Not surprising in the least. Anyone who has browsed 4chan instinctively senses that the pendulum swings from downright madness to sheer brilliance on a post-by-post basis, and this is something you can’t really find on other sites no matter how much you analyze the so called “signal to noise ratio.”
You can’t have an open and intellectually gratifying discussion if you know there are things you cannot say. So the topics, and their themes, are stifled from the get go. Be exposed to this environment long enough and you’ll self censor.
> Responses like these are why we are where we are.
I believe this proves the point. I didn't insult anyone's mother. I didn't make a Hitler comparison. All I had to do was disagree in an abrupt fashion to cause my discussion partner to tap out.
Not sure when you think this shift happened. HN intellectuals migrated from here almost 10 years ago. I don’t think the atmosphere has changed it’s always been a young loudmouth group. Dang is a recent entry in the compendium.
HN has never really been a highly intellectual place simply because a number of key subjects, viewpoints are off limits. Inability to at will gracefully discuss sensitive subjects basically means we are all pretending to believe what we say. I don’t know what cognitive ability research says about people being able to separate their identity and worldview from what they say, but there you have it.
Not sure. We had a period of “goodbye HN” posts. You can hopefully find them in the search results unless they got purged somehow. Those have stopped, haven’t seen one in many years. Basically people could sense they were in an unhealthy bubble and decided to cut ties. Good for them.
That fellow who would regularly post graphs of HN traffic/topic patterns at us to disprove peoples theories hasn’t posted it in many, many years. I guess he either woke up to reality or shrugged and moved on.
A few old timers remain here and there. I think we just got tired and fatigued of the bullshit.
You can’t have an open and intellectually gratifying discussion if you know there are things you cannot say. So the topics, and their themes, are stifled from the get go. Be exposed to this environment long enough and you’ll self censor.