Re:Reverse engineering Skifree
by formerly_proven on Monday June 13, 2022 @03:56AM
(#31722514)
Invite-only selects for the other kind of insanity, the 1% who are actively engaged with sites, instead of the ~99% who mostly lurk.
Re:Reverse engineering Skifree
by karma_fountain on Monday June 13, 2022 @04:14AM
(#31722645)
You don't have to be invited to lurk though? I guess you mean you don't get the folks who just sign up to post a one-off or once in a while comment?
For me it’s a lot more than a few bad apples. It’s the general state of discourse and empathy from a reasonably large chunk of the user base.
HN was never perfect (since I found it), but it’s much worse now.
To be fair this has happened in general to a number of sites/thing in the exact same timeline. It’s not an HN specific problem, other than the degree to which such people may be attracted to the usual HN spheres.
I see "the orange site" phrase used a lot over at lobste.rs, and they obviously followed a different path - you need to be invited or somehow known to get on board. So they've got less of what they think of as toxicity and everyone's supposed to be pals with each other. Except little conflicts and tantrums do happen every now and then, and there's less activity overall (current top story has 26 comments on it, 10 of the 25 stories on the front page have no comments at all).