I like hypothesis generation, and I particularly like that in this post a few of the points are mutually exclusive (like numbers 7 and 10), which should happen in a hypothesis generation post. However this list, as well as the topic, feels lazy to me, in the sense of needing much more specificity in other to generate more light than heat.
I think my main issue is the extremely vague use of”quality” here. It’s ok to use vague terms when a concept is hard to define, but in this case it feels like there are more useful ways to narrow it down. For example you could say “the average post seems less informative/well-researched” or “the average poster seems less experienced/ qualified”, or “I learned more from the old forum than the new one” (I think especially a focus on your experience would make the issue more precise, and open up new options such as “posts became less fun once I learned all the basics and new people who are just learning them became less interesting to me”). I would like to see a hypothesis generation post that focuses much more on the specific ways that posts are “worse” (and generates hypotheses on what they are) rather than on reasons for this to be the case. I suspect that once a concrete question is asked, the potential reasons will become more concrete and testable.
Another issue is that I think a lot of the points are more properly “reasons that posts on a forum can be bad” rather than issues with current vs old posts and I have trouble believing that these issues were absent or better in the past. This would also be solved by trying to make the complaint specific.
I like hypothesis generation, and I particularly like that in this post a few of the points are mutually exclusive (like numbers 7 and 10), which should happen in a hypothesis generation post. However this list, as well as the topic, feels lazy to me, in the sense of needing much more specificity in other to generate more light than heat.
I think my main issue is the extremely vague use of”quality” here. It’s ok to use vague terms when a concept is hard to define, but in this case it feels like there are more useful ways to narrow it down. For example you could say “the average post seems less informative/well-researched” or “the average poster seems less experienced/ qualified”, or “I learned more from the old forum than the new one” (I think especially a focus on your experience would make the issue more precise, and open up new options such as “posts became less fun once I learned all the basics and new people who are just learning them became less interesting to me”). I would like to see a hypothesis generation post that focuses much more on the specific ways that posts are “worse” (and generates hypotheses on what they are) rather than on reasons for this to be the case. I suspect that once a concrete question is asked, the potential reasons will become more concrete and testable.
Another issue is that I think a lot of the points are more properly “reasons that posts on a forum can be bad” rather than issues with current vs old posts and I have trouble believing that these issues were absent or better in the past. This would also be solved by trying to make the complaint specific.
I agree that this list is “lazy”, and I’d be excited about someone doing a better analysis.