,,Today, many important institutions in our society still aren't doing enough to address the issues younger generations face -- from climate change to runaway costs of education, housing and healthcare. ''
Maybe there are ways to improve the quality of discussions _within_ Facebook to help solve these problems. It works for Hacker News, so I don't think it would be impossible. Of course indirect revenue from oil companies would decrease somewhat, but a balance should be found.
I'm always curious about claims that HN is degenerating. Where are those dissenting opinions of which you speak?
I took a look, and didn't find any. I did see several early comments by your account, including its very first one, that were downvoted. Which comments were downvoted vs. not seemed consistent with what would get downvoted today, though today they'd probably get downvoted more—probably because there are many more readers who can downvote things.
The problem is that these perceptions are very much in the eye of the beholder. As the saying goes, things have always been getting worse.
If anyone can come up with an objective measure for any of this, I'd be interested. As far as I can tell, though, these perceptions are strongly affected by the fact that the things that we dislike make a much stronger impression than the rest of what we see.
From my perspective, the downvoting isn't more aggressive than it used to be, there isn't more junk on the front page than there used to be (though there might be more ideologically conflictual material, since society is moving in that direction), and the titles aren't more baity than they used to be, since we edit most of the bad ones. I'm biased, though, and conditioned by the moderation job. The interesting question is whether there's a way to get beyond such biases.
While I think "degenerating" is a strong word, I do think there is a noticeable drop in the quality of comments since a decade ago. I don't have any hard data on this, but I think it's fairly obvious if you dig around in the archive. There used to be a more academic and countercultural feeling to commentary, as well.
Maybe some metrics to investigate are: number of words per comment, vocabulary level of the average comment [1], and so on. While neither of these are solely indicative of quality, I think they are something to consider.
I dig around in the archive a lot, and that's not obvious to me at all. There was a lot of variance in the past and there's a lot of variance now.
Number of words per comment would be easy enough to measure, but I'm not sure length is a good indicator of quality—not everyone who goes on at length has much to say. Your vocabulary link is interesting though—thanks! I've made a note to look into that.
Edit: since you mentioned "academic", I was thinking of your comment when I noticed the top two comments in the current Sci-Hub discussion:
To me that seems more common than it used to be, and a good sign. But it could just be sample bias.
Edit 2: here's another, randomly run across today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012673. Not academic, but technical in an unexpected way. There are a lot of physicians posting to HN.
All perceptions are in the eye of the beholder. Anyway, my unobjective measure is number of interesting articles and discussions I want to read after scanning the front page. It’s declining over the years.
It’s not really surprising since there are two contributing trends:
Online communities generally degrade as they increase in size.
Attention economy brings “heat death” of internet: amount of produced content is higher, quality is lower.
There's the notion of where good conversations are found, or what sources are referenced by external sources, or what links where will result in more traffic (or conversions) to linked sites / services.
There's metrics such as MAU and user time-on-site.
As dang noted in another recent comment, one of HN's scarcest commodities is its front-page slots. As with attention and time/day, that's an absolutely rivalrous good, and one which decreases comparatively as the site increases in size and volume -- more users means more competition for the 30 front-page slots per user.
And if more stories rotate through those slots, there will be either less time per story, or a restricted exposure (e.g., stories presented to only a subset of readers), or both. (I'm not sure what HN's specific mechanics are here, though I believe it's a mix of both.)
Conversational quality metrics are difficult to come by. Most tend to be expensive to calculate, especially in the absence of clearly parseable engagement information (e.g., likes, re-shares, comments). I've played with this concept in a few cases, most recently when trying to make assessments of activity / genuine community in Google+ Communities, prior to their shutdown.
Some of the more interesting research I'm aware of was based on Usenet, looking at thread dynamics, out of Microsoft Research, in the early/mid aughts. I think it was Marc A. Smith, see for example:
As for me, I didn't get a DM, just a shadow ban for a controversial comment (xiphias is my original user name). A few months after not ever being voted up somebody wrote to me that she sees that I'm shadow banned even though I'm writing constructive comments.
At the same time I don't know anything even comparable to HN, so I shy away from controversial wording / topics, and this way things that I write goes through the ,,dang'' filter. I still think that he's much more constructive than what would be here without him at this scale of (non-geek) users.
Lobsters is probably the closest, I’d think. It’s not super active, though. Why not build it yourself?
I got shadowbanned on Reddit after creating one of the more popular subreddits. It’s a weird feeling. With decentralized moderation, who sets the constitution? This is why AI/ML in response to this self-governance stuff is a meme.
I don't need decentralized moderation actually, I would prefer highlighting comments of people that I like and people that they like. This would be enough for me to find constructive smart people.
The why not I build part: network effects are strong, so I think it's really hard to do something that people would use.
There are several identifiable commenting communities, and quite a few different voices.
I consider myself a dissident voice. Whilst my input isn't always appreciated, it often is, and I've found some measure of success pressing back against several of the more notable hivemind sentiments.
Not taking the challenge personally helps. Finding your own best argument also. Persistence pays off.
I think I see some patterns where topics that used to get downvoted get upvotes instead, and I hope that's because others have decided that they don't like what this says about the community, and so they upvote them on general principle. (The Cynic worries that someone's astroturfing budget ran out).
It seems schizophrenic because there really isn't a hivemind. Rather, there are various mutually antagonistic groups who differ in their beliefs in what the "hivemind" represents (as opposed to "authentic" Hacker News culture,) based on their suspicions about what sinister conspiracy is behind moderation and comments contrary to their point of view. Almost no one here seems to trust that people who disagree with them are ever posting in good faith.
Whether a topic gets upvoted or downvoted seems to depend on which camp gets to it first, and the bias introduced by the first comment, which will inevitably determine how long the topic lasts, barring moderator intervention.
I have noticed this trend as well. That is why I read HN with dead comments enabled, and vouch+upvote a dead comment whenever I think it adds to the discussion (e.g. brings new info or brings up a point or angle that I haven't seen in that thread and makes me stop and think about it for a second or two), regardless of whether or not I agree with that comment.
Sometimes good comments end up forgotten, just because someone got to them first, who disagrees with them and is not intellectually mature enough to handle that.
Maybe there are ways to improve the quality of discussions _within_ Facebook to help solve these problems. It works for Hacker News, so I don't think it would be impossible. Of course indirect revenue from oil companies would decrease somewhat, but a balance should be found.