I haven’t been on HN for a decade or anything, but I do see founders in the comments more often than not. Of course this is n=1.

HN comments are really nothing at all like Reddit comments.

All of the superiority, snark, self importance and toxicity.

None of the juvenile humor.

I mean if I'm gonna be preached at by jerks who think I'm stupid I'd rather they be funny jerks.

There isn't a forum in the world without superiority, snark, self-importance, and toxicity; some of that is simply an artifact of communicating about contentious topics in the context-stripped medium of text messaging.

But Reddit's shitposting culture makes threads difficult to follow and powerfully impacts the culture there. On the better, closely moderated subreddits, threads are swiss-cheesed with deleted comments. It's just a very different reading experience.

Depends on the sub, really. All of the subs I read have the occasional abrasive blowhard but don't tolerate shitposting.

Oh, man. My rate of trying to insert a non-obscure joke into a comment and a half-dozen commenters taking the exact words at face value and then pointing out their factual incorrectness is too damn high. I don't know if it's a symptom of, let's say, neurodiversity, or ESL, but humor on HN is almost universally punished. I don't think they are bots because once in a while I crack jokes in AI prompts (to amuse myself when exceptionally bored) and the LLMs always recognize them, even if they don't respond right away with a sensible chuckle GIF.

In my experience, those HNers actually think that they are the ones being funny when they point out your factual incorrectness or when they want to be pedantic about something.

just goes to show how different people can be. i never would have considered this but i can imagine it now

A sarcasm tag cannot mitigate that problem /s

We get closer every year.

> HN comments are really nothing at all like Reddit comments.

This is a good example of a worthless comment. You're well known here, but that doesn't mean people want to know your specific opinion with zero supporting arguments. To your credit you do provide a rationale later but this comment on it's own should be nuked.

HN comment threads have been blamed for becoming Reddified since at least 2009.

But Reddit keeps lowering the bar at a higher rate, so there’s no convergence.

People were saying the exact same things two years ago.

People were saying it 12 years ago too.

Note that it may actually be true. One way to look at it is all successful organizations and communities are continually dying. In order for an organization to get critical mass and start attracting people, it has to be far above the mean in quality; the mean idea, after all, never gets realized. After that, everything is regression to the mean, i.e. downwards, until it ceases to exist.

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That's scary. Someone might've viewed that front page with an infant on their lap and that infant can now vote.

I'm one of those infants...

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I can, sadly, relate to this. Is there a name for this phenomenon or is it simply a trick of the mind, a calcification of temporal perception that gradually boils the frog until one day you realize that referencing Van Halen or Max Headroom results in blank stares?

The brain is very good at compressing information, so if your days are fairly similar to each other they'll all blur together. And I don't mean the things you think about, but the places you go to. Real places, I might add.

If you rarely discover real places you've never been to, the memory will just be compressed and it seems like last year that you moved from your last place, when it was actually forty years ago.

Now, this can be alleviated by instead of visiting new places learning new things, but those things have to be actually new to your brain and not just more of something you are already familiar with. Otherwise it gets compressed all the same.

New places, new things, new people, new routines all reset the clock.

Subjectively it felt like I lived about 5 years in the first 2 months after my first kid was born - certainly they were more memorable than the previous 5 years. We were basically confined to the apartment except for doctor's visits during that time period, but the experience of caring for a little person was dramatically different from everything that came before. And then the newborn periods of our 2nd and 3rd kids flew by, because we had all the routines down.

2020 also felt like I lived a lifetime in a year, even though we were shut-in, because of all the events and changes of routine that year.

No, it's not! I was there! It was 46 years ago. How did that happen? I can't understand it.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, World War 2 was ancient history, but at the time, it was only 20 years ago. And now, 20 years ago is only yesterday.

> Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you.

It goes in cycles has been my observation. I think some of it is that as new generations rise in tech, young guys coming up always seem to think they have to take it out of others hide how wrong they are. Very weird cultural phenomenon in tech. Then folks chill out, get older, gain some wisdom, dial back the vitriol.

Then their children show up and the cycle repeats again.

Time flows like a river, and history repeats itself...

It’s like this in every industry and everything else (more or less with some nuance)

See several thousand year old commentary on how the youth is rotten

I would agree with and extend your remarks with bot percentage only increases over time, there's a repellant mechanism that pushes away humans and no mechanism at all to lure them back once they've been pushed out of a site.

Eventually you end up with stackexchange or Reddit or 4chan where 95%+ of posts are bots or at least LLM generated, and the remaining 5% is crazy people who refuse to leave. HN is behind in that cycle but will inevitably and unavoidably catch up because as I stated there's no repair mechanism. All successful online orgs and communities attract bots and LLMs that kill the organization. There is no immune system other than unplugging and touching grass IRL.

My guess about "large scale socioeconomic effects" is we can't talk about Dead Internet Theory in public in polite company, but we can talk about "too much LLMs" or whatever in a vague sense while describing all the symptoms of Dead Internet Theory. Like those people who complain about poop on the sidewalks but can't be permitted socially to declare any sort of dislike of homeless people, so the talk is focused solely on the symptoms as if the symptoms appeared magically, an uncaused causation. The advertising fraud bubble will pop, eventually, and it'll all be blamed on LLM bots on social media, it totally wasn't planned and aided and abetted by the companies themselves, no, LOL. Their profits off advertising fraud were totally accidental and unintentional, you see, so they should get away with it. The people to blame are those vague AI bot things that magically appeared and totally had no legally prosecutable humans behind them.

Another large scale effect to talk about is massively pulled forward demand. A decade or two of Facebook and that pulls a lifetime of demand forward. What happens when the bill's due and nobody left but a tiny fraction of hopeless addicts? If the population as a whole does a lifetime of doomscrolling in 20 years, the next generation at least will be a total drought. Internet access will never go away because its too useful to pay your bills online, but social media will almost certainly go the way of the late 1970s CB Radio crash. I assure you CB radios are still being made, people still making money off them, and people are still using them, however only a microscopic fraction of the population uses CB Radios. So it will be soon, for "socializing online".

To the extent that LLM's can be considered a new kind of creature, we might as well for the sake of analogy pretend the arrival of (semi)intelligent aliens, for alien persons to enter, a typical nation state has procedures and eligibility conditions. Do you consider a kind of digital border control for LLM's to be desirable?

People also frequently complained about new users upvoting the wrong content. So they made /classic, which only counts votes from accounts of a certain age. It used to look quite different from the front page. Now it’s basically the same.

We've been saying it since long before slashdot, even.

When you have a mirror, you can shine light wherever you want.

> Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.

Absolute nonsense.

> > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]

The guidelines post above links to nine comments echoing yours, some almost 20 years old.

Those ~20 year old comments compared HN to Reddit of that time, which was insulting to HN. In the 20 years that passed probably HN at some point crossed the threshold of old Reddit. But now the insult is to compare it to current Reddit.

On the other hand putting it in the rules that you’re not allowed to say X and then quoting the rule as evidence against X is at the very least not an intellectually interesting way of making a point. Imagine if everyone put in their profile that they’re never wrong and kept pointing at that when challenged.

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The new HN is lobste.rs. You need an invite though, which is why it's the new HN and not the new Reddit.

Been curious for years, never asked anyone for an invite. You wouldn't happen to have one do you? Email in my profile.

I'd like one if you have any, as well. I like Hacker News but I really need to go "outside" more on the web, I realized the other day that HN has become my hobbit hole over the last decade plus, but when I look for other places I'm mostly only finding value in small, semi-private communities.

Lobste.rs is quite different from HN, though, so I think it's fair to warn people in advance:

HN allows anything that "hackers" might find interesting. On lobste.rs, anything that's not directly programming-related is generally off-topic.

HN encourages self-promotion, lobste.rs discourages it.

Until recently lobste.rs was very actively anti-AI. Newer rules have rolled that back somewhat, but there is still a rather vocal anti-AI contingent that is not afraid to pick fights with people who openly admit to being interested in machine learning as a technology.

> Newer rules have rolled that back somewhat, but there is still a rather vocal anti-AI contingent that is not afraid to pick fights with people who openly admit to being interested in machine learning as a technology.

HN does the same thing with blockchain. Someone earlier wrote "People only ever work for cryptocurrency companies in the first place because they're scammers themselves" - which would include nearly everyone anyone in the finance or payments industries.

Lobste.rs is alright.. I've taken some dips as a reader and turned down invites.

Ignoring the actual submissions, which are usually mirrored on HN, I find the small user base often doesn't offer much in interesting comments. Many are short with little value, and I don't recall seeing many submission authors piping in, or luminaries with the deep knowledge that you sometimes see drop in on HN.

Friends tell me there is a definite political bias that leaks out.

I think Hackaday is a good alternative for hardware oriented HNers.

It is useful to go check out lobste.rs when a big story hits and you want more perspective. ..or for research.

Go and compare it with HN on any big recent story and judge for yourself.

Absolutely not. Just look at the fiasco when it came to Bun's rust migration. So many threads about how it was a marketing stunt, how it will never work, how when it's working it's still not on main, when it was on main how it took a whole couple months and X $. And now that the articles about it's completion have come, practically radio silence and no admission of being completely repeatedly wrong. HN was bad, lobste.rs was awful. That saga showed how inaccurate and motivated reasoning both of these forums are.

lobste.rs was the new HN for a while but now it has two major issues:

1. They have abandoned their former policy of “everything non-programming related is off topic” to allow discussion about politics

2. They have lost most of their users. It’s like a ghost town.

HN have some flaws but is still the gathering place for many technical people.

It is my feeling that there has been an uptick of negativity for the last few years. Well before AI.

I understand people have their reasons to be negative about tech but they could go somewhere else to post their comments. Going to a Star Wars forum to tell everyone how much Star Wars sucks would be nonsensical. Imagine a Star Wars forum full of people saying Star Wars sucks. That’s how I HN has felt for years now.

I’ve taken breaks from this site from time to time because eventually it just makes you feel bad. It wears you down.

> I understand people have their reasons to be negative about tech but they could go somewhere else to post their comments.

Are they complaining about the tech or are they complaining that bad people are doing bad things with it?

The current hot topic with me is LLMs. Someone could be doing nice things with it, but the only ones I see are making "educational" videos with hallucinated information. By the time I figure out that the channel is slop, I now have to purge several videos worth of fake facts from my knowledge base. And all this so someone can make a quick buck off of youtube ads.

>Going to a Star Wars forum to tell everyone how much Star Wars sucks would be nonsensical. Imagine a Star Wars forum full of people saying Star Wars sucks. That’s how I HN has felt for years now.

Have you ever interacted with a fandom?

No one hates Star Wars as much as Star Wars fans.

I wish I was special

But I'm a creep

I'm a weirdo

What the hell am I doing here?

I don't belong here

Case in point. This isn't reddit, and song lyrics aren't funny or insightful.

Well they are more funny and insightful than the millionth “HN is Reddit” comment

"Imagine a Star Wars forum full of people saying Star Wars sucks."

Then you might be surprised. I'm old enough to remember Episode I and the ... love for Jar-Jar shortly after the release of the movie.

During my teens I used to hang out on a Naruto fan forum, and it eventually became a Naruto hate forum. Understandable though, because the serie really sucked after a while. The memes and essays were fun.

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I disagree with _that_ being the turn of events. In my experience, the conversation has died because everything turns into either: "That article was written by LLM" or "how this relates to LLM"

My perception is that HN got pickier, more hostile, less listening and more "broadcast-only mode" writing, progressively, over several years. It got more zealots, more shills, and a smaller fraction that was actual genuine conversation.

And then LLM happened. And HN got more LLM writing, more LLM articles, more complaints about LLM-written material, plus AI became a dominant subject of conversation. LLM is in addition to the other negative changes.

I'm here because there's zero gate to signing up and ocmmenting.

I'd bet the closure of other walled gardens like reddit drives traffic more than anything of content.

These comment sections follow the same trajectory of all comment sections since the birth of the internet.

just a side note: HN is just a well laid out site thats easy to read and easy to comment on. i find reddit hard to use, making me click to see more comments and then taking me to a new page and disrupting my flow, yuk.

>My perception is that HN got pickier,

While HN is part of the set, I think we need to look larger. Is it just HN, or is it everywhere? If it's not everywhere, what percentage of sites is it? What are the sites that don't have this issue like or do different.

I think part of it is that HN has grown a lot because of a lot of other sites getting worse. The problem is that growing makes it worse. Then add on top of that there are a lot of high value targets here on HN that bots try to target, financially or politically.

Internet is a messy place now. I remember years and years ago, like early 2000s people thought that things like astro-turfing weren't real, and governments were not targeting individuals/groups on forums. How nieve their were.

I don't think accepting that the rest of the Internet became more hostile is a good defense IMO. I understand it's probably a "top of funnel" problem but the fact that it's leaking out here shows that HN needs to evolve with the new norms.

HN's entire thing is to not evolve with the new norms.

Well yes and no. It has an LLM detector now (which has some false positives I've noticed but I'm generally a big fan of.) I'm advocating for changing this position. I understand minimal change but I think the time to not evolve is gone if the forum doesn't want to get blown away by outside trends.

I would argue that LLM is not an addiction, it’s a negativity multiplier, as it lowered the barrier of entry for low quality content and promotional material

> It got more zealots, more shills, and a smaller fraction that was actual genuine conversation.

While it has always been a thing on here to some degree, the one growing trend I will note is that people are increasingly more forceful in demanding that everyone know about the things they aren't interested in, and more demanding that other people don't talk about things that don't interest them.

It's like people can't just skip a submission on the front page. They absolutely must go in to every discussion to tell everyone how much they don't want to read about or talk about that subject, and how much they want everyone to stop talking about it.

It's tilting at windmills. Right now this can mostly be seen in AI discussions where just about every AI-related submission will have a number of people declaring that it's all so boring and they wish there was an HN ban on such submissions. Cue someone foolishly believing them making yet another "HN without the AI" variant that sits unloved.

But the same thing could previously be seen against things that people don't want to be a thing. When WWDC happens people will announce that they're sick of all of the Apple news. The same for Google during I/O. Etc. People are against some thing and they really, truly think they can shame or scold others into falling in line.

This is what my analysis [1] so far supports. It's not really a topic distribution. The temperature in comments here is rising. I suspect that's changing a lot of the site culture.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225117

A couple years ago it was all about blockchain or complaining about blockchain. I think hyped technology just gets tiring really fast.

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Yeah? You reckon they are on the same level? I wasn't there but I find it hard to believe people were as worried about PHP as they are blindly prompting an LLM for 10 hours a day.

For a period it was endless NoSQL submissions. Then endless Anti-NoSQL submissions. Then there was the Ruby period where every Ruby release yielded endless submissions and murmurations. Then that turned to Go. Then, as you said, how we all needed to become blockchain experts and everything was going to be built on blockchains, also did you see some random retailer uses a payment processor that through a long and convoluted process will let you pay with BTC?

At every juncture there have been people reminiscing about the good old days that never actually existed at all. About how great it used to be compared to day.

I think the funniest are the constant "man, remember when the BIGS used to engage with us proles?" Ignoring that there are still many founders and the like hanging out here, present, future and past, what a weird thing to reminisce about. It's like "I used to be in the presence of people who mattered". I mean, matter yourself, because pretending you're in a club with them is foolhardy.

The prevalence of blockchain-related tangents then is nowhere near the amount of LLM discussion injected into every topic today, it's not even close.

the amount of money invested into AI is far in excess of the blockchain

and LLMs are good for only a few things, one is shitposting

And here is another thread of people picking at each other.

i was going to agree with you but before doing that I went to Algolia to confirm that this was the case [^0]

it is definitely not the case

This year's most popular posts are mostly about AI. That was not the case for 2020 [^1], 2018 [^2], 2016 [^3] or 2014 [^4].

[^0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1798502400&dateRange=custom&...

[^1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1609113600&dateRange=custom&...

[^2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1545868800&dateRange=custom&...

[^3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1482710400&dateRange=custom&...

[^4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1419465600&dateRange=custom&...

> In my experience, the conversation has died because everything turns into either: "That article was written by LLM" or "how this relates to LLM"

Which is why every few days, I have to post a comment along the lines of:

"At some point in the future, the obsession with whether something was written by AI or not will be classified as a mental disorder."

I get downvoted every time, but it's refreshing to know others share my gripe that it is tiring to virtually every day see this discussion play out in some HN thread or other. Those threads rarely add anything to the discussion.

Yes. Those are the choicest comments, and they still occur.

HN has long been extremely variable by submission:

The more general or mainstream or meta, the more reddit-like posts there are.

The more technical or mathematical or niche, the less.

Interesting. I felt like after the election HN "tech bros" were just more "tech bro", and those of us who think most of these technocrats are repugnant stopped censoring ourselves.

Yes. Those are the choicest comments; they still occur.

HN is extremely variable by submission:

The more general or mainstream or meta, the more reddit-like posts there are.

The more technical or mathematical or niche, the less.

> Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.

More specifically: comments with an opinion and no justification are modded up. "PHP is garbage" or "Person X is a terrible person" used to be considered noise. Not because they were right or wrong, but because "PHP is a language that can't keep a consistent function names and argument poisitoning in it's own standard library" or "Person X is a terrible person because their engineering milestones are frequently delayed".

Dan or whoever will throw out "everyone one every site always thinks the site's going downhill" but it is, really.

You'll find founders and "interesting" well-connected people commenting here and there still; it's a big reason why I still use this site over Reddit (where the SNR is much lower)