Have HN comments gone downhill?<p>Well dang, who can resist weighing in on that one? :)<p>The problem is that a crowd of 100K is just a different animal than a crowd of 5 or 10k. I noticed sometime in the first few years that I couldn&#x27;t say much of anything without somebody misunderstanding me -- or getting offended. So then I spent a lot of wasted time either 1) writing comments the size of the Titanic, or 2) responding 43 levels down to help define what the definition of &quot;is&quot; is.<p>One of the things I used to like about the old HN was that it was startup focused, but open-minded. We&#x27;d post all kinds of stuff, but at the end of the day the conversation all came back to &quot;And what could we do <i>right now</i> to help fix that?&quot;<p>Now the conversations just spin off along traditional lines, the same as you&#x27;d see anywhere else on the net. (Admittedly, the mods make it much nicer than most places)<p>This relates directly to the &quot;Friends&quot; story now on the front page. I&#x27;d rather belong to a smaller, more focused group, one that shared my interests (but not my opinions, problem-solving methods, or worldviews) I find this is both better for me and for the discussion as a whole.