HN on second day from launch

Clickbait titles, useful advice "how to track user's mouse movement" (!!) , and Europe's osteoporosis. Good times though; for me Hacker news has lost a lot of its appeal in the past 4-5 years, as for some reason it has become overly political and "suits-oriented". I used to read a lot of technical commentary, which i now find on reddit instead.

True, but a lot of the linked pages 404. Not so at the archive.org page.

I so rarely come across a commenter who shares this opinion that I feel like I want to hug you. Hacker news has declined in quality. The most precipitous drop in my opinion was right after all the buzz about Facebook becoming less popular, musk joining mastodon and everyone in the comments brainstorming about alternative social media schemes. After that things really took a dive.

I think it has to do with the influx of new programmers and the growth of programming as an industry. Programming is becoming easier and more mainstream so the natural result is the ratio of excellent people to disappointing people changing for the worse. computer forums no longer intrisincly filter out stupid people.

Googling “reddit alternative,” HN is on of the first results.

I find lobste.rs to still be good. It probably has to do with the fact that you need an invite to post there.

I’m really scared and disappointed by HNs decline. HN is the only good intellectual watering hole on the internet as far as I know, and I have looked. If HN were to continue getting worse or if it shut down, it would be a huge loss for me.

I’ve considered starting a new website, filling it with a hand-curated pool of users gathered from around the internet, and then launching an invite system. Lobsters isn’t good enough because it focuses too narrowly on web development and also people are really afraid to comment there because they might mar their image or get their invite revoked, I think. I believe there is a very large amount of arbitrage when it comes to online communities.

There is so much arbitrage! A new Wikipedia that’s actually good at teaching rather than just being a reference book for experts. Social sites that differentiate between curation, storing and fluid, in-flux communication and exchange. And most of all, using new techniques for raising the quality of content and comments. The space of incentive schemes is virtually boundless and there are def some veins of gold out there.

It's still as bad as it always was, if that's what you mean. :P

http://hckrnews.com/ is much better.

> More decentralized sites (like the one you proposed with hand curated content) will crop up. I'm personally investigating the Linus Tech Tips forum as an HN alternative since it seems to have the maker and hacker vibes that I used to see here (and on Reddit and JCXP before I found HN).

What if gasp mailing lists made a come back? The longer I exist, the longer I realize I don't want the next iteration of Facebook, Reddit, Hacker News, or whatever comes after and uses IPFS and Filecoin for the foundation. I just want high signal and civil discussion in my inbox with a firm but benevolent dictator moderating. So, HN, but through my email client.