alt Hacker News> 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.
This sounds like your disappointment is largely that HN has high volume behind political opinions which you disagree.
No.
It's that there's little opportunity for meaningful, substantial discussion in a form that moves discourse forward.
HN's guidelines are reasonable. Their application is lacking. And where discussion occurs on controversial subjects which challenge the status quo, one example of which is the current governance of the country in which HN operates, HN's guidelines actively handicap those arguing against power.
The fact that those with the advantage of power also tend strongly toward nonsubstantive, partisan rhetoric, inflammetory baiting, and gloating ... helps little.
My comparison isn't of HN against discussion at other sites. Again, HN is generally better though the bar is parlous low. There are some other smaller discussions which seem better managed, the most notable of which I'm aware is Metafilter, for reasons which may merit further exploration. There are reasons to believe that any sufficiently large discussion will tend to a minimum viable standard for reasons I've discussed for many years though scattered amongst many comments here and elsewhere, ultimately having to do with media theory, power laws, and group dynamics.
What the HN of the past three days does suggest is at least four years of distressingly poor discussion quality. I hope not longer than that, and if at possible, shorter.
As for news: I read / listen to news media to some extent. Many of those are exceptionally poor, and my results recently writing a parser for CNN's "lite" page give measurable assessment of that. My own media selection is generally left-centrist, and includes numerous non-US venues. I can assure you that the general take on the US is somewhere between disappointment, shock, and horror.