The crowd isn't some invariant. The people here and quality of their responses is a function of the kind of topics that get discussed here, the repetition these topics receive, and the grace others have in receiving those comments. You can't just neatly swap in the HN community and say "okay you used to discuss Elixr tooling now it's time to discuss US politics."
What happens instead is, people start getting heated at each other and vitriol across the site increases. Folks who don't find that grace anymore exit the site and folks who are heated stay. This attracts other people who want to be heated. This creates a downward spiral across the community. This isn't HN specific, it's the same thing that happened to pretty much every other public internet community once they started featuring lots of discussion on polarizing politics.
The entire reason HN used to be high quality open internet forum is because politics wasn't a huge part of its contents. But the site has been under quality pressure for some time now and ever since the start of Trump 2024 it's started going downhill faster than it was before. That's fine of course, if folks just want to battle out politics and shout at each other or cry out in anger they can go ahead. But it won't be the "intelligent crowd here" doing it. Those folks will go elsewhere.
As an example, this thread is ridiculously large (2818 comments as of this writing.) There is no way for a reader to get much out of this without copious amounts of minimizing threads, scrolling randomly, or page-searching for terms. The only sense I can make of it is throwing the thread into Gemini and asking it to summarize it for me. The summary tells me nothing that my own thoughts and some social media comments I've read don't already tell me. So what has the "intelligent crowd here" really given us? I'm waiting for op-eds from the MSM and blog authors I follow to give me literally anything more rigorous than the slop in this thread.
> There is no way for a reader to get much out of this without copious amounts of minimizing threads, scrolling randomly, or page-searching for terms...
Or you could, you know, jump from parent to parent and actually read the threads that interest you. I wholly disagree with your broad assessment. I have seen plenty of substantive, interesting comments in threads like this. Of course there will be duds, but that's equally true in threads about the latest front end web framework.
Intelligence and outrage are not mutually exclusive. Again, the world is not an apolitical place. If you do not represent and speak up for your own values, someone else will decide your fate for you. This forum, like all others is a chance to signal boost and stand for the values you care about.
The moderators have also done a good job of keeping the volume of these threads reasonable. Sure, on the new page they are rampant, for good reason, but only one or two max make it to the top thirty on a given day.
Agree to disagree. Speaking up for your own values has nothing to do with winning elections. For that, voters in R districts need to call their reps and tell them their mind. Internet comments don't win win votes.
What happens instead is, people start getting heated at each other and vitriol across the site increases. Folks who don't find that grace anymore exit the site and folks who are heated stay. This attracts other people who want to be heated. This creates a downward spiral across the community. This isn't HN specific, it's the same thing that happened to pretty much every other public internet community once they started featuring lots of discussion on polarizing politics.
The entire reason HN used to be high quality open internet forum is because politics wasn't a huge part of its contents. But the site has been under quality pressure for some time now and ever since the start of Trump 2024 it's started going downhill faster than it was before. That's fine of course, if folks just want to battle out politics and shout at each other or cry out in anger they can go ahead. But it won't be the "intelligent crowd here" doing it. Those folks will go elsewhere.
As an example, this thread is ridiculously large (2818 comments as of this writing.) There is no way for a reader to get much out of this without copious amounts of minimizing threads, scrolling randomly, or page-searching for terms. The only sense I can make of it is throwing the thread into Gemini and asking it to summarize it for me. The summary tells me nothing that my own thoughts and some social media comments I've read don't already tell me. So what has the "intelligent crowd here" really given us? I'm waiting for op-eds from the MSM and blog authors I follow to give me literally anything more rigorous than the slop in this thread.