Literally every forum I have ever been on, when it gets old enough, complains about declining quality and new users. There was a big discussion about this on a popular IRC I used to hang out on. And I spent the weekend setting up a bot to replay messages from 4 years ago in real time. And the general opinion was that the quality wasn't any higher back then.
Same thing with a default subreddit I moderated. We got endless complaints about declining quality. Using web archive to go a few years back, and the quality was just the same or worse!
All the time I read old discussion threads on HN. Either through the search feature or the "past" button. And I really don't see any difference between the old HN and the current one.
If anything it's slighty improved. I think many of the complaints discussed 4 years ago here aren't relevant any more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373 When was the last time you saw a "_____ in js" post? Honestly I miss those a bit.
Ideally I'd love to do statistics and see if stuff like average comment length or political words have increased over time. Maybe I'll try that sometime.
Same thing with a default subreddit I moderated. We got endless complaints about declining quality. Using web archive to go a few years back, and the quality was just the same or worse!
All the time I read old discussion threads on HN. Either through the search feature or the "past" button. And I really don't see any difference between the old HN and the current one.
If anything it's slighty improved. I think many of the complaints discussed 4 years ago here aren't relevant any more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373 When was the last time you saw a "_____ in js" post? Honestly I miss those a bit.
Ideally I'd love to do statistics and see if stuff like average comment length or political words have increased over time. Maybe I'll try that sometime.