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Ribbonfarm Is Retiring

(www.ribbonfarm.com)
177 points Arubis | 4 comments | 19 Oct 24 19:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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blfr ◴[19 Oct 24 21:23 UTC] No.41890886[source]▶
It seems to me that the blogosphere was not a ZIRP but rather a young Internet phenomenon. Which could exists, like usenet before it, when mere access to it was a filtering mechanism.

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-...

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bartread ◴[19 Oct 24 21:31 UTC] No.41890931[source]▶
> Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb.

Why can’t you? There’s a logical leap in this statement I don’t follow.

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rogers12 ◴[19 Oct 24 21:50 UTC] No.41891017[source]▶
Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. The Eternal September effect has been getting stronger ever since it's first been observed.
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whatshisface ◴[19 Oct 24 22:00 UTC] No.41891097{3}[source]▶
>It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience.

"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.

...

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rogers12 ◴[19 Oct 24 22:19 UTC] No.41891229{4}[source]▶
This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.

You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.

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1. gyomu ◴[20 Oct 24 02:33 UTC] No.41892468{5}[source]▶
There's an interesting phenomenon where any time a long time HN user says that discussion quality has been declining (something many have reported), a moderator will essentially say that people have been claiming that for as long as they've been moderating, but that it does not match their observations.

I've always found that contradiction interesting (and puzzling).

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2. kelnos ◴[20 Oct 24 05:03 UTC] No.41892988[source]▶
My theory is that it's two things:

1. People change. My HN account is 15 years old, and my interests and ambitions and tolerances are not the same as they were in 2009, when I was 28 years old and in a very different place in my life. When you interact with something for many many years, even if that thing stays exactly the same, you change, and think differently about it.

2. The site changes, too, of course. They aren't necessarily bad changes (and often I would say they're good changes!), but people sometimes associate change with negative feelings, especially with something they have an emotional attachment to or at least have been a part of for a long time.

Mind you, I don't think discussion quality has been declining here. In many ways I think it has been improving, or at the very least staying the same under a barrage of new users, higher scale, and low-effort LLM-generated comments.

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3. plorkyeran ◴[20 Oct 24 05:55 UTC] No.41893201[source]▶
In 2010 I found the average HN comment far more insightful and likely to be true than I do in 2024. I am fairly certain that this is almost entirely due to me changing, and not the content of the site. At a very basic level my views on the concept of a VC funded startup is so very different now from what it was in 2010 that I would certainly interpret all of those discussions very differently now.

When Google takes me to a very old discussion on HN I am usually surprised by how similar they are to threads from today, even if some of the specific viewpoints in vogue are different.

4. jart ◴[20 Oct 24 06:29 UTC] No.41893355[source]▶
I also joined HN in 2009 and I agree with you. HN isn't perfect but it's about as respectful and intelligent of an organic community as it gets on the public web. When I do analytics on my blog, an upvote on HN is worth 10 on Reddit. Manipulative paywalled media pieces usually stay off the front page. I love how when I read news about a famous CEO like Matt Mullenweg, I can see him commenting here like the rest of us. I also think we're very fortunate to have dang running things.