I agree there was some natural slow down as the corpus grew - the obvious questions were answered. But if the community was healthy, that should not have caused growth to stop. New technologies get created all the time, each starting with zero SO questions. (Or Google releases v2.0 which invalidates all answers written about v1.)

SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems though.

I think about better voting systems all the time (one major issue being downvote can mean "I want fewer people to see this", "I disagree", and "This is factually wrong" and you never know which.

But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior.

I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anything similar.

Arstechnica used to have different kinds of upvotes for "funny" vs "insightful" - I forget exactly all of them. But I found it awesome. I wanted to and could read the insightful comments, not the funny ones. A couple years back they redid the discussion system and got rid of it. Since then the quality of discussion has IMHO completely tanked.

We don't "get small glimpses of that on HN"

We get exactly the same thing on hn, because it's the same people, the same culture, the same incentive structure, the same codified toxicity.

And the exact same thing is going to happen to hn. Already is. Already has, frankly.

It's just how sellout culture works. There's no integrity.[1]

SO failed because the founders had no integrity and HN is going to fail because the founders have no integrity.

Lacking integrity has short term benefits that sacrifice the long term.

From Good to great to failure.

Anyone else remwmber when Joel said he'd never sell SO and then this [1] happened? I remember.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-sold-...

It goes even farther back to 2009 when Jeff sold out the benevolence incentive for self promotion to make money for himself thru SO.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-careers-amplify... (be sure to read the comments)

The stated purpose of SO was that the expert sex change.com was making money off q&a and jeff and joel resented that.

And then the SO folks make their q&a site about making money.

No integrity. So the good people left and the toxic people stayed.

That's the root cause analysis.

well you can say all that but it doesn't hold up to experience. The culture feels very different here. So, no, it's not the same.

Well I've been around here longer than you and i don't have a vested interest in the koolaid.

You think being on this site gives you cred. That's why you personally identify yourself. You likely have your hn profile link on your resume or website etc. Hoping maybe this place will lead to something for you.

Clearly we don't agree on that. I don't even bother to turn off secret mode for this tripe.

Thank you malfist for proving my point. Lol

For someone with a green username, you sure do have strong opinions about hn

I literally said I've been here longer than someone who has been here since 2013 so you attack my profile age.

This is the toxic destruction of hn I'm talking about.

You are the toxic one. You offer negative value.

If you meet one asshole on your way to work, they're probably an asshole. If everyone you meet is an asshole, you're probably the asshole.

maybe I think those things, or maybe I think totally different things; you have no way of knowing

I know because i click your username and see your email and website.

Click on my name you get nothing.

Yours is full of hope of someone reaching out to you. Mine is idgaf.

I don't need to defend the status quo. I don't want karma pOints.

I want integrity.

What you seem to want is to fill the comment section with deranged rambling

> Well I've been around here longer than you

Prove it. Use your main account, you coward.

I don't have anything to prove to you.

You are the toxicity I'm talking about. You've added zero value to the discussion. I've offered value.

You attack my account age and I've already said why it's not old.

Because idgaf.

Integrity usually means owning your words. Pseudonymity can be fine, but pretending it signals higher principle is backwards.

This response sounds quite toxic actually

Because you don't want to hear it, that's all. It's not toxic, it's idgaf.

> I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are.

They are not "threads" and are not supposed to be "threads". Thinking about them as if they were, is what leads to the perception of toxicity.

It's funny that people blame the site for this.

That toxicity is just part of software engineering culture. It's everywhere.

Its karma farming. Number must go up regardless of the human cost. Thats why the same problem is seen here, to a lesser extent.

Karma in social media is a technology to produce competitiveness and unhappiness, usually to increase advertising engagement.

Compare how nice the people are on 4chan /g/ board compared to the declining years of SO. Or Reddit for that matter.