You forgot AI.

Also:

>Want to see a contrast?

The new Digg (2012) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321773

What difference in comment quality do you mean exactly?

> OK, I fire up the site. I see 6 big pictures, 6 links to actual content and minimal navigation. A whole screen and only 6 bits of actual content? Its like a children's book. And more and more sites age going for this style. Is this the web now? The BBC Olympic site has gone this route and its awful to navigate. [0]

Wow, a comment about Digg in 2012 applies _perfectly_ to new Reddit, except I get 2 big pictures instead of 6.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322126

> You forgot AI.

You're right, but the reason I didn't include it is that the coverage around AI isn't all emotional. There's a lot of hype behind it yes, but at it's core it's based on new products that people are excited about. But maybe I should have. A lot of them devolve into the same type of hellthread.

> What difference in comment quality do you mean exactly?

Discussion about CSS and web design features, discussions about web accessibility, and how there were just very few flippant comments. These big Reddit threads have a lot of pithy "f** Reddit" comments and lots and lots of silly (angry) jokes that make me feel like I'm on Reddit and not on HN.

On one hand, it doesn't make sense to be talking about CSS and web design when we are talking about _policy_ changes. I'm sure if you go back to when Reddit first released the new frontend, you would fine all the CSS discussions you look for.

On the other hand, lots of discussions are also happening around design and accessibility. Reddit's official app has bad design, including many dark patterns and terrible accessibility and performance. This has been discussion alongside the policy changes from day one.

Wow, it was peak "Apple, my way or the highway" mentality there. They were also expecting users to ultimately just put up with it, it doesn't seem like they expected the exodus. Calling Noscript users entitled. It really does feel like a different era. People aren't so ready to give tech companies the benefit of the doubt now.

It's a good place to discuss these changes. Especially if your an IT entrepreneur. You can get priceless information about user attitudes to change and what they really want and not want. The level of discourse he is much better than most anywhere else, so you get well thought out opinions and arguments.

I think some context you might be missing is the intimate connection between Reddit and YC. Reddit is a YC story[1][2] and the founders even claim that Reddit was the first YC Company to launch[1]. As far as I understand it Reddit was one of those key early startups that Paul Graham modelled future YC around.

Further reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, rest-in-peace, was a and highly inflential in his contribution to RSS, Creative Commons, Open Access academic publishing and pushing for an open internet generally. Maybe some see it as a stretch to point to the impact of Aarons work in todays Reddit but the history is there. His story is part of Reddit's story and YC/HN's story.

Reddit is a product of YC and HN has always followed Reddit closely.

Generally available API access has been a defining feature of many HN startups so far. This shift alone, towards a world where big tech are locking out API access and squeezing indie devs, is also of great interest to many who rely on API's for work and play.

It's a perfect storm and we're all watching closely.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPN2vmZl4kA [2] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit [3] https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/30/3709702/watch-this-reddi...

> I think some context you might be missing is the intimate connection between Reddit and YC. Reddit is a YC story[1][2] and the founders even claim that Reddit was the first YC Company to launch[1]. As far as I understand it Reddit was one of those key early startups that Paul Graham modelled future YC around.

Reddit is definitely a YC story, and so is HN. But Reddit isn't HN's story. It's one of many. Except the frontpage is filled with multiple Reddit stories with repetition of the same comments.

> Generally available API access has been a defining feature of many HN startups so far. This shift alone, towards a world where big tech are locking out API access and squeezing indie devs, is also of great interest to many who rely on API's for work and play.

> It's a perfect storm and we're all watching closely.

Sure there's nothing wrong with following closely. As you say, this is a big moment in economic models of tech. But the quality of this commentary is just bad. I feel like I'm watching my grandmother watch a soap opera on TV after a long day. Maybe this is just me, but judging by the voting happening on my comment, it's not.

> Reddit is definitely a YC story, and so is HN. But Reddit isn't HN's story. It's one of many.

That is true, but emotional/historical connections changes how people feel about things, even though it might not be "how it ought to be". Reddit is closer to YC and therefore closer to HN, no matter how independent HN should be from YC.

It will pass. A lot of HN users are Reddit users. It’s natural for there to be overlap. Let us nerds mourn the decline of our meme sanctuary & things will return to normal.

> Reddit is definitely a YC story, and so is HN. But Reddit isn't HN's story. It's one of many.

HN and Reddit are deeply intertwined at multiple levels. There's a cultural connection ("this site is turning into reddit" is a decade+-old meme that just can't die). There's a historical legacy one - HN came about because pg wanted to recreate the kind of culture Reddit had in its first two years, while the latter kept evolving past niche startup/tech content. There's a technological one - Reddit started as a Lisp success story (written/prototyped in Common Lisp, subsequently rewritten in Python), HN is written in pg's own Lisp dialect, Arc.

For better or worse, Reddit is part of HN's DNA. It's not just accidental phenotype similarity (both being link aggregation/commentary boards with up/down-voting karma mechanism) - HN is Reddit's younger sibling.

> Except the frontpage is filled with multiple Reddit stories with repetition of the same comments.

This is temporary. Reddit is going through a critical moment right now, but the amount of Reddit stories should start to decay in the next couple days or weeks (unless Reddit manages to turn it into a perpetual high-intensity crisis).

I'm pretty sure for the last decade or so the main reason people read and contribute to HN is that it's not reddit.

Part of that HN is not known for the perpetual "drama" generation the reddit community is known for.

I say that as someone who left HN for reddit. And someone who mostly tries not to comment here, lest that makes HN more like reddit. HN should stay different.

> for the last decade or so the main reason people read and contribute to HN is that it's not reddit

To the extent people think or even say this explicitly, this is literally defining HN in terms of Reddit. The sign on the vector may be negative, but it still connects the two.

That was so long ago it’s almost irrelevant. The only relevant connection is the last remaining YC founder Steve Huffman who likely is going to be heavily influenced by Sam Altman on the LLM=fresh real-time conversational data being valuable.

If stuff like GPT is going to be useful as a Q&A engine on Google/Bing it needs plenty of data feeds that are coming in quickly and fed into training. People claim some old scaped DBs of Reddit comments are enough because some OSS model trained on it but I’m skeptical that’s a serious option for Microsoft and the like.

Otherwise the HN/YC<>Reddit is pretty much just an old founding story, not one relevant to today or the culture of HN.

In general the lack of separate communities, and the technical posts that take up a good portion of the front page seem to guard against that kind of Eternal September on HN. The top of the front page right now:

  1. Before Reddit and Digg, there was Fark. Then a user-hostile redesign killed it (fark.com)
  2. Why Perl?
  3. Video to Video with Stable Diffusion (Step-by-Step) – Stable Diffusion Art
  4. The Surprising Power of Documentation
  5. Intel is all-in on backside power delivery (ieee.org)
  6. Temperature-dependent RNA editing in octopus recodes the neural proteome
  7. MIDI 2.0 driver support coming with Linux 6.5

I suppose you'll know it's over when there are no more technical posts. So keep upvoting them ;).

We can always hit the emergency button labeled "please post and upvote some Erlang stories quick!". Worked well in the past.

That was back when pg still posted here and could rally the troops.

Doesn’t look like he engages much https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg

Maybe dang could arrange something or it could happen organically. But that particular event was in response to an acute flood of traffic. Not some long term reduction in comment quality and Reddit-tier rage/politics.

You can’t fight floods with a small temporary dam. Nor can you moderate your way out of it entirely as every major subreddit has shown (hyper modding usually does the opposite by sanctioning a certain ‘acceptable’ set of low quality posting and fuelling meta drama).

I think that was updated to a Rust button long ago.

Nah, Rust is way too hip these days. I think a more suitable topic would be eBPF or theorem provers.

Just ignore every post related to this subject and you'll be fine? If some people want to discuss it just let them, there is enough space on the site after all.

Let’s hope that hacker news prevents new signups if a mass migration looks imminent. This is still a great place I hope it stays that way.

I would like to ask a different question: Why is the site Hacker news still called Hacker news?

I've been reading Hacker news since 2008, but as things stand now, I'm afraid I won't be reading it for much longer. Why? Because for the last (at least) few years, more and more often I catch myself asking: why is "Hacker news" even called "Hacker news" anymore?

Maybe this question will sound strange to some people here, but once upon a time in the past Hacker news used to have a lot of posts that were actually interesting to hackers. Today on HN mostly topics about entrepreneurship, economy, about unscrupulous rich people who make money from the corpses of others, and for whom the audience applauds in unison here, etc., prevail. We can say that the topics about everything that real hackers have never been interested in and which is the antithesis of hackers prevail here.

Guys, I guess we know what hackers are, what kind of people they are and what actually drives them? I say this because what we read here on HN has nothing to do with it. Why did this shift in interest occur? And, wouldn't it be great if the owners of this site would admit it, be honest and rename the site to, for example, "How to become the new Elon Musk"? I think that would be quite appropriate, because this place has nothing to do with hackers anymore, so it would be fair to admit that!

What are some examples of articles that you think would be of more interest to hackers?

Where is the SNR better than HN though? Maybe lobste.rs, but there's almost no conversation. It's easier imo to ignore the stuff that I don't care about (despite regularly getting caught up in whatever dumb thing) and pick out the interesting gems, than anywhere else.

Put another way, there's a tradeoff between false positives, (hustle bro Musk story, say) and false negatives (a story that would generate good discussion not making the front page - yesterday there was one about the air India flight landing in Russia that had a bunch of political comments but also lots of interesting talk about other times planes landed on the wrong runway, taking off with one engine, etc.)

Since the cost of false negative is much higher than false positives, better to skew that way.

There have always been fluctuations and swings in HN's history, sometimes big swings, and those always bring these sorts of reflection. But then it fluctuates or swings its way back out.

Let's not forget that randomness includes sequences that seem non-random—sometimes long sequences, and occasionally longer sequences than one would think possible from a random process.

If you have any ideas about how to further dampen hellthreads, I'm all ears. We can't just suppress them because that would produce an even more hellthreadish backlash.