Is HN slowly starting to experience enshitification?

I wish the world were such that it wasn't as important to talk about "politics", but it keeps intruding into HN-relevant areas: defending science, promoting quack science, arresting students, etc.

HN is still the best community I've found for discussion. I regularly encounter comments that expand my understanding and change my mind.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

That said, I've been on HN for over 10 years. There does seem to be a slight increase in low quality / low effort comments as of late. That's probably a function of moderation than anything else. The average number of comments on posts have been growing steadily, and I suspect it's getting harder to moderate.

Every time I read the word "enshittification" I feel a little shittier, and the frequency with which I see it here is increasing, so yes.

But really, it's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

Sometimes you have to go with the least dirty shirt in the hamper

In my opinion yes. The quality of submissions and the top page is still high, but there has been a large shift from startups, tech and science to pop and politics.

The main change I have felt is in comment quality. While the amount of juvenile humor or AI assisted posts seems on par with Reddit, the quality feels to have the wrong derivative.

Folks feel strongly about many social, cultural and political topics. It's a moment and a trend, and certainly not specific to HN. Does it make HN slightly less interesting sometimes? Maybe. But then, is there a forum entirely immune to it? Not really.

I don't think it's enshittification in the sense that Doctorow coined the word.

I don't see YCombinator as having gone down a path of "create something to attract users, then they degrade that to for their "business customers", and finally degrade it further for users and business customers to maximize profits for YCombinator."

It was obvious (to anybody who put even the slightest thought into it) that Hacker News was always, from the very beginning, a way for YC to have access to "hackers" that they could feed into their startup accelerator and venture capital business. And I don't see any sign of that having changed, and certainly not in a way that's made it worse for users of HN. It is what it's always been. They've never tried to hide that.

What I do think has changed is me. And the "community" here over the years.

I'm way way less interested in GenAI and the LLM frenzy than most submitters (and I think commenters) here.

But that's not a new thing, I was never interested in NFTs or crypto/blockchain either. And not just the tech hype topics, I skip over things that just don't interest me at all, like Kubernetes or retro computing or language advocacy/wars.

I also have a (quite possibly wrong) view that as HN's user base has grown, there's a lower percentage of people here for the "hacker" discussions - which I define as the interesting technical stuff, whether computer related or not - and a higher percentage of people here for the latest tech fad or who are just here for the money, and hoping to get noticed by YC or founders, instead of being here out of pure intellectual curiosity.

I look at the https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders list, and I'd guess I recognise probably 1/3rd of the top 50 usernames there. (I have been here a while, since 2009.) I rarely notice those usernames these days, either because they've significantly slowed down in commenting, or perhaps because these days they're commenting in threads I don't open.

I 100% believe that for me, there was a higher signal to noise ratio for both discussions I'm interested in and discussions with people I recognise and respect, than there was 10 or 15 years ago. But I'm still here.

Lol I remember arguing with someone on here that children can't consent to the surgery and other trans gender stuff they were pushing on them back in 2018. I think somewhere in the rules it says you're specifically not supposed to ask if HN is getting worse because people say it is so often.

Personally I think it had a rough few years after 2020 (which sites didn't?) but it doesn't seem much worse than I remember it.

I truly do not ask this to be pedantic or snarky, but “enshitification” is a very specific type of platform decay related to business models. How does that apply here?

My subjective ratio of good to bad links is better than almost every other website I visit. Keep up the good work HN!

It’s fine. We’re fine.

You’re right, you probably haven’t been around long enough to notice the cycles, or the cliques, or even the lack of dark mode (too soon?)

> “enshitification” ??

I don’t think that word means what you think it means:

“…then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.“ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)

Ycombinator is not degrading the quality of this forum. You’re unhappy with the qualities of posts from free user participation (which is everybody; no premium paid tier users). Totally different situations.

>but I'm increasingly seeing more ideological posts that are especially not hackerish,

hasnt changed. When you give anonymous people the ability to censor the speech of others, it creates a bad situation that will always enshitify.

People who get censored always leave. The remaining cohort loses more than just that who specific censored subject. Leaving the site a bit shittier and declining.

It's really the design of the site that will result this way.

Being a hacker and not wanting to deal with politics is like being a fish not wanting to deal with water.