Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I do feel like the quality of discourse has taken a nose dive.

Changes like that are hard to measure.

Changes in sentiment can be hard to measure, but changes in posting behavior seems incredibly easy to measure.

The people barking are actually the least worrisome, they’re highly engaged. The meat of your users say nothing and are only visible in-house.

That said, they also don’t give a shit about most of this. They want their content and they want it now. I am very confident spez knows exactly what he’s talking about.

I didn’t post about not engaging with or using the platform anymore. Nor did I delete my account, since it still holds some value to me. But I slinked away into the darkness and now HN is my social media tool.

That said, I think you could easily correlate my hn activity with my reddit usage (inverse proportionality). Loving it tbh, higher quality content overall and better than slashdot ever was

I'm curious, what do you think deleting accounts and starting new is going to do?

They'll just link it all together another way.

you can’t.

https://old.reddit.com/u/speff

The relevant stakeholders here are the potential future employees, who are seeing in public exactly how OpenAI treats its employees.

And the employees also have way more leverage than Reddit users; at this point they should still be OpenAI's greatest asset. Even once this is fixed (which they obviously will do, given they got caught), it's still going to cause a major loss of trust in the entire leadership.

Just as Reddit users stay on Reddit because there is nowhere else to go, the reality is that everyone worships leadership because they keep their paychecks flowing.

I know extremely desirable researchers who refuse to work for Elon because of how he has historically treated employees. Repeated issues like this will slowly add OpenAI to that list for more people.

Aspirations keep people voting against their interests.

I personally worry that the way fans of OpenAI and Stability AI are lining up to criticise artists for demanding to be compensated, or accusing them of “gatekeeping” could be folded into a wider populism, the way 4chan shitposting became a political position. When populism turns on artists it’s usually a bad sign.

I also remember when the internet was talking about the twenty four Reddit accounts that threatened to quit the site. It’s enlightening to see that the protest the size of Jethro Tull didn’t impact the site

I think your sample frame is off, they did themselves unforced damage in the long run.

It's definitely had a very impact - but since it's not one that's likely to hit the bottom line in the short term, it's not like it matters in any way beyond the user experience.

Lots of people have pointed out problems with your determination, but here's another one: can you really tell none of those people are posting to subvert reddit? I'm not going to go into details for privacy reasons, but I've "quit" websites in protest while continuing to post subversive content afterwards. Even after I "quit," I'm sure my activity looked good in the site's internal metrics, even though it was 100% focused on discouraging other users.