The crazy thing is the amount of material being hidden - I'm seeing almost 200-300 submissions being blocked a day, and it is these submissions that appear to be driving the bulk of conversation on HN now.
You might just be witnessing the backlash to YC's increased investment in defense and surveillance companies. In general, the startup pendulum is shifting away from the populist B2C status quo we used to have during the SaaS days.
Here's a past approach that proved successful for some time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4102013
I tried a call to action years ago and all Dang told me basically summed up to "become more active on HN".
At this point I think active filtering on my own is the only solution, as the guidelines around tone and conduct increasingly don't appear to be enforced anymore.
But maybe calling out some notable examples would be useful.
Established public figures here know how to play it. Everyone else either uses it as a temporary means for virality or are just here to hotbox the forum while it still stands.
In the meantime I hope your filter turns into something you think is worth making public. I have a 'concept of a plan' for an alternative but it would take some time and would not be a Show HN.
And we'll see. If I refine it well enough, I'll try to create a more generalized ruleset that anyone can use as they so wish.
This would be useful. As of right now it looks like HN is leaving that sort of analysis up to its users. Which is fine. But if this is going to be the case then a coordinated effort is necessary to help spring the mods to action.
But because of their "business model", they seem to care now only about retaining a critical mass of users (over everything else), nevermind that a large percentage of them are just worthless bots/shills/propagandists/etc. This is the poison pill for all social networks.
Basically, they have given up on their initial slogan of "news for hackers" and have now become a catch-all bucket with a heavy emphasis on everything AI which is rather a shame.
My general gripe with the level of discourse here isn't necessarily topical as much it is based on my impression that the community has reached some sort of Dunning-Kruger-Dunbar number where the threshold of people knowledgeable in some areas who engage in curious debate in other areas has been breached by people who think the purpose of the site is winning arguments/handwringing and other nefarious actors.
"Better mad with the crowd than sane all alone".
-- Aphorism 133, "The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence" by Baltasar Gracian trans. Jeremy Robbins.
1. is this topic "technical" (ie. Directly related to the day job of a software engineer, electrical engineer, computer engineer, computer science). If so allow.
2. Does this topic give advice on how to drive GTM? If so allow.
Everything else I'm hard hiding so it is somewhat lossy, but I don't need to read discourse about zeitgeist about "VC" or politics from random HNers who don't know what a vintage is or what an LA does.
I could go more precise with my rules and filtering, but it's good enough for me.
I haven't thought of a solution for account filtering yet though and some accounts (a couple of whom are on this thread as well) are deeply aggravating.
The difference today is that the hottest technology has also become a hot button culture war item that has for the first time split the tech community in half. This in turn creates comment sections that turn into ideological flame wars.
You could find a ask hn for ever year since inception pontificating about how the site has changed and yearning for the old hackernews.
I've been running analytics on HN recently. It's all getting prepped into a bigger blog post, but for now this is just my observations.
HN is:
* More hostile every year, with a huge inflection point after COVID
* Talking less about STEM (and moderately less about business/finance) and more about politics every year, with the biggest inflection change around COVID
* Decreasing the number of sentences and words in each post year on year.
* An increasing amount of positive or negative sentiment comments with a sharp rise in 2024
* Always a higher number of negative comments than positive comments, with a sharp rise in negative comments in 2024
The trajectory of HN does not look good. Today's HN is getting more hostile, more negative, more political, and has shorter more off-the-cuff comments than it used to.
But in all honesty I don't think there's any way to fix this without fundamentally changing the site. It's no coincidence that so much of the site changed over COVID. In my experience, anonymous and pseudonymous online communities all became much more hostile from COVID onward. Those are just the people that hang out online these days. Any change to counteract this would probably involve fundamentally changing HN's rules, ranking, and sorting. My guess is the mods have largely "given up" on this and treat HN as a sort of maintenance node community, in a sort of late stage management role.
1. Things have always been this way.
2. Read the guidelines. They have always been this way.
3. Follow the guidelines. You are off-topic.
4. Email us at hn@ycombi etc.
Been here for much longer than most, frankly.
I mean, I guess we all just pick up our ball and go to lobsters? HN has turned to dregs and every time we call it out we are warned. So of what use is it than to mindlessly ramble with burner accounts and nothing to lose? The old “even Reddit is better” holds true. Oh no, I guess I broke the guidelines by comparing to Reddit. That’s a paddlin’.
Try fucking moderating the site once in awhile, ffs.
Tomhow getting into a back and forth with me, ignoring what I’m saying and without at all reading the room is on brand. Hold on let me email you instead, Tom. I wasn’t clear the first five thread levels. Yeah that’ll do it.