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I'm always fascinated by the posters here who insist on second-guessing the writers and the scientists who spend their whole lives studying a topic like this.

• deleted 1y ago
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• dvt 1y ago
  I second this, and it tends to be a sitewide issue. HN has really changed over the past 5+ years: went from healthy or interesting skepticism to reddit-style snarkiness and shitposting.
  • acdha 1y ago
    There’s always been some of that but it does feel like it’s getting worse. I think there’s a general shift in how people approach Skinner-ized apps and social media, where a couple of generations have been trained to prioritize a number going up, but also something about how politics became both post-factual and unavoidable even in communities which used to avoid it, all of which has driven a lot of former contributors away. I’m not sure how to rebalance things - and certainly won’t claim to be perfect about not taking the bait myself – but it seems to be slowly starving a lot of communities which don’t have some in-person anchoring.
    • umeshunni 1y ago
      > Skinner-ized What does this mean? A quick Google search didn't help me
      • mlekoszek 1y ago
        Arranged like a Skinner box -- something which dispenses reward stimuli for desired behaviours with the aim of maximizing those behaviours. Interestingly, a Skinner box can be made to dispense rewards randomly after a while, or stop dispensing them entirely -- but the desired behaviour is likely to continue. Think doomscrolling, slot machines, loot boxes, dating apps, etc. A worthwhile survey of this I was introduced to in my undergrad: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/addiction-by-design https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/ad...
      • acdha 1y ago
        mlekoszek answered very well, so I won’t duplicate their comment but I will note that I used to work with a bunch of neuroscientists and a number of grad students were recruited by tech companies specifically to use their knowledge of human behaviour and addition to boost “engagement” and revenue. There was some talk about ethics but even back then people knew those companies meant it about as much as big tobacco had.
        • d34db33n0car 1y ago
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  • mmooss 1y ago
    You might read the guidelines, much older than five years, about saying HN has changed, and also saying it's more like reddit.
    • lordnacho 1y ago
      I don't think I've ever been on a forum that doesn't have comments to that effect regularly. "It was better a few years ago, it's all going to hell now, we're becoming Reddit/4Chan/Slashdot" It's the internet forum version of "the youth has gotten lazy, it weren't like this when I were a lad"
      • borgdefenser 1y ago
        I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too late and usenet already sucked then. In all fairness too, my 17 year old self who knew basically nothing about the world ,really did add absolutely nothing of value to the usenet discussions I participated in besides noise. Of course, at the time I thought the complete opposite. The thing that amuses me most is at the time there would have been a lot of "pro communism" in my responses on anything society related even though I knew absolutely nothing about communism and even less about economics as a whole. I think this is just the way semi-anon discussions with big age and generation gaps go.
        • awesome_dude 1y ago
          > I was on usenet in 1995 but I have heard that was too late and usenet already sucked then. BBS were cool(er) :-)
        • mmooss 1y ago
          If you live long enough, you might look back at your understanding now and say the same thing. Maybe what we should learn is not to be so certain about our current knowledge.
        • addaon 1y ago
          > In all fairness too, my 17 year old self who knew basically nothing about the world ,really did add absolutely nothing of value to the usenet discussions I participated in besides noise. Of course, at the time I thought the complete opposite. Me too!
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  • booleandilemma 1y ago
    This is refreshing to hear compared to all of the "HN is becoming Reddit, omg!" comments and threads that pop up every couple weeks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380385 From 2008 :)
    • mlekoszek 1y ago
      Unless, of course, it continually has been becoming Reddit, but Reddit has been constantly changing too ;)
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  • jader201 1y ago
    From the guidelines [1]: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. (With that last sentence linking to 9 examples in [1].) [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • simonsarris 1y ago
      You don't think it's changed? You've been here about as long as we have. At some point you can't rely on it being a noob illusion if a place actually does change. The guideline is not a magic incantation that prevents it from never becoming false. Snarky replies used to be routinely downvoted swiftly, now they are not.
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • jader201 1y ago
        I’m not arguing either side. Just saying that the meta discussion is a discussion that the guidelines try to discourage. IOW, it’s not really relevant to the article, so it’s not promoting curious, interesting discussion. So both this discussion as well as the snarky comments you’re arguing against are both not following the guidelines of trying to keep discussion curious and interesting.
      • ForTheKidz 1y ago
        The downvoting here (as well as comment scoring) is probably my least liked thing about the site. It exacerbates the already prominent issue of hivemind and seems to actively lower the quality of discussion. People seem to mostly vote based on emotional reaction. On paper, a downvote just doubles the value of a vote. Meanwhile the graying of comments that never deserved to be downvoted to begin with is infuriating and seems to mostly stifle interesting conversation. Personally, I advocate for abolishing the downvote and the scoring and switching to randomized comment order.
        • 1y ago
  • ForTheKidz 1y ago
    That's hardly isolated to this site. COVID did a number on us. Fwiw, people have been saying this since the site started. Don't worry. There will always be a safe space for rich assholes to divorce themselves from reality and romanticize their exploitation.
• gosub100 1y ago
  Science cannot be trusted anymore. Journals don't validate anything they submit. Departments are rewarded by how much money they wring out of the government, not by whether what they say is true. Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong. Also you don't sound "fascinated", so if you're complaining at least be honest about it. There are many more descriptive words than "fascinated".
  • mmooss 1y ago
    > Science cannot be trusted anymore. Journals don't validate anything they submit. Departments are rewarded by how much money they wring out of the government, not by whether what they say is true. Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong. What do you feel when you post that?
    • gosub100 1y ago
      I feel like my tax dollars are wasted and the college students are being lied to with their ever-increasing tuition that somehow promises them a future when their departments are led by liars.
      • mmooss 1y ago
        Those are not emotions. What I meant is (I don't mean to ask twice, I'm just clarifying), what drives these comments? Anger? Hate? Is it for the lolz?
      • mnky9800n 1y ago
        It sounds like you just don’t like American universities. Good news is you don’t have to attend them or send your kids to them. There are plenty of universities in the world that are not American.
  • ranger207 1y ago
    > Next week they'll publish another paper about how they were wrong. Isn't that what's they're supposed to do? "Hey we found this thing, here's how we did it." Next week: "Yeah I checked your data and got different results, let's figure out what's different." A few months/years later: "We've figured out where the problems were and now have a better understanding of this."
• jcims 1y ago
  I'm probably guilty of making comments that read this way at times, but it's almost always out of curiosity and a dash of invoking Cunningham's law. Lately I've started feeding my questions into LLMs to explore these ideas. Given that I will almost certainly never make a decision where an improper understanding of astrophysics is at fault, I'm willing to run the risk of hallucinations leading me to improper conclusions. :) For the morbidly curious: https://chatgpt.com/share/67dc94a3-07c8-800c-bdbf-039dd2ce50cf https://chatgpt.com/share/67dc94a3-07c8-800c-bdbf-039dd2ce50... (It's funny, I've seen people say that they generally don't even bother with spell checking questions to LLMs because it doesn't seem to make any difference. I was tempted to rerun this before posting to fix the disorganized thoughts in my questions, but I ain't got time for that.)
  • atonse 1y ago
    I love this chat. This is exactly the kind of chat I’ve had with ChatGPT about things like Native American reservations, their history, etc. Stuff like this is what I love most about these LLMs. As someone who minored in astronomy and especially loved stuff about stellar life cycles, I didn’t see any red flags in what you were told.
    • jcims 1y ago
      Nice! It's like having a patient neighbor that knows a lot about some topic but, you know, don't bet your life on it being accurate haha. Thanks!!!
• atkailash 1y ago
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• gwervc 1y ago
  > the fact that you didn't really read the link I think this is due to a big flaw in the link aggregator website model. In the forums of yore, we had a post creating a discussion that was a must read, and everything was contained in the same place. Links were part of the post but as side dishes sprinkled over the OP. In the aggregator model, which is arguably a dumbed-down model of forum, there is no OP. Or more accurately, what can be interpreted as the post is the title of linked content, not the linked content itself. Clicking and reading to an external link is a burden and a disconnection to the discussion on the aggregator. In the end, a lot of discussion occurs based only on the content visible in the aggregator, that is the title. One might regret it, but it's the format pushing this behavior. Also since there is an endless stream of content instead of threads being dumped, I feel comments are more fire and forget. PS: did not read the linked post.
• hadlock 1y ago
  The acronym RTFA is probably older than the mean age of the posters here, for a reason