Growth assumes that older posters continue to post, which both according to TFA and my own analysis isn't true.
In my own analysis, comments in a thread have a recent-user bias and roughly 30-40% of an article's comments will come from the last 3-4 years of users. I found this to hold true for many large threads over the past 5 years, though I haven't yet exhaustively demonstrated this yet simply because I don't do HN analysis that often.
What that means practically is that the folks who post on this site are constantly changing. I also, generally, find that the most contentious threads on this site tend to have a relatively stronger recency bias among its posters.
By that regard, eternal September is ever present: the posts on this site weigh toward recent posters. I'd be curious to see if that effect can be explained by throwaways and sock puppet posters but I'm not sure of any reliable way to identify those especially as historic karma counts aren't kept for users.
While I have more robust models that work a lot better, a very simple method I've found is that the more recent the upper percentiles of posters are on a thread, the less I will like it: to me Eternal September is here. Of course my user here is ancient from 2009. The numbers just quantify that there's been a change in audience since I joined, a wholly unsurprising fact.
i did read the article but didn't come to the conclusion that "Eternal September" is here. although i don't argue that the quality of posts has gone up recently, i do believe that many of the new users of 2022/2023 have become - or will become - the high quality posters that attracted them here initially. as i said in the first post, i think this is true because there hasn't been an unprecedented spike in new users.
basically, quality(new user + time) = quality(old user), as long as the proportion of new users/old users remains small. of course it's subjective as to where you put this value though. i just think it hasn't been reached yet here.
What "Eternal September" means to anyone is different.
What I assert based on data (simply map the comments in to the join date of their authors and make a distribution) is that most large threads with a lot of discussion on this site have a recency bias: newly joined users post a disproportionate amount on the website. At any given time, any given thread will be more heavily commented on by newer users. Given that observation, Eternal September is largely personal: do you still value the content on the site given that recent posters create more of it. For me the answer, as borne our in data, is no. I find from ~ 2016 a change in the types of discussions on the site and find that the newer the poster distribution skews from that time period onward the less interesting the discussion becomes to me. That's really all. I'm glad that you still find value in the site but that makes sense: you're a newer user. Of course this may be your second or even nth account in which case I'm obviously wrong, but what I can be certain about is myself and my own preferences, and even those change over time.
> newly joined users post a disproportionate amount on the website.
What is your definition of a new user?
> For me the answer, as borne our in data, is no. I find from ~ 2016 a change in the types of discussions on the site and find that the newer the poster distribution skews from that time period onward the less interesting the discussion becomes to me.
I am curious: Can you elaborate on how such analysis is being made?
> I am curious: Can you elaborate on how such analysis is being made?
Try doing analysis on the time at which posters in a thread joined this site. I weigh their dates based on the number of times they comment in a thread. If you do that you'll see a recency bias. The mass of the distribution is clumped more heavily in the last 3 years since the article's submission. If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. People are probably much more energized to comment when they first join and eventually get bored and stop. You point out a really similar effect out in your own analysis about posters that stop posting after a year.
this is my first account, and i understand your perspective. i did sometimes come to HN from 2015 onwards, but not enough to really get a feel for the level of content and conversation that happened. 2015 is still much later than you first started using it, so i can see how your older first impressions of this site led you to the conclusion that present-day HN is a shadow of its former self.
so i think we agree on everything, except that you're comparing pre-2016 to now, vs. me comparing 2020 to now, which leads to the opposite conclusions. excuse me for being a part of the less interesting era of posters ;-)
Something that makes this all harder is that HN and other sites don't exist in a vacuum. There's an external world that shapes the opinions and ideas of people.
When I joined HN, hacking was mostly for nerds. The real important tech people worked on chips or devices and the money makers were in finance. This has changed. With it has come an interest in lurid tech coverage, like the existence of sites like "Techdirt", and something about software has led to the growth of a tabloid style news interest in it in a way that never happened for hardware (probably an artifact of the rise of tech being concomitant and convergent with the evolution of the Internet.) There's also been a lot of other changes going on in the greater world as the internet has become a larger part of our lives. I suspect those changes outside "in the real world" that eventually finding itself into here.
For me the antidote has been more focused conversations on other sites like Discord or BlueSky but this is all very personal.
In my own analysis, comments in a thread have a recent-user bias and roughly 30-40% of an article's comments will come from the last 3-4 years of users. I found this to hold true for many large threads over the past 5 years, though I haven't yet exhaustively demonstrated this yet simply because I don't do HN analysis that often.
What that means practically is that the folks who post on this site are constantly changing. I also, generally, find that the most contentious threads on this site tend to have a relatively stronger recency bias among its posters.
By that regard, eternal September is ever present: the posts on this site weigh toward recent posters. I'd be curious to see if that effect can be explained by throwaways and sock puppet posters but I'm not sure of any reliable way to identify those especially as historic karma counts aren't kept for users.
While I have more robust models that work a lot better, a very simple method I've found is that the more recent the upper percentiles of posters are on a thread, the less I will like it: to me Eternal September is here. Of course my user here is ancient from 2009. The numbers just quantify that there's been a change in audience since I joined, a wholly unsurprising fact.