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.
1. Why is it not a cause to worry if Hacker News declines at all? It doesn't matter if it happens by default when it does happen. It might not be reversible.
2. Corollary to that, I believe it has happened. During the NSA scandal, I tried to do what I could to dispel what could best be described as hysteria. I don't believe the majority of people on Hacker News can be described by hysteria, but a hugely vocal minority can be, and they direct the movements of the front page.
3. I am not pessimistic about Hacker News, I don't like to believe the forum is succumbing to the inexorable march of time, or some such. And I'm not going to soapbox comparisons to reddit. However, I don't think optimism is enough. You don't seem to be particularly concerned about this, but I see sentiments of concern at least daily in some form or another.
I understand I'm not a powerhouse of karma and influence here on Hacker News, but I've tried twice to raise proposals for some sort of change to the political atmosphere of the forum. It hasn't worked. What else do you have but optimism, to put it bluntly?
EDIT: When I joined Hacker News in 2011, I wasn't as savvy to the mechanics of the forum as I am now. I thought that the front page being dominated by political fads every few months or so was just regular. But in being here to the present, I've seen that it has only gotten worse from 2011 to 2013, and in reading archives/the comments of senior members, I can see how this pattern developed. That's why I've tried before to submit a proposal to the changes thread.
I submit that it doesn't matter if politics can be intellectually gratifying or even relevant, as per the guidelines. It's categorically unrelated to startups or technology, save for being indirectly so in occasional cases when those two topics scale. Whatever benefit comes with political discourse is eliminated by the sheer level of scathing derision that comes from combatting sides debating the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_i_see_it
You don't need data. I know, that's an unpopular phrase to say on a forum like Hacker News - but seriously, if you were alive at the keyboard on HN during the NSA debacle, you shouldn't need to ask for data. Whether there were 100 or 10 people poisoning the discussion with political strife, they were certainly the most vocal and noticeable. Their comments were easily upvoted because they were full of pathos and emphatic calls to action. As I wrote in my reply to pg here, I don't think it's enough to do what's being done now with stories - there should be a user filtering system. Restricting posts somehow could be good, but I also understand that we don't want to turn the forum into some sort of elaborate rule system.
I also believe the problem is intimately related to karma farming, and also intimately related to overpopulation. Hacker News is a fond ideal, but I don't believe it scales. Not without changes at least. I know that might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it's true.
The best option that I can see is to allow users to mark a post as 'off-topic' in addition to 'flag'. Subtract the off-topic count in some fashion and generate second set of rankings. Then allow users to chose between the normal front-page and the filtered front-page.
It would not split the community into have/have-nots and it would enable a little self-selected filtering. It feels like a general enough case that it would have merit across a wide range of posts.
It would also provide a lot more information upon which to make judgment calls.
Fascinating site you've got going. This is the only place where I can actually stand to read the comments.
In addition to the politics, I've noticed what feels like a bifurcation in age or maturity with stories and commenters. My working narrative is that much of the negativity is immaturity from HN's endless september of college and high school students, although I know that's likely incomplete as many simple narratives are. Also, something about reading a blog post with a "Discuss on HN" link at the bottom irks me to the point I feel like the content isn't so much about improving understanding as it is to generate clicks and drive traffic. I am not a fan of personal brands or personalities in any industry, though it feels like many come here to create one.
The issues I see are related to people and their behavior in the community and not the HN site or features. I believe the best way to nudge the community back to neutral is with more people correcting or excluding the negative behavior.
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?
And while overly emotional topics are certainly bad currency in a large group -- no doubt about that -- I find it weird that we think we can talk about helping people suffering from starvation, slavery, lack of electricity, and all kinds of other problems and not be able to discuss the impact of the technology we create in the privacy and anonymity realms. I'd go so far as to say it's purposefully myoptic. Seems like all sorts of things are fair game -- as long as it doesn't show us the results of our own work too closely. We'll talk about any problems but the ones we helped create.
I wish HN the best of luck, and I certainly don't want flame wars or policy advocacy here. But hell, we're not morons. Or robots. If you want all that gossipy SV crap on the front page, you're going to have to take some other stuff you don't like as much. People vote based on emotional impact of stories. I can't see how you "fix" HN by continuous tweaking, making the system non-intuitive and frustrating.
Perhaps the best thing to do is go back to just tech and business. But even then, I find it impossible to believe that we can continue to live in some kind of artificial bubble where uncomfortable topics from the outside world never appear. If that's the plan, good luck with that.
Offtopic, but I've considered adding such a link to my own blog before--not to "generate clicks and drive traffic", but--since I don't have inline comments--simply to give people something to click through if they want to comment on a post of mine without breaking flow. If you know where "the" discussion for your post will be happening, why not just link to it?
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.
Not counting talent acquisition and buying/investing into startups
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.
In the good old days, there was usenet... and it felt nice that there was only one place to discuss say a particular subject - and meet with those interested, and specialists within that realm. I couldn't stand the scurge of online forums as it scattered the conversations all over the place. And you also end up with the same conversations and realisations happening in different places. This could be negated if you did a little online homework, and posted a link to someone elses comment that perhaps was inline with yours. Kind of like a +1. But hunting down other comments and trawling through forums isn't efficient or particularly easy so I guess this isn't really that practical.
Anyway the point is that these conversations are happening elsewhere all over the place. So how do you seed/promote the piece and the ensuing conversation in the first place? And how do others know where the conversation is taking place. You could possibly provide a search for backlinks to your article.
It's kind of a shame that everyone doesn't have their own blog, and within their blog they just make a comment referring to what they've read elsewhere, and that link becomes available to read somehow from your article. This could be handled by the browser alone, it could do this by default - in a 'Elsewhere' panel for instance, by doing something like searching for backlinks etc. Pingbacks go some way, but they could be quite distracting.
I'm not sure how eternal HN comments are. Not hosting comments yourself puts you at the mercy of others.
Plus I'm not sure how polite any of this is. Hey myself and others are coming over to your place to discuss matters.
I personally don't have my own blog, I just throw comments into the wind on the web. If I were to host my own blog, I probably wouldn't add a comment system for fear that I'd want to censor or moderate them! But I'd welcome feedback.
My preference may be to have people email me their thoughts and for me to then add feedback to articles at a later time. This might be a little burdensome and not practical whatsoever.
To many the discussion is in part the article. And it feels too difficult to be at every table at the same time.
You could be absent from the conversation and leave your right to reply for a post mortem on your posts. You could do that by hunting down comments and discussions after the fact.
Who'll go back and how will they know to read your post mortem anyway?
It reminds me why I'm not a blogger or a journalist!