alt Hacker NewsFrom characteristics of HN that I can observe directly (stories making the front page, sites represented, classifications of those sites), relatively little change.
Mind, that's what a two-year-old historical scrape of the front-page alone shows.
What I don't see in that is voting behaviour, submissions overall, stories which haven't made the front page, etc., etc., etc. Much of that is only available within the HN server/DBMS itself, though some might be evident from a more comprehensive scrape of the site. Since items (submissions and comments) are assigned monotonically-increasing IDs, that's at least theoretically possible, though at 42.8 million items and counting it'd take some doing, and there is still a great deal of information concealed from the public: comment votes, purged content, flag detail, vouch detail, unannounced moderator activity.
What has changed markedly is the pardonee's relationship to the political system, and the political system's own degree of (dis)functionality. To that extent, HN both reflects, participates, and is a mechanism for influencing / being influenced by a larger system which has changed markedly.
HN has long been unable to discuss contentious subjects. It's particularly prone to status quoism, and in the present environment, the status quo is markedly authoritarian, fascistic, and personality-cultish, all of which HN's biases inherently (if not intentionally) support.
It disappoints me tremendously, as for all those faults HN remains one of the better online discussion sites. The bar is falling rapidly however, so cold, cold comfort there.
Late edit: Specifically as regards general news sites, those have always featured heavily on HN, with the New York Times specifically being among the top 3, if not the top submitted site. That changed markedly around 2019 not due to changes in HN, but as the Times significantly tightened its paywall, causing front-page appearances to drop to roughly 1/4 their previous quantity. To that extent, HN sees less general news, and less reasonably nonpartisan news now than in its first decade or so. The degree to which social media sites, and Twitter in particular, have themselves shifted rightwards, there's also a strong bias.
Specifically partisan "think tank" (read: propaganda) sites have long had a submission penalty, and don't seem to be more prevalent so far as I've checked. Partisanship has crept up on other sites/domains, however.
> From characteristics of HN that I can observe directly (stories making the front page, sites represented, classifications of those sites), relatively little change.
Right I'm specifically talking about comments here. I agree that the site, largely, posts and engages with very similar content as it always has.
> It disappoints me tremendously, as for all those faults HN remains one of the better online discussion sites. The bar is falling rapidly however, so cold, cold comfort there.
This sounds like your disappointment is largely that HN has high volume behind political opinions which you disagree. I agree with you and probably share very similar political opinions, but it's also true that fora throughout the net and web have always had resident biases oriented around the founding members. To me that is what it is and not necessarily an indictment on conversation quality which is distinct from the political and social environment it resides in, though I realize it's not completely possible to divorce the two.
> It disappoints me tremendously, as for all those faults HN remains one of the better online discussion sites. The bar is falling rapidly however, so cold, cold comfort there.
Perhaps, but for myself and I suspect many like myself, online discussion sites died years ago once they became dominated by the kind of comments you see on this thread. Knee-jerk opinion blasting and short, emotional posts rarely generate signal but only noise.
> Specifically as regards general news sites, those have always featured heavily on HN, with the New York Times specifically being among the top 3, if not the top submitted site.
My comparison with general news sites isn't to say that HN now has more of it; I've also done my own analysis of site submissions and I agree, I think there's less general news on the site than before. What I mean to say is, the comments here are generally indistinguishable from those you see on the Verge, NYTimes, local news sites, and even most of Twitter.
This sort of gets to the heart of what HN meant to me and I suspect many of us: HN was a unique gathering of tech and non-tech folks who discussed things charitably and in good faith. This means not responding with short, emotional comments meant to be more cathartic than explanatory. This meant that acknowledging that another poster may have a very different political or social lens than yours and that while a discussion may change no minds, it can educate participants in the various ways of thinking that manifest from these varied backgrounds.
Today's HN though is nothing special. I can get this quality of commentary from pretty much any large discussion site online. The only thing that's interesting here is the selection of topics, but that's never been HN's strong suit as it's fairly easy to curate tech topics through various socials and RSS. It's always the commentary and community that's given me, and I suspect others like me, value on this site.
FWIW I don't blame anyone or anything and this post is largely meant as catharsis for myself, much like all the snappy emotional shouting in this thread is meant as righteous catharsis for many of the posters. But I also think it's time to acknowledge that large scale discussion on the web in English is dead. The participants have become too balkanized, too angry, and too disinterested in learning through conversation to have any educational effect. Instead online English-language discussions on large fora largely function as catharsis.
EDIT: I see a lot of people very loudly proclaim how they've given up news sites and social media to read HN. This feels utterly nonsensical to me as there's pretty much no difference in comment quality. Instead, it points to some form of identity sorting where commenters try to "identify" as the kind of person who indulges in fora rather than news sites or social media. To me this feels even more counterproductive because the establishment of an "HN Identity" leads to even more partisanship than what we already have affecting discussions.