zlacker

>>uuilly+(OP)
I realized a long time ago that indignation about political issues was for forums what bad currency is in Gresham's law. We actively compensate for that in various ways. Sometimes when an issue seems a genuinely big deal and/or of particular interest to hackers, we compensate less. It's always a judgment call. But don't worry, if HN declines through indignation about "issues," it won't be by default. We've fended that off for years, and I'm optimistic we'll continue to.

>>pg+C6
You do it with the stories, by weighting them manually. You do not do it with the commenters. But there are factions of commenters who are introduced to the site by following stories onto it, and they stay, they promote bad sources, and they inject both politics and a particular inflammatory mode of debate into all the threads.

There are overwhelmingly more people on the site saying quality has degraded sharply --- most of them citing politics as one of the reasons --- than there are people defending it. Also, a close look at the people who do defend the current quality of the site might be instructive.

>>tptace+md
The decline is because there are more people on the site, not because of politics per se. The same thing happened to Reddit: success leads to growth leads to lower average user IQ.

>>mcante+Vi
> The same thing happened to Reddit: success leads to growth leads to lower average user IQ.

Are you sure it's IQ, or as another user suggested, some kind of mass hysteria?

The mainstream news exploded with the whole NSA thing, and then HN did too.

Is that a function of IQ?

>>antitr+IH
>Are you sure it's IQ, or as another user suggested, some kind of mass hysteria?

What's sort of mass hysteria has been suggested?

>The mainstream news exploded with the whole NSA thing, and then HN did too. Is that a function of IQ?

My IQ reference was about the general decline in HN/Reddit comment quality, not about concern with the NSA on HN/Redditm which I think is a healthy thing. Being interested in the fact that someone is collecting one's private communication is a rational security concern.

>>mcante+641
I wouldn't use the term IQ, it can be a bit misleading. High IQ individuals can squander their time arguing about frivolous nonsense (I went to school with a couple of guys like that). Average IQ folk can be thoughtful and engaging.

What's happening is a kind of evaporative-cooling effect- specifically, the very natural rise of cheap wit and sensationalism. These things trigger upvotes more easily. Pithy answers and responses get rewarded quicker by larger crowds, and this discourages the carefully-evaluated-and-reasoned answer.

We don't have to bring IQ into the picture when making sense of this phenomenon, so let's not do that.