I haven't been browsing this site for more than like a year, but have found it one of the places on the internet where political discourse seems to be relatively tame and good-faith for the most part. I've also learned a lot from the blog posts you mentioned and really knowledgeable comments on them.
Is it really worse now?
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Yes, it used to be much more optimistic and less cynical.
As someone who was here since day two of the public launch, I'm not sure how true this is. It's true the conversation has changed, but less cynical? More optimistic?
The cynicism and optimism seems to have stayed more or less constant. The quality of conversation is the problem.
Luckily, quality tends to bubble to the top, barring manual intervention that occasionally makes a few (few) mistakes. So far.
The extremes are true: I've increasingly felt that people here are disconnected from reality in a way not seen in previous years. I'm not quite sure how to put it into words, and it deserves a substantive eloquence beyond my capabilities at the moment.
Are there any places similar to HN on the internet where one can find high quality, non political, non religious, non news conversations?
Head over to lobste.rs, not much activity but it fits your description.
HN's political discourse has been quite unpleasant since last couple of years. Used to be quite a gamut of perspectives, now it is completely lopsided.
Worth noting you have to be invited to join Lobste.rs (by a current member). I'm not one, but the discussions there are often interesting - IME about half the stories I've seen here first and on those stories in general the Lobsters threads are a bit more technical and a bit more focused.
I quite like the 'what are you doing this weekend threads' it feels very small-community-like. [But that might just be that I've often felt a lack of tech community - as an example, I've used Linux for >20 years and don't have anyone in my life I could have a conversation about it with like you might chat to a neighbour/friend about pruning a tree or fixing your car.]
The political downvoting has also increased dramatically.
> HN's political discourse has been quite unpleasant since last couple of years.
Here we totally disagree.
Before people used to be banned without explanation, some views would be downvoted heavily etc.
Today it is better: there is even room for republican voices as long as they are reasonable.
And yes, I've been here over a decade.
"I think we're more cynical"
"I think we're less"
"I'd say it's the same"
It should be pretty straightforward to actually figure this out by sampling posts from different HN "eras" and doing sentiment analysis.
What's the standard practice for sentiment analysis these days?
Agreed.
> I've increasingly felt that people here are disconnected from reality in a way not seen in previous years.
Well, I don’t think that is surprising given the rise of popularity of HN. The early days had people interested in startups, and hence their virtues, and later came a large crowd that had some interest in tech but had random alignments.
I feel that human beliefs form a distribution where almost anything will believed by someone, and if you gather a large enough crowd you can find a large cohort that will earnestly believe various nonsense things.
I've been part of this community, and slashdot before it, for more than 20 years. The shifts in attitude are huge.
To start with a tech-focused example: there used to be at least a sizeable minority in favour of GPL licensing, vs. MIT, and people on both sides of the issue had at least some familiarity with it. Today, I see comments where people seem unable to even grasp the idea that anyone would consider the GPL.
Since it's difficult to believe someone would actually forget so much on an issue of importance to them, I believe it's changing audiences rather than the initial audience getting older. Or, alternatively, the tech sector simply expanding by several orders of magnitude, and any people who have been in it being drowned out.
This is somewhat noticeable on issues of social justice: all the major tech companies still have policies to promote participation by groups that were traditionally marginalised. But you wouldn't expect that from the comments here, Gamergate would still be filed in the ethics-in-journalism-dept', if that joke had survived.
It's tame in that people will opine that women are too stupid for IT, but they will do so very politely.
HN moderators are very proud of being accused at roughly equal rates from both of the US political tribes. That's the sort of triangulation leading to false balance even local journalists have managed to pick up over the last decade, where they still exist.
I'd really prefer if they flipped a coin and grew a spine. Is George Soros eating babies or not? Answering that question with a shrug isn't neutrality. For anyone in a position of even minor power over the discourse, it's dereliction of duty.
Practically, it means that any even barely political question on HN is discussed on a level where I could write both sides of the discourse in my sleep. If it's SF housing it's going to be "you don't want homeless people around where you life if you have children" vs. "you do know not all homeless people are violent, right?".
In the process, everyone retreats to their corners. The "virus lab leak" idea, in its first incarnation, was not something I'd be willing to explore, because allowing any possibility of it would immediately be weaponised by people pushing the idea that it was an intentional release of a biological weapon, an idea with completely different ramifications that was, nonetheless, superficially similar and closely linked.
Any tread on COVID is 90% fighting over "it's just the flu" (very beginning), then hydroxywhatever, and lately ivermectinopleasedont. In that regard, I truly doubt the comments are representative of even the readership of HN, let alone the US public, and even less the world's public.
Opinion on "mainstream media" is probably the most out-of-wack compared to opinions generally voiced in polite company. It's enough for a story to be published by the NYT to get a dozen comments often not even arguing that, but assuming everyone agrees with, the idea that everything they write is a lie. This may be an outcrop of the single uniting characteristic of commenters: they love to be contrarian. So much so, on this issue they all agree. "Actually", they tell each other with the mannerisms of a big truth being revealed, "I am much too smart to believe what everyone is believing". And if that means water isn't wet, so be it.
Yeah, it is. To put it bluntly, it's a lot of internet boomers venting about how everything is terrible.