I agree with your basic assessment - "all search functions suck" and "people just want to talk." _refugee_'s point stands, though - #askhubski is a miasma of tedium, whereas last year, it wasn't.

It's not a problem of #askhubski. It's a problem of Hubski becoming a Reddit annex. The "thoughtful web" has become a place where Redditors show up and go "I'm thoughtful! Listen to me being thoughtful! You, over there! Be thoughtful!"

The new global options suck ass. Used to be you could look at stuff with seven shares and find decent content. Now you just get the "ZOMG THOUGHTFULNESS SHARE ERRYTHINGS!" overclicked links. Which, by the way, were on /r/foodforthought three days previously. I should know. I moderate it. Hubski is rapidly becoming the new Digg for pseudointellectuals.

The worst part is it attracts a specific kind of pseudointellectual - the kind with a blog, the kind with a twitter, the kind with six friends who think he's clever, the kind who has never learned how to handle dispute. Mommy's clever, special flower whose wisdom is complete, whose insight is total, and whose thoughts need not be backed up by research or facts because in these halcyon days of homeschool thinking you're right is the same thing as being right.

It's funny. mk pushed some code without telling anybody so when you mute someone, they're muted throughout your post history. So that last blog post had a "conversation" where half of the conversation was censored out. There are three "best of" "conversations" with similar problems - Two where I'd been muted, one where I'd muted someone else. And it all comes down to this - where "I disagree but I can't say why" used to be the norm around here, "I disagree therefore you're wrong shut up" has become the norm.

I've muted people before, had conversations with them, and unmuted them. I've been muted before, had conversations with them, and been unmuted. Gotta say, though - this latest round, there's no point. "Eternal September" comes in waves, to be sure, but at some point all the new blood drives the old blood away. That's what that Reddit post was about. A lot of people came here. And the new Reddit blood is driving them out. I know I've not shared things for about a week now because fuck you guys, seriously. "Have an upvote" is rapidly becoming the mentality around here and every time we lose granularity, those of us who use the system differently than the median have less and less motivation to participate.

_refugee_'s point is "stop being boring." She's too nice to say it that way. Me? I'm so cantankerous that I know that if you're boring, it's not a choice. "Stop sharing the boring" is why I don't follow hardly anyone - the "have an upvote" mentality combined with the "I'm a clever person" mentality means that anything AdBusters would have run in 1998 ends up with eleventy-seven shares within a day or so. But that also means that "global" became a wasteland the minute we couldn't pick the level of popularity.

It really comes down to this: I don't have the time or the patience for "beginners" for "beginner's sake." I'm not here out of altruism, I'm here because interesting discussions used to happen. Lately? "Here are my completely groundless and unexamined thoughts on a subject I barely understand, reward me."

Old communities become new communities and the old guard gets flushed out by the new guard. That's how it works. The old guard will mourn the loss of their commons while the new guard sweeps in and says "nice digs! Thanks for painting." And we can stick around, or we can jet - but if we stick around, we stick around on the terms of the new, not the old. And if we jet,

…well, we're the new guard.

It's easy to say "not to say reposts and search aren't problems to be solved - they are." What's hard is to arrange your social structure such that it can be welcoming to the new while also giving the old a reason to stick around.

I'm out. I'm out for the rest of the year at least. I have too much to do and too little to say to people who think they're clever by default. That probably makes me a bitter old man but hey - Green Day didn't invent punk, no matter how many hand grenade stickers you put on your mom's CR-V.