trash, and there were a shockingly bad number of spelling errors. I couldn't help but wonder if someone was deliberately poisoning data.

Slashdot tried to solve this problem by making mod points limited and requiring you to give a reason for moderating a comment. Then there was a metamoderation system where you decided if the moderation someone gave was fair or not. If someone consistently doesn't use the moderation system correctly (and the metamoderation system is successful in identifying this), they don't get mod points anymore.

It didn't work perfectly (obviously the site is still highly opinionated in favor of certain things, like Linux and free software), but it also wasn't the smooth-brained hivemind that Reddit comments sections are. I can't think of another site that's even tried to come up with a better moderation system than simple up/down votes. At best, there are some behind-the-scenes algorithms that decide how exactly to prioritize comments based on the voting, but that's derived from popularity as well. An immeasurable side effect of this is that many heterodox comments simply aren't posted at all since people know they're going to be downvoted to oblivion anyway.

In my experience, your message would get buried or you would get bullied to the point where you leave the forum, nowadays it's done via downvotes. I don't see much of a difference, other than that the new way produces less noise.

They'll also go through your recent history and downvote any comments you've made that are still fresh enough. Downvote culture has some clear drawbacks that I have never seen validated, let alone addressed, by any community mod/admin. Dang responded to me once, but not with validation, and not to my follow up. It's the best I've ever been treated by a mod. I must be a bad person with evil opinions.

HN is not anything like the old internet forums or BBSes.

Content would get moderated but you could still read messages. Even the ones that went against the dogma.

Not at HN, anti-dogma posts get downvoted into oblivion or flagged if they are bad enough. I recently posted a counter-opinion on burnout and was downvoted pretty badly. I didn't flame, and tried to articulate my point well.

HN is composed of the exact microcosm of people who have ruined the internet. It's just an echo chamber where counter-points are nuked. No different than facebook, or anything else. At least /. made you think about using your modpoints to downvote. Now it's free - and for many very pathetic people downvoting is a source of dopamine. It's far easier to drive-by-downvote without having to even articulate a reply as to why. Comparing this to the old BBSes and forums, you at least got a moderator note (or a VERY disparaging note from a user) in your PMs about why you're being moderated. It is wildly frustrating to type something well thought out and be downvoted into oblivion because your stance isn't en-vogue.

While I don't think it is often as bad as some people here try to make it out to be, it's also sad that comments pointing it or mostly dead, which is why I vouched for you. Because there are to many dead comments that did not deserve that status.

This orange website is truly a fascinating place. We reminisce about the old, less commercialized internet while rubbing shoulders with the people who made it the way it is today.

Indeed. I find it extremely ironic how people here - of all places - are sympathetic to this sort of stuff.

And we (software professionals) are the ones with the power to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to just stop working on products/companies that are making the Internet worse!

“Ads are annoying and intrusive!” posts the HN commenter whose next Jira ticket at work is to integrate a new ad SDK into their product.

I’ve quit jobs that I believed were making the world a worse place. Software Engineers supposedly are in demand and have the power to pick their projects and companies. Be part of the solution then, and not part of the problem.

I'm not personally a software professional, but to me it seems that the problem is economical. Centralization and walled gardens happen because they are a way to couple the internet platforms to the economic system. I think that if done "nicely", much of the software and internet tech exist in market failure corner of the economy. It's not like there aren't many federalized/decentralized/community driven and open source projects in existence, it's just that no-one wants to fund and/or market them so that they often become non-viable in the long run.

> And we (software professionals) are the ones with the power to fix it! It seems obvious but the answer is to just stop working on products/companies that are making the Internet worse!

I'm not convinced. We don't work in defense contracting but that industry seems to be doing fine without us.

The problem is the bulk of the demand is at the places with all the money, and those places mostly make the ads, show the ads, or serve companies that make or serve the ads.

Fwiw I’m old enough to remember people deriding the internet for replacing more pure bbs’ and newsgroups with flashy websites like /. and digg.

The internet killed bbses. Bbses were local (or not) more personal, easy to make longterm friends, meetups in malls died with the bbses.

I miss bbses. I resisted the internet switch for as long as possible. I remember the last c64 release..wasn't it monsters of mayham.. the graphics were amazing and the gameplay fast. Sort of like a mario world.

BBS could be elite where you needed references. It could be local family focuses with no swearing. There was a network of bbses who would share posts.. that was cool.

The best thing about bbses. As a SysOp I could start chatting with any user. The person logging in actual used your computer so in real time you could watch what the user was doing. Websites lost that.

Some BBSes evolved into forums but even those were different.

We lost the “local” based internet groups and we only really have “subject” based groupings anymore.

Yeah. Phpbb was a huge deal in the early 2000s. Then reddit came along with subreddits and Facebook groups took over. All stuff now happens under the curated moderation of the corporation that owns whatever hobby/interest.

You're omitting a major driver of the exodus from private forums to walled gardens. It's the same driver of many other problems: assholes.

Spammers killed many a forum because it became a full time effort by admins and moderators to remove them. Automated tools, especially early tools, had limited effectiveness. People running a site as a hobby don't want to spend their days removing spam comments.

Assholes also (for many reasons) will DDoS forums. This is another administrative headache for site owners if not a financial headache.

The same driving force saw blogs remove comments for centralized solutions like discus or abandon self-hosted blogs for Medium and the like.

While Facebook and reddit have plenty of spam issues the "owners" and mods of a group/subreddit are different from the site admins. There's a lot less financial risk for someone running a group there than their own server. They also let a wider swath of people run a group rather than only those that are interested in a niche topic, have the technical skills to effectively run a forums, and the money to pay for it all.

I actually found HN quite late (a few years ago) and was pleasantly surprised how well the spirit of the old Reddit and Slashdot lives on here.

What the hell happened to Slashdot? I was on it from 1997 until about 2010ish, and now it is pretty ugly.

I think /. cratered due to poor moderation. It's just toxic. Digg is now like Axios for people who think link I do, so I check it daily. And reddit is, well, since the Digg/Reddit wars, its just become all-consuming and too noisy for me.

I'm guessing HN has remained civil because paid mods--who strive to be objective--really do make a difference.

On HN with its dang moderation that is often praised, I have noticed a tendency to ascribe Slashdot's fall to poor moderation. That wasn't actually how things happened, though.

Slashdot's decline started in the years around 2004 because of a site redesign that was taken very badly by the community, and the sale of the site to new owners who began to make all kinds of annoying changes with a view to monetizing. A lot of longtime users bailed out. It was only due to this loss of the productive participants that the site seemed to be taken over by low-quality posting.

I remember the site UI change, but I was mostly grumbling because it looked even more 1990's post-redesign. I didn't realize that cause people to leave en masse. I'm surprised UI was more important than discussion, esp. when the UI change wasn't really that dramatic, IMHO.

I'm kind of thinking that it was more about the new owners than about the site redesign.

I still visit /., but it just isn't what it used to be. If anything, the trolls are even more vile than they were back then.

The UI changes weren't especially popular, but I don't think they were the cause of a mass exodus. I think it's more that Reddit was gaining in popularity. Slashdot posts had to go through their "editors," who were kind of laughingstocks who regularly let dumb mistakes through, reposted old articles, and regularly posted low-quality, flamebaity articles and thinly disguised advertisements. People put up with it since the articles were largely an excuse for a discussion topic. But then Reddit bypassed this and let people submit things directly. And the quality of Reddit posts and comments was a lot higher since it drew a more cerebral crowd in those early days, which made it more of a threat to Slashdot than the more mainstream Digg (which it also replaced ultimately).

Facebook was cool before it allowed to post images and the same goes for reddit. Once the multimedia content was allowed, the incentives changed, the crowd changed and things started to go downhill..

Take a look at HN, no images or videos, so it tends to bring more of the literate crowd.

Many of us here followed the same path. HN is good for now, but it has been changing. It's unlikely we'll still be here in a couple years.

Sadly, you are probably right. For better or worse, I keep thinking that invite only forum is the way go to maintain a decent level of 'interesting conversations'. HN still has them, but it is getting harder to filter through.

I think that that will work in the short term, but unless you're very proactive about recruiting new blood your userbase is just going to dwindle away.

It's true that HN has gotten more crowded with more noise, but it is still the best there is. I won't be going anywhere.

I am constantly amazed at the thoughtful comments from people who are informed on a subject and take their time to layout a cogent argument. This makes it worthwhile to spend some time scanning more and more other stuff. I am getting to be quite a speed reader in this place.

HN will be just fine as long as Dang (and the other guy) spend so much energy here.

I swear I read a comment exactly like this on Reddit, Digg, and Slashdot before they lost that quality.

Many discussions here turn argumentative but still retain their civility. Many posters will apologize and further clarify their ideas if anyone complains for the slightest reason. While not every discussion is of this level, there are many that are. The forums that I have personally followed as they went to hell showed very little of this even in their heyday.

We also have our own form of Kryptonite, the HN front page list of discussions. Many of the people that get kicks stirring up trouble would not understand or care to read this stuff.

Slashdot still exists, and the text internet is still a thing. It takes a deliberate effort to seek out smaller communities.

I run one myself, because I want more of them to exist.

Slashdot indeed exists, but its comment section is complete garbage and the news are less and less about science and technology and more and more about politics and nerd tabloid style journalism ("You wouldn't believe what Linus Torvalds said on the Kernel developer mailing list!").

Hn, unlike the rest, doesn't have a business model they strongly encourages them to make the site a dumb as nails tabloid