A very large percentage of those people are former FAANG employees, employees of companies trying to get acquired by FAANG, or employees of companies doing exactly the same things that FAANG are getting criticized for. (Some are all three!)
I doubt any of them are getting paid to AstroTurf, but they know what side their bread is getting buttered on.
Quite un-so! HN is targeted at one group only: the intellectually curious. So curiosity—keeping HN interesting—is the only thing we care about and optimize for.
As for VC-funded startups, since only about 10% of HN users are located in Silicon Valley, the number working for such startups is certainly far less than that. 50% of HN users are outside the US. This community is orders of magnitude more diverse than your image of it here.
People work for many different employers. Are their views impacted by their work experience? Of course they are—for every user here. There's nothing sinister about that. If someone posts a view that's wrong, others will correct it. As long as they do so thoughtfully, that's great. The cycle of life on HN.
Also, when dang contradicts me about HN, that means I'm wrong, lol.
Is it 50% of registered users or 50% of active commentators? And I think the image HN has been trying to cultivate is vastly different from the image of what HN actually is, at least from some of the other sites and circles I post on. The rather negative reaction to the Katie Bouman news as well as the summer programming for women incident show that somewhere down the line there is a serious breakdown in what culture HN is trying to create.
I'm glad you have a sense of the culture HN is trying to cultivate. Even getting just that across is astonishingly hard. By far the likeliest default is that nobody has any sense of it.
Does it fall short? Sure. The question is how much is possible on the internet—specifically on a large, public, optionally-anonymous internet forum, the bucket HN falls in. We're happy to do our utmost, but only along the axis of the possible. We can't come close to delivering everything people imagine and demand. Your comment doesn't allow for the constraints we're up against, how few degrees of freedom we have, or how close we come to getting crushed between the gears.
HN is a large enough population sample (5M readers a month) that it is divided wherever society is divided. That means you're inevitably going to see posts which represent the worst of society relative to your own views. Societies, actually, because whether you doubt it or not, HN is a highly international site. People post here relative to their respective local norms, but mostly in mutual ignorance of that fact. This accentuates how bad the worst posts seem.
So yes you see awful posts, but it doesn't follow that they're representative either of the community or the culture. Jumping to that conclusion is an error nearly everyone makes, because painful impressions (such as nasty comments) are vastly more memorable than pleasurable ones (such as sensible comments). This has been studied and there's a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect. The phenomenon was established about news coverage (https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019...), but internet comments are no different.
What are these "other sites and circles" you mention that do so much better culturally than HN does? Are they public forums where anybody can create an account? Are they optionally anonymous? How large are they? In other words, do they face the same problems that we do? If so, and they're better than we are at solving them, please point us there so we can learn from them. Nothing would make me happier. Usually, though, when people make this claim, they're talking about much smaller communities and/or ones that are not fully open.
This is quite an insightful observation that I hadn't considered before.
Specifically, I don't see how HN nowadays is cultivating that sort of intellectual curiosity when I've seen how horrible the culture here can be to certain groups of people. Not only that but the sort of posting culture encouraged here is weighed in such as a way as to be anti-intellectual: Specifically the idea that you're supposed to flag or downvote egregious posts rather than respond in kind. Now I understand that you're not supposed to feed the trolls, but what I believe this has resulted in a sort of 'tragedy of the commons' incident where nonsense is allowed to expand and grow without proper response. Some of the incredibly toxic things I've seen I've flagged and downvoted in kind, but the net result is that it goes unchallenged.
I see HN encountering the same problems as Reddit where HN is not prepared to deal with growth and bad actors. I see people being shadowbanned (and for good measure), but I don't think HN can remain a completely open platform without falling apart like many other platforms that have existed before.
And as for the other sites/circles, I mostly post on semi-private controlled forums because that's where I can find the highest quality of users and debates. My point was that I see the overall impression of HN from the people on those platforms to be more starkly negative. And it's getting harder for me personally to see any real cultural difference between HN and a more tech-oriented subreddit.
The idea that large public internet forums inevitably degrade has been the default understanding of internet forums since before PG started HN—in fact he started HN as an experiment in escaping that fate (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). So another way of putting this is that you think HN's experiment has failed. That's fine, but I cling to a different view for the time being; out of cognitive dissonance if nothing else, since I spend days and nights working on it.
The guideline about flagging egregious comments is there to prevent obviously awful comments from generating off-topic, repetitive flamewars. If a comment like that is flagged and downvoted, that is challenging it. It means the community has rejected it. Better still, it minimizes its influence by stopping it at the root. Responding by pouring fuel on the flames is what causes it to expand and grow. Since you refer to not feeding trolls, you obviously know this. Beyond that, I'd have to see specific examples.
Since I don't know what semi-private controlled forums you're referring to and can't look at the criticisms of HN people are making there, it's impossible for me to evaluate them. That's a pity, because we might be missing opportunities for improvement. But the fact that they're starkly negative doesn't say much by itself. Smaller communities always have a negative view of larger communities—that's how community identity gets created. And cohesive communities always have a negative view of non-cohesive communities, because divisive topics inevitably produce responses that fall outside their acceptable spectrum. Sharing an acceptable spectrum is part of what makes a community cohesive. We don't have that on HN, certainly as a function of size, and probably also for other reasons.
And to call back to my original examples: The Katie Bouman thread(s) [1] [2] and the Women: Learn To Program [3] threads should give you quite a lot of pause. The fact that such benign incidents resulted in large flamewars is specifically an issue because it indicates a greater rot growing inside HN's culture.
There's obviously more examples (such as anything politically related almost immediately devolving into flamewars or whataboutism) which indicates that the mission statement simply isn't working. And the greater problem of flagging only works if the community as a whole agrees in a positive direction; if suddenly tomorrow HN was filled with people who held highly negative beliefs, then the flagging system fails.
When I look at other forums such as SomethingAwful, Penny Arcade etc I see them as surviving because they have much stronger moderation while maintaining a sustainable community size. And right now I don't see HN outlasting either of those communities. Without some sort of cohesion guiding the community, the end result is that the site will eventually be pulled away from its original purpose.
To sum up what I think would be necessary:
1. Long time contributors would need to be emphasized more. Especially the high quality contributors, because they serve as a way of keeping a community united.
2. The mission statement of HN needs to be less vague and more to the point. Keep a focus solely on things that happen with the tech community and issuing harsher but smaller punishments to people that cause issues. You issued a warning to me a while ago because I was being an ass, and on other sites a warning like that would've resulted in a harsher punishment like a temporary probation.
3. Politics is inescapable as was found out during the 'political detox' week. But other forums can help moderate and control political debates and inflammation by keeping them solely inline with the site's mission statement (ie: a gaming site focuses on politics as it relates to games).
That said, implementing a lot of this might be almost impossible at this point because people would decry censorship almost immediately, resulting in a large reactionary wave. Which unfortunately I think also says a lot about the overall lassiez-faire moderation style HN employs for everything but the most egregious and repeat of offenses.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19632086
> The fact that such benign incidents resulted in large flamewars [...] indicates a greater rot growing inside HN's culture.
Such incidents result in flamewars because society is polarized on these topics and getting more so. Is there a single place on the open internet at HN's scale or greater that is any different, or indeed isn't worse? HN can't be immune from macro trends. (For example, there have lately been more nationalistic flamewars, especially about China. That's plainly related to shifts in geopolitics.) If HN is a ship, the sea is stormy. We can't control the waves, or how much vomiting the passengers do. If we focus on what we're actually able to affect, maybe we can prevent the ship from sinking.
I took another look at the threads you linked to and don't see what you see. The balance of the community there is clearly supportive. Most of the indignant comments are from people protesting against the negative reactions, which were clearly in the minority. Those don't represent the community, although (as always) the community is divided. So I come back to what I said in my first reply to you: if you're judging the community by the worst things that appear here, that's a fallacy. (Actually, I'm talking about your links #1 and #3. #2 was worse.)
Perhaps my standards are lower than yours? That's possible. On the other hand, sometimes when people post complaints like yours I have the impression that what they really want is for us to take their side on every issue and ban everyone on the opposite side. We can't do that. The community would not allow it, and trying to force it would destroy it—what good would that do? There's a deeper reason too: enforcing homogeneity would be incompatible with intellectual curiosity, and we're optimizing for the latter. The price of that is a certain turmoil on divisive topics—enough to convince ideologically committed users that the site is dominated by the other side (see "hostile media effect" above). If you don't think people on the opposite side of the issues have just as "starkly negative" a view of HN as people in your circles do, I have a long list of links I can share. In fact I almost unearthed them to post here, but decided to spare you.
It's not necessarily the case that people sympathise with companies because they're involved with running them. It might be that they involve themselves with running companies because they sympathise with them.