So I went over there, and the first article is about protocol-less links, and the first comment notes that they have performance issues in css for IE7 & 8. The second article is a link to dadgum and the first comment is about optimizing network communication.
It's not HN, but awful is an overstatement.
Agreed. In many ways I find Reddit to be much better and more enjoyable. First, it provides a better UX, especially for posting and revising comments. Second, there is much less pedantry there than on HN ("Well technically... Well technically... Exception in this exceptional case! No it's not. Yes it is! Exotic edge case under theoretical conditions I read about in a book that one time!" etc.). Third, there are less haters. Fourth, there are lots of funny and creative writers there, again, unlike here on HN. There are definitely positives about HN, and both HN and Reddit share some of the same weaknesses (a unimind or Thought Police effect: if you post a view that strays too far from the median you will get downvotes that penalizes your karma, even if your post was thoughtful, well-written, constructive, polite, etc.)
I tried for about 2 months to politely explain to posters why their posts didn't fit the guidelines and then I quit and gave up. Why fight an inevitability?
The percentage of interesting articles has declined over time. Is that because I have overdosed a bit on the types of articles and discussions that appear here? Or simply because I have consumed more internet based news now than I had when I started reading HN? Who is to say.
Yes, sites in general can and have declined. However, due to the fact that I have not seen trolls dominate HN, and in my view the quality of HN is approximately as good as it has always been, I find it difficult to measure the quality of the site to a precision that would allow me to track it over time. In my own head.
The short answer is, this site is still among the best discussion news sites on the internet.
A good way to test this hypothesis would be to check with people who are new to the scene and new to Hacker News. Do they react to the content similarly to how old members initially reacted?
>> People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
Two things:
1. "Worse" is subjective.
2. I think it's more of a trade-off between quality and size. Hacker News doesn't have to get "worse", but would have to remain niche in order to avoid it. That is why subreddits can succeed, because Reddit is essentially a platform for lots of niche communities.
Reddit is the easiest way I know of to generate a targeted community. I've set up subreddits, forgot about them, and come back to find them with thousands of members and fresh content. Are there other comparable ways to do this?
The quality of individual subreddits varies wildly, of course. This should not be a surprise. In a way, Reddit's subreddits feature brought back the spirit of Usenet.
They only get worse for people who don't like mainstream content.
Prior to the Internet you had mass media controlling distribution. The Internet comes along and you have things like Usenet and the proto-Web.
Then comes the first crowdsourcing sites to allow people to find content without employing people to curate that information. Slashdot was certainly early in this trend.
What Digg allowed is a certain band of people to control the information flow. People would get paid to promote submissions as it became clear that a front-page submission generated a lot of pageviews.
But what became apparent with all these community sites (and this includes forums) is they start with an early group who provide value to each other. This group ends up becoming insular. De facto standards form. But even in the Usenet days you had the "September" problem (where new college freshmen would get Internet access and not understand the "rules" and conventions that were in place and would ask questions that had already been answered, etc).
Basically all these social sites get worse over time as the masses flood in.
Digg died because the idea that there is a central source for news was a holdover idea from the old media days. Reddit understood this. Global reddit is basically useless. The subreddits are the only remotely interesting thing about reddit.
People complain about how HN is getting worse. That's probably true and it is true (and will continue to be true) of any such social site in the future.
I've heard the same complaints about Twitter.
Facebook for most people is not a source of news. It doesn't have the same link-sharing mindshare (IMHO) for most people that other mediums have. Ultimately I think the biggest use case for Facebook is still sharing photos. People go to Facebook to find out what their friends are doing. Very few go to find out what's going on in the world (much as Facebook would like that to be the case).
I'm surprised at how some wax lyrical on how amazing reddit is. It's just a minor tweak on a long trend of existing prior art (the subreddits). Personally I think it's a cesspool full of trolls. Proggit (programming.reddit.com) is (IMHO) just awful.