Unapolgetically meta, but has anyone else noticed the rise of what I'll call "Reddit style" comments on HN recently? Subjectively, I've noticed more and more joke comment threads that a year ago, were never seen here.
That's the exact reason why I moved away from reddit some time ago. Reddit used to have insightful comments and debate, but it deteriorated into knee jerk one liners and pun threads (at least in the main subs)
Sadly the same trend is noticeable on hackernews too lately, still very rarely but it seems to become more common.
I absolutely have. It could be that reddit trains people to automatically think of puns for social gratification. It could be also because HN is basically a subreddit, and people automatically associate this format with puns and cynical one liners.
It's been known since the days of BBS's that communities get worse as they get bigger.
I don't know. I just suddenly started seeing a bunch of pun threads. A year or so ago they would have been downvoted and had people making polite posts about how that kind of thing isn't welcome here. But these didn't seem to have downvotes. I have no idea if they got flags or not.
Maybe I just started noticing something that's been here a long time?
It'd be interesting to see if mods noticed anything.
You are not alone. Lots of comments on HMM in the past 4-5 months have been low effort, half hearted cynical reddit fare. The community has done a pretty good job of policing the tone here, but it's certainly becoming noticeable.
This frightens me - I'm sure most people here are familiar with the quality of discussion of any reasonably large subreddit. The idea of that happening here is not enjoyable.
Glad to hear some consensus on this. I've been flagging low-quality comments but the sudden & sharp increase in reddit-style comments worries me. Curious if any mods have noticed this as well?
Well, a year ago I'd see "low effort" jokes or simple statements downvoted or removed. I'd see many discussions which had disagreeing replies one after the other, all positively voted.
So perhaps "Hn's habit of downvoting" has evolved over the years.
