An incorrect story is posted, and quickly rises up the homepage.
Hacker News commenters wave their torches and pitchforks.
Somewhere between a couple hours and a couple days later, a correction is posted.
The correction never attracts the same amount of attention, and multiple people inevitably post comments saying something to the effect of 'just because this time proved to be factually inaccurate doesn't mean our rage isn't justified, since this could conceivably happen in the future.'
The worst part of that life cycle is being one of a minority group trying to explain what's really going on. I had the top comment on 3 different NSA stories at one time, correcting misinformation in each. I still don't think it helped.
The demographic of the site really feels like it has shifted in the years I've been here (this is my second account -- the first one was around for even another couple of years before).
In the past, I would say that most people on the site were successful doers, either working on startups or in tech. The focus was almost exclusively tech, with very little politics. But over the last few years it really feels like the tone has shifted in the anti-business, especially anti-big-business, direction. There are also a lot more commenters who seem to feel disenfranchized in the current system. And there are a lot of folks who seem to have a pretty pessimistic outlook and are ready to believe and upvote stories that confirm it. Not sure if these things are related or if it's just different groups of folks who have happened to become attracted to the site around the same time.
That doesn't mean the site is going down the tube, but it definitely has a different character than back in the old days.
HN always contained a healthy dosage of politics, anti-big-companies rants and gossip. I distinctively remember a really popular link at one point showing a picture of Steve Jobs on a meeting with Eric Schmidt over coffee and people were considering it some kind of historic event and also commented on Steve's choice for shoes, not to mention all the stupid speculation about what this meeting was about. It made me sick.
What really happened is that some noise threshold was reached, while the website's implementation hasn't changed much and so links about engineering, programming, startups, weekend projects and so on have a much harder time reaching the front-page and managing to stay there for a couple of hours.
HN is still the best place on the web if you crave for rants. I swear, if you want confirmation bias or to read funny and informative rants of smart and educated people, you can hardly beat HN.
I agree with you, but it's worth remembering that the early days of HN predate things like the financial crisis. Maybe HN's stance on big business has changed because society's stance also changed?
The prevalence of posts about politics can likely be attributed to the increasing(ly disturbing) intersection of politics and the internet.
Regardless, I'd say HN has done a pretty good job remaining relevant.
Reminds me of when Tech Crunch ran with a story - based on unconfirmed anecdotal evidence - that private messages were showing up as public on user's Timelines. Within hours they updated the story to say they could not actually find evidence it was true.
One of my favorite HN comments from that thread:
"If I could short FB I would do so immediately. The fallout from this is going to be immense and long-term."
As far as I see there wasn't anything actually incorrect about the story. At worst it was implied that it was a deliberate move and the rest seems correct including that tor users are actually blocked. Maybe if people understood critical thinking as actually thinking instead of being critical this wouldn't be a problem to begin with.
How are you measuring "attention"? Points? Comments? It seems entirely possible that more people have read the correction but feel less compelled to comment on this (less "exciting") story.
An incorrect story is posted, and quickly rises up the homepage.
Hacker News commenters wave their torches and pitchforks.
Somewhere between a couple hours and a couple days later, a correction is posted.
The correction never attracts the same amount of attention, and multiple people inevitably post comments saying something to the effect of 'just because this time proved to be factually inaccurate doesn't mean our rage isn't justified, since this could conceivably happen in the future.'