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.
I don't, Meta discussions like this have happened since forever on HN. And attempting to curb them is a good thing.
OPs "comment" on what should be correct behavior on HN is now the top comment and surpasses by far the few people that he is critiquing. And hence our discussion now is all about this meta thing, which means we are not talking about the article.
I mean, I can scroll through the hacker news history to 2016 when I started reading, and the comment quality and submission quality is much higher IMO.
As I've said before, there's a reason why my entire social group of programmers (and a lot of programmers I've met from outside it) refers to this pejoratively as The Orange Site.
It definitely feels much more homogeneous than it did 10+ years ago. I notice now that in discussions on for example women's rights we exclusively have men talking about how they perceive women to be affected, but "back in my day" it was not uncommon for actual women to share their perspectives. HN has become such a cold house for anyone outside the preferred demographic that they seem to have almost entirely left.
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.
I'd argue ranking comments per se isn't the issue, it's whether the culture is preserved that encourages useful application of the voting system. Whether any community can preserve their desired culture is arguably the most important factor and it's what the grandparent post is essentially referring to.
On HN the main goal of upranking is if one comment is more interesting/informative than another (or as a group test to see how robust its argument is if the voter has no experience to judge directly). Downranking ime isn't meant to be the method used shift the order of comments but rather to discourage a post that doesn't fit the HN culture/guidelines. OTOH most popular gamified discussion systems don't discourage use of reactionary downvoting, which can creep into other posting cultures.
The problem the grandparent post raises is if signals that voting users would ordinarily use to shape the continued posting culture (eg: downranking comments that don't fit in tone/substance) aren't used like they were intended to be and if the guidelines discourage meta discussion then there isn't any other avenue to inform users what the desired culture should be in practice.
Certainly one can post non-meta comments showing what type of comments one would like (and thankfully for most strictly tech topics here it's still reasonable) but if the culture shifts enough among the silent voting users then the concern is this erodes the quality of discussion as the signals for what is wanted/not wanted get skewed.
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.
