It's not barbarians, its just sheer quantity. We are all snot-nosed loud and unexperienced brats in at least one topic, don't forget that.

If you want to just stop at one, or the minimum, well, I guess that's fine. But some prefer to express themselves with more than the minimum. Do you want to just do the minimum?

Teenagers will frequent this site, and will say stupidly naive things about topics they know nothing of, and they will grow from it. It happened to me, it happened to you.

It's not about people consistently bringing their A-game to HN because it's higher tier - most of its users are not far from their teenage counterparts.

A very small minority of experts will weigh in on one topic, and because their audience is a few hundred people instead of a few tens of thousands, a discussion can actually form.

Experts exist on every public forum in the world. Whether they are heard or not makes the difference. It's quantity that's the detrimental factor.

>Teenagers will frequent this site, and will say stupidly naive things about topics they know nothing of, and they will grow from it.

To be honest the worst takes in here I've seen have been from long standing industry professionals.

I think I know what you mean, but even if I disagree with the professionals, I can't help but respect that their opinion is likely more informed than my own, at least in the high circles they revolve in.

You're taking this quite seriously, it makes me think you missed a cultural reference: GP is sarcastically quoting a movie.

The sarcasm isn't mine. It's straight from the movie, but otherwise, yeah.

Did we watch a different movie? He was dead serious

The entire movie was nothing but a sarcastic commentary about work in tech cube farms. Did you see a different movie?

No, the movie is a parody of corporate culture; the character in the scene is being totally serious.

> And if you think about it, this is what the internet, reddit, Twitter etc were at the beginning

I would agree with you if you stopped at internet. By the time reddit and twitter came around, we'd already seen the trend of where things were going. they just took the knob and turned them to 11

kindof... not exactly

back in the day, reddit was really like that, then digg collapsed after getting redesigned and then reddit started to dilute. that's when r/truereddit and later r/truetruereddit happened. but this is history by this point!

truly there's something about "internet scale" that is still boggling our collective mind/culture to this day

> truly there's something about "internet scale" that is still boggling our collective mind/culture to this day

to me, this is precisely why the echo chamber style places are the most popular. people just don't want to go some place to have their views challenged. the internet echo chambers are just internet scale versions of everyday life though. people hang out with like minded people. they prefer to live, shop, assemble with like minded people. it is the rare person that ventures of to areas that differ.

the internet is just trying to homogenize itself, or the users are making it that way whether intentionally or not

Well, I think here in HN we have a healthy (and educated) level of challenge no? And it seems to have a broad audience in terms of knowledge (not only techies now) and also lots of countries and cultures.

There is a point of critical mass that turns the community very toxic, I can pinpoint when exactly, but my guess is when you can't properly moderate everything anymore. The bigger the community the heavier the moderation.

In the beginning there was Usenet. It was a wonderful microcosmos of technical expertise and niche hobbies. Then 1993 came and the constant flood of new users overwhelmed the culture and ability to enforce norms [1]. Truthfully, it didn't begin with Usenet. It's the old dilemma of universal access and freedom versus mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon. Even before that, Aristotle wrote "That which is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common." Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

It may also not be wrong to say: "those who know history, are destined to repeat it".

"That which is the common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care..." is not a universal law, and it is easy to think of counterexamples. Without listing these, here are some axes that can govern which side of well-cared-for resources in the commons may end up:

- the extent to which people hold cooperation to be an important ingredient, versus dispensable - the extent to which people are able to trust others, versus not - the extent to which a commonly held resource is considered as much a personal resource, as a common one, versus purely common and otherwise inconsequential - the extent to which people are able to value the importance (and impact) of small, consistent actions versus grand(iose) ones - the extent to which people are willing to learn from mistakes and change, versus the extent to which people feel entrenched and defensive

Most of these come down to education, culture, and type of previous interactions with other humans.