Where are we going again?

We don't have to go anywhere. It's the joy of trying new ways to communicate and having feedback.

So we're going nowhere. We're just running in circles. Social circles, I guess.

Back to the safety of IRC - #hackernews freenode

It doesn't have to be this way.

If the platform is designed to cluster the users based on their interests automatically, you'd have early adopters and normal people co-existing without bothering each other.

That's what I'm working on now.

Let's see how (or if) Quora or HN follow that path.

Well, HN used to be much more technical early on, so I'm sure some would argue it's already happened.

Long gone are the days of waking up to a front page full of Erlang posts in an attempt to scare off the general public whenever there was press about HN. I think it's been accepted that HN is more just general interest about startups these days.

I don't think that HN is less technical than it used to be. It has always had mixed content. Perceptions of it are perennially mixed as well—someone was just asking me why there hasn't been much startup news on HN lately.

I still think HN is full of mostly relevant discussion and a good bit of it is higher quality than you find elsewhere. I really think it's still reddit before reddit became mainstream. Reddit was technical/intellectually focused from what I remember. Now it's a bunch of trolls in most places (some sub reddits seem to avoid this). Hopefully HN is niche enough to stay about where it is now.

I don't know, as I'm writing this there are about 7-10 posts that are actually technical on the front page. The rest are product announcements or fluff tech articles from Wired. Actually, some of these technical posts (like GHC passes in Coq) are feature announcements as well.

That's not to say I don't enjoy HN, it's great, but I certainly could use less of the "Show HN" startup announcements on the front page or techcrunch articles that are about nothing.

I really think this is whatever that bias is where we rewrite our memories to match how we feel about the past.

As long as we're taking random samples, let's see what, say, November 2010 looked like:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101119073443/http://news.ycomb...

How about March 2008? (I'm picking these arbitrarily...)

https://web.archive.org/web/20080327223917/http://news.ycomb...

If either of those front pages showed up today, people would be complaining very loudly about HN's steep decline.

Yeah, I guess the takeaway is that Wired and Techcrunch have been terrible for a long time ;)

I still find both of those archive grabs more interesting. They're certainly not all posts just for the neckbeards, that's not what ever drew me to HN, but they don't lean so heavy towards "Show HN: Please look at my startup".

I don't really see Quora ever getting the regular Joes.

I think it has already.

My feed now looks like this:

What should a 22 year old do with $3000

What should a 23 year old do with $2000

What should a 25 year old do with $5000

on and on and on.

A few years ago, it would have been "How can/should spending and saving evolve over a person's life?"

I know that's a specific and perhaps pedantic example, but there's been a definite shift in the vibe on Quora, from a place where users hoped to contribute insight, to a place where users feel entitled to receive it.

Agreed. Killed the e-mails with toplists from Quora some time ago. Too much bs.

I also think it has happened already: I want to search for questions about the big bang, I'm typing lazily, expecting the system to auto complete my intent; but when I am at "big b", the suggestions are: "big brother", "big breasts", and "big booty".

The kinds of conversations I have seen on Quora and arguments about god and other things have led me to believe it's already kind of overrun with silliness.

that is a very fair statement