Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb.
Either way, I enjoyed it while it lasted. Thanks for the Office series!
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Why can’t you? There’s a logical leap in this statement I don’t follow.
"Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:"
...
26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars.
27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <---
28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either.
...
You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me.
I still get a ton of value out of HN, even after over 15 years. I visit multiple times a day, and genuinely enjoy reading articles and comments, and joining the comment threads myself. It's not perfect; there's certainly annoying crap, bad-faith posters, trolls, spam, LLM-generated junk, etc. But (with the exception of the LLM-generated junk) none of that is new since I first started hanging out here. Overall the quality of discussion (like this one!) is still quite high, and there isn't another news/interest/discussion site on the internet where I spend anywhere near as much time, even after 15+ years.
(I'm not going to argue about whether or not it has "peaked", since that's not a particularly useful measure. If quality is a scale from 0-100, and we already hit 100 but are now hovering around 80, stably, then who cares if the peak is in the past? The quality is still fine.)
There’s a famous email exchange—I’m sure you’re familiar with it—where someone writes to Steve Jobs complaining about a bunch of things Apple was doing, and they go back and forth a few times, and Steve Jobs finally gets annoyed and writes back, "By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations?" HN these days is absolutely full of people who don’t seem to do anything but criticize others’ work and belittle their motivations.
I’m not saying that HN never had unfair criticisms in the good old days—the “middlebrow dismissal” has been a trope here for a very long time—but we didn’t use to have entire threads filled with nothing but middlebrow dismissals. And we also had tons of people criticizing Apple, but then again most of them were complaining that Apple was actively interfering with their attempts to create things (e.g. the uproar over arbitrary and unfair App Store moderation policies).
The clearest indicators of decline to me have been the signs of evaporative cooling. Maybe I’m falling into a different common fallacy by saying this, but I do think HN was a lot better when the old regulars—yourself included—were more active. I don’t exactly blame you guys, but it is an indicator.