Reminds me of on interaction a few months ago where I mentioned the left-right spectrum in passing and someone accused me of making HN a worse place, only to call me a "snowflake" in their very next response! As usual, "things shouldn't be so political" is often uttered from a highly-political sense of discomfort. The quintessential example for me was its usage in US anti-desegregation rhetoric in the 1960s, alongside its resurgence in the anti-DEI movement today -- demanding that no one discuss our shared institutions is too often an endorsement of them, rather than an honest effort to focus on something else.

"toward the left" aside, it's always a little frustrating to read the ubiquitous "this place sucks" comments on here and Reddit. I have tons of problems with HN--both petty (markdown when??) and fundamental (SV/PE has metastasized in a discomforting way...)--but I'm still here because I love it, and think it's one of the best communities the internet has to offer.

Specific critiques of specific people or ideas are always welcome, but comments like "everyone here is curmudgeonly" just makes me wonder why they bother to log on in the first place...

We've seen the same kinds of discourse arrive here as is common on other social media sites, where too much political discourse is just signaling what tribe you belong to and vilifying anyone outside it.

Haven’t people been saying that since the late 2000’s?

Its alright, were not all like that. I found the site cute, at least there are people standing up to the bullshit. I have been blogging about it on my site to https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/

I do feel like 40-50% signal ratio is still good compared to 90%

HN did give me some leads in the start of just cool things to follow and I have been able to make an understanding of what things interest me and what don't due to it. And this has also been the reason I read a lot of comments etc. and content here, maybe more than I should.

I don't know to me, building my own website and forum etc. are possible but they feel complicated and I still can't seem to get eye balls. On Hackernews Comments its easier personally to write something, get feedback on it, (improve?/learn?)

Of course if one wants to optimize for eyeballs, they can probably go for reddit or twitter maxxing or similar because cmon this is exactly the stuff the article is talking about from what I see.

Hackernews does indeed sit on the perfect spot. I feel like if you want more informationally dense topics, perhaps lobsters can be good for ya.

https://lobste.rs/

The site that is really, insufferably toxic is LinkedIn.

Whereabout you plan to move?

>No it hasn't.

I'm sorry, is it a 5 minute argument, or the full half-hour?

It's useless without describing concrete, practical solutions to those problems.

What do the voters want? Zero taxes, no crime, world peace and infinite benefits.

It's easy to identify things as shitty because the above doesn't describe the world yet and thus it's a banal observation. Implementing real, practical improvements is really hard and requires much more thought and consideration and introduces the possibility of failure. Which is why that part isn't discussed as much.

Constantly? As if it were a psychological compulsion? So often that dang had to make a guideline about it, which no one even attempts to follow?

Two actually - the guideline against being "curmudgeonly" is separate from the guideline against going on a tilt because you get triggered by any website that doesn't look and act as much like plaintext as possible.

And yet if someone so much as cracks a joke they get rapped across the knuckles and lectured about a rule that doesn't actually exist (no humor allowed)?

Yes, that's negative. That's a culture of performative misanthropy.

I will even go as far as stating that it is one of the only few places left on the Internet where you can see differing opinions interleave in a not-completely destructive manner. Really no idea what OP is talking about because it has not been at all my experience.

I am not sure, I would say I just joined hackernews for a year so I don't know the whole situation.

but the way I see it, If I assume you are correct, hackernews is in a bit of rough spot because there was this one comment which did some analysis and it feels like hackernews is definitely saturating a bit/(peaked?)

From my personal experience, I feel like we all just use reddit (as the article says) and so we just deal with the annoyances with it and not look for anything else. Or perhaps we join some discord communities.

If people who are within Hackernews are resonating this statement, its in a tough spot because people say such things.

Perhaps, its that Hackernews grew too big for some people and its too small for others. Perhaps one side's currently on reddit not even knowing about it and the other's complaining it on hackernews

And perhaps there's also a middle sweet spot where people aren't complaining but nobody hears them either because they got nothing to complain.

But from the outside what people see are other people complaining about hackernews on hackernews. Same goes for redditors too I guess.

I checked your comment and it says 5 months, I had been assuming you were here for years from the tone but perhaps I was wrong.

I don't know but to me hackernews felt like an information arbitrage of sorts which had these tid-bits of info which made me feel better if I ever were to do somethings like this or gave me confidence in myself in finding the right tool for the right job

If you are tired of hackernews, I would suggest you to open up a fediverse lemmy instance about anything related to hackernews because of the masses perhaps, then you would have less people but more signal since clearly someone would be interested if you create a lemmy instance about similar topics to hackernews but the problem then becomes is if that thing stays idle.

I see your concerns but do you have any suggestions, I see dang and others around here, I am sure if they could do something about it, they probably would?