Ask HN: How would you rate HN comment quality?

It's weird: I feel like HN has great comments, but on a number of occasions when I've mentioned HN on Twitter or Mastodon I've gotten responses from people I greatly respect saying they never read HN and especially never read HN comments because of how terrible they are.

I don't get it. I often find the comments more interesting than the linked URL that generated them.

Compared to other platforms? Generally much better, though that might be because standards on most social media platforms are on the floor... fifty feet below sea level. By comparison to the average post on Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/whatever other large social media site you can think of, Hacker News comes across as thoroughly enlightened. It's like comparing a somewhat standard book club to an active war zone.

Compared to previous years? Probably worse, since just about every platform gets worse over time. Eternal September is in full swing by this point, and I've seen a lot more political arguments and barely disguised extremist talking points thrown around than I used to, especially in more controversial threads.

the quality of all online platforms is at risk (if not already serious affected) by the bot crisis. Improvements in LLM's are only going to make this worse. I am see-sawing about not using discussion platforms any more because of this...

it only takes a few minutes to see how often people are using GPT's to summarise things, or answer questions by taking an OP and punching it into GPT's and then pasting answers as if this was helping people understand things, as if they couldnt have done these things for themselves.

Then there's the ones that dont get detected or reported...

Much worse than before. Downvotes used to be about offtopic comments, uninteresting comments, unthoughtful comments. Now they're primarily about "I don't like that", "I disagree", "I can't allow your voice to be heard"

Interesting comments and comments that might spark more discussion often get a lot less upvotes than ones that strike an ideological nerve.

Thoughtful voices are less and less heard, and less and less present.

Better than almost anywhere else on the net.

Unfortunately, less good than it used to be. 10 years ago, there was far more reasonable argument, and far less yelling and ideological war.

I miss those days...

Far better