

The Decline of Reddit, Hacker News, and the United States - danielrm26
http://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-decline-of-reddit-hacker-news-and-the-united-states

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tptacek
_The United States is now full of people who haven’t read a book since high
school, think Jesus is coming back soon, don’t believe in evolution, and don’t
know the name of their congressional representatives. And Hacker News is
becoming more like Reddit every day._

As opposed to, say, 1885, when everyone read books, nobody thought Jesus was
coming back soon, everyone believed in evolution, and everyone knew who their
congressional representatives were (although maybe not their Senators, who
they couldn't elect).

Point being, it's easy to idealize or even mythologize the past.

~~~
atlantic
In 1885, this set of beliefs would have been normal across western countries.
In 2010, it is an anomaly which is specific to the US and sets it apart from
other first-world nations. In that sense, it is worth mentioning.

~~~
SamReidHughes
It's not like people in other countries who believe in evolution do so for
good reasons. They think they're supposed to believe in evolution, so they
find reasons to do so.

------
ElbertF

        Next cool thing > Hacker News > Reddit > Digg > Youtube comments > /b/
    

These sites are all slowly turning into their right-hand side neighbor. I
suppose /b/ will always be /b/.

------
prosa
Linkbait title, but I agree with the sentiment. It's the same phenomenon that
occurs in the real world. Artists, entrepreneurs and other creatives create
interesting cultural centers in low-rent areas, which leads to "trendiness"
and gentrification, which leads to a yuppie influx which eventually kills off
the vibe, drives up the rent and pushes the artists and entrepreneurs to
another part of town.

Having said that, I'm not sure what you can do about it without creating a
walled garden.

------
JacobAldridge
I have a slightly different take on the cause for this phenomena - I called it
a pond theory because it reminded me of ripples in a pond. Essentially, a
small, founding group have a lot in common, though each individual has diverse
interests.

The community expands, and while new ripples will continue to have things in
common with the centre, they will increasingly have interests that are more
diverse than other new members on the other side of the pond.

Eventually the community grows too large, there are too many interests for the
original core to remain strong, and (like the ripples in a pond) the energy
dissipates and the group fails.

[1] Thoughts - [http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/197-my-pond-theory-or-
wh...](http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/197-my-pond-theory-or-why-social-
networks-must-fail)

[2] Possible Solutions - [http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/199-my-pond-
theory-or-ho...](http://www.shirlawsonline.com/blogs/199-my-pond-theory-or-
how-social-networks-avoid-failing)

And for the record, I don't think HN is already too much like Reddit / Digg /
Slashdot / Whatever.

------
nl
_You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were
young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected
their elders._

<http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/lyrics/graduation.htm>

Change happens. Accept it and move on. There are worse fates than getting
popular - anyone remember kuro5hin?

------
pg
Compare:

<http://news.ycombinator.com>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/classic>

~~~
mahmud
As of now, out of 30 posts each, they differed in only 7 articles (77%
similarity):

Classic has:

    
    
      Simplicity vs. Choice
      Introducing the BankSimple Engineering Team
      First Clojure conference
      FB vs Foursquare
      Don’t let jQuery’s $(document).ready() ..
      Did Germany experience industrial boom in 19th ..
      C++ Compilation Speed
    
    

New has:

    
    
      A smartphone retrospective
      Do you understand HTTP Caching?
      Google Suggests changing your name ..
      JITB
      Notes on Writing Good Commit Messages (
      Product to Platform - My Start-up's Summer Journey
      What different sorting algorithms sound like

------
Detrus
Social organization should be harder to solve than finding dark energy and
higgs bosons. It's a massively complex problem.

Walled gardens grow stale, progressive communities fall apart. That's the
natural order of things. The best thing to do is make this process smoother.
Have those magic members of the community leave earlier by starting new and
better communities at a faster pace.

Maybe you don't need to rewrite backends every time. Just modernize the look,
add some features like autofollow based on friend follow graph and see if it
works. Maybe just split the community into smaller groups, that occasionally
trickle out into a central group, something that Digg 4 is attempting.

