I never was a huge Reddit user before, but I have noticed an increase in lower-quality reddit-style comments here on HN in the last year or so. Thankfully they usually get downvoted or are already dead. I might have to turn off showdead though.
Be careful bringing up this phenomenon, it's already been explicitly mentioned in the rules [0] - which means that it can't possibly be actually taking place here at all.
Discourse on the internet in general is becoming less open and candid as people self-censor out of fear of retribution, ostracization, and/or cancellation. Expect more people to withdraw into exclusive, closed communities and cliques where frank, quality discussion can actually be had, away from the preying eyes of the censorious authoritarians and moderator types, as well as the vapid Tweet-length, Reddit-style shitposting that the masses bring with them.
Prepare to enter a new informational dark age, far from the original ethos of the early Internet hackers and engineers who sought to democratize and maximize open access to information for all. Now information can be dangerous - it can be false, misleading, misinformative, and therefore its dissemination should be strictly controlled and moderated to prevent people from getting "the wrong idea." Moreover whatever you say online is more likely to be used against you, and so it is preferable to practice a policy of reticence and silence than speak at all.
Because you brought up the "cancellation" bogeyman, I don't think that's it at all.
I think, in general, people got exhausted at just shouting out to everyone. Over the past two years I've significantly drawn back my 'public' social media on favor of having more focused discussions with smaller groups of people. No one benefited (apart from advertisers) from me sharing my every waking thought and opinion to the world.
It difficult to draw much from the "early" internet to now. There's orders of magnitude more people online, with more types of people. Internet access is significantly more abundant abundant - previously you needed to "log in" to the internet. Now pretty much everyone is permantantly online by at least on device they carry on themself
How do you know they're Reddit-style if you weren't a regular Reddit user? This is literally one of the most common complaints about HN, and has been repeated continuously since HN's inception. It's in your mind. Every forum's activity changes over time, especially as it continues to grow. It's not becoming more like Reddit. Reddit just becomes more like "a forum that grows over time", like every other forum does. Eternal September.
But just to comment on the idea that some comments here are "low quality, like Reddit", I'd like to note that your preferred form of comment isn't necessarily "high-quality". Not in the way you probably mean. Almost all HN comments are low-quality. They're made by the inexperienced, usually sharing opinions rather than facts, with no evidence, often arguing over something banal or subjective, with an aim to correct rather than educate.
There's just not that many experts out there. When there are, and they do comment, they often get downvoted by the ignorant. Instead most people share comments which are more like opinions dusted with a little information they read once and probably don't remember completely accurately. Often comments and conversations get downvoted or flagged purely because someone doesn't like their opinion or disagrees, regardless of whether they might be right or have a genuine argument.
The big difference between Reddit and HN is a HN user believes they are superior. Intellectually, morally, behaviorally, or just in the company they keep. You keep seeing this comment all the time, "Reddit is low-quality, HN is high-quality". But it's not. "Quality" can have many different dimensions and each of those be subjectively preferred based on the person. HN encourages people to share thoughts even if they have no idea what they're talking about. And discussions often devolve into the ignorant arguing over nonsense. It's like a sewing circle for nerds who believe that believing you are smart or right is more important than actually being right. That argument for its own sake is better than making a light-hearted joke. HN is where levity goes to die, and the intellectually insecure reign.
This is one of the highest quality comments I have seen here in a long time. Ironic that it complains about "quality."
First, you caught my attention by dropping a powerful and memorable term (eternal september). Second, you followed up with an entirely accurate indictment of the problems with this site.
However, you lost your way a little bit at the end. Is it really that hard to recognize that Reddit-tier comments are uniquely low quality content? For at least a decade, that whole site has been overrun by angry people posting comments that not only do not contribute to any sort of intelligent discussion, but actually deter more thoughtful and reasonable people from even bothering to try to contribute. How is this at all controversial for you?
Feel free to substitute "low quality comments" with "comments that I don't find valuable" or simply "comments that I don't like". That's not really the point that I was trying to make.
I've noticed the same. Usually it takes the form of dumb phrase-like jokes, retorts, puns, etc, with the entire chain being downvoted and flagged. This is necessary to keep HN from devolving into thoughtless meme-style posts that just clutter the space.
I get the notion of not allowing it to devolve, however I do think it should be OK and acceptable to upvote someone for truly making a humorous or clever comment. I work with a lot of clever people in my job, and humor (even bad humor) is part of our daily camaraderie and social interaction, so in some ways it's second nature for me to want to post humorous comments.
Not to over complicate the comment system here but I wish one could just tag a comment as "humor" and one could then choose to just not show them if one did not care to see such things.
The distinctive thing about the type of reddit humor I think they're talking about is how referential it is. You don't so much make a clever joke as invoke the standard joke on its trigger phrase or subject.
I see plenty of jokes on HN but they are usually part of a comment that would be made anyway. Joke-only comments also aren't that rare and when they're clever and specific to the context are usually pretty well received.
Glad it's not just me. I've seen many people complain about the reduced quality of discord on HN for years and years, and never noticed it myself. Last few months I keep running into very low effort comments, to the point that this notion has really started to become impossible to ignore.
I've been using both HN and Reddit roughly equally since 2013. A few months ago I started noticing a higher incidence of joke comments here at HN. Fortunately they seem to get down voted quickly.
I seem to recall it being just as popular reading here ~7-8 years ago. What has always made HN good is the creation of good material, not the sole presence of it.
Yes, I've noticed this trend too. I find this entire thread positively alarming because an influx of Reddit users can be deadly for online communities.
Reddit was useful because it kept those people contained within the reddit.com domain. Now, I fear they are loose on the Internet and we may see many sites/apps/federations quickly deteriorate into uselessness.
