Tell HN: I'm done with HN for a while, maybe forever

A couple years ago I found a wonderful little gem on the Internet called Hacker News. It was a community of like-minded folks, building a place dedicated to the synthesis of business and technology. It was free of the kind of chaos, irrational thought, politics, memes and other hallmarks of most community websites and stayed true to its core foundational guidelines. It was also a place where its focus of topics could be debated, vigorously, people could meet and build cool things and ultimately discuss things that hackers found near and dear.

There's an ever present meta-discussion on HN about maintaining this high quality resource -- even if the trade-off is a smaller community. Community policing, a set of clear guidelines a dedicated panel of super-users and the clear piloting of pg all kept this site at an unusually high quality, focused and prevented it from sliding down the reddit->digg->4chan slippery slope for a very long time.

However, this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2053228 and the resulting "discussion" reminded me of something that's been troubling me about the site for a while... In the last six months or so the quality of the site and the community have slipped -- severely: the topics that make the front page are less interesting, off-topic (e.g. politics or non-hackery current events), karma voting is a crap shoot with unclear semantics and the commentary has started dropping to near reddit levels and moving south fast. PG seems largely aloof from his piloting role, and all out flame wars are erupting over tiny bits of pedantry. The post in question is a symbol of the state of the site. Content-free comments are rewarded, while rational discourse is beaten down with a stick.

As an example, the highest rated comment is, in its entirety "They're not legally required to be so badass about it." with 91 points, while the second highest (with 73) is "This is a very elegant way of giving them the finger.". This is nonsense. While witty (and not deserving of any downvotes), neither comment really brought anything to the discussion, put forward no information or insight, and ultimately could have been left out entirely from the discussion without diminishing the commentary about the post in any way. In effect, these two content free posts slurped up the lions share of the karma and the discussion of the post. The rest of the discussion was similarly dreadful.

Worse, the site has become predictable and a refuge for an irrational set of users focused on long-tail topics. On any given day the majority of the front page is covered by topics that represent such an infinitesimal part of the overal business-tech scene that reading them probably loses me money. That's okay if it represents a small portion of the overall content (even unpopular ideas can have merit), but I know that anytime I go to the site, the front page will pretty much be dominated by:

Haskell, Clojure and Lisp - (sorry guys, not a big enough language ecosystem for me or the rest of the business world to care)

Something about how Apple is great - (with an associated group think commentary so irrationally incestuously inbred it makes my head hurt sometimes)

Interviews or articles on people not associated with the tech business community

Weight-loss or Weight-building tips

Cooking ideas

A few politics posts (recently wikipedia or TSA, but doesn't deviate far from those types of topics -- usually with no business and/or tech discussion around those topics in any way)

And maybe, if we're lucky that day, a smattering of on-topic posts that HN is famous for.

Voting is similarly predictable. Contrary statements to "let's stick it to the man" notions are downvoted. Anything that represents that sort of counter-culture ethos are slavishly drooled over while perfectly acceptable (and better performing alternatives) are shot down. Appeals to rationality and logic are met with a public beating while illogical and impractical appeals to emotion are lauded.

The semantics of the vote here are undefined, and there are no official guidelines for how to vote (though pg has spoken on it several times and the way it's being used is clearly not congruent with what he's said).

In other words, HN, rather than a refuge for like-minded folks trying to build cool stuff and sell it, has become a pool of group think, dedicated to counter culture niches so irrelevant as to be meaningless. I used to learn at least one new thing about the business-tech scene every day -- things that, when I applied them to my business, caused it to prosper. I haven't found anything worth remembering or applying in months. In short, HN has become a site for the hipster business tech scene, if you aren't irrelevant or obscure, then you are clearly stupid...that's the message the community is sending out.

There's no longer skepticism on the board, no free and respectful debates about meaningful business strategies, no more useful new tips about technology or architecture philosophy. Nobody talks code, formal learning, education, hardware or other hard engineering topics anymore. The commentary and posts are all so emotionally loaded and abstract as to be information free.

Most everything here these days is just recycled echoes or schemes to game the system and stick it to the man by being ultimately right about one of these long-tail plots that have no hope of building viable tech businesses around -- all supposedly justified because a handful of folks managed to get-rich-quick that way. It's like a message board dedicated to people trying to win at lotto while giving tips to themselves about looking fashionably good at the same time.

Here's a great and recent example of the staleness of the current HN community:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2053956

I opened this with baited breath, expecting to see some really cool new stuff and ideas. The results of months of hard work, business ideas made manifest as cool stuff. Was this to be one of those deep, insightful posts HN is known for? Was it to have brilliant and insightful discussions by future captains of industry? Is HN the new digital French Salon who's grand raison d'être is the merger of technology and business? Set to bring together established business leaders and new up and comers? Instead I got lists of things that I already knew in 2009 because they were ever present on the front page pretty much every day* since then.

According to Google Trends

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=news.ycombinator.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

In April, the site started to gain new users rather quickly. I think it was around that time I noticed a severe drop in site quality - but the meta-voice was raised a few times and kept it more or less in check. But now that meta-voice has started to tire and wither and now we never have that little talk with ourselves. Have the established business leaders left and all that remains is the feisty, but unproven and highly opinionated demographic?

In October, the site suddenly shed a huge amount of traffic, and I think users as well, and I've noticed around that time that the site basically became an entirely uninteresting cesspool of group think. Are those the core users largely leaving? Some of my favorite users here seem to post not at all or very little. Several of the users in the top-100 posted less than 20 times in the last 3 months and one user posted less than 5 times!

I'd ask pg to consider only six changes for the start of 2011. These may not bring me back personally, but just some humble suggestions that might help bring the site back under some kind of vision and control.

1 - Reset the global karma scores to 0 - too many people get votes here simply for being popular. It's a Paris Hilton type phenomenon. Level setting everybody back to the beginning is a great way to clear out the cruft and minimize this effect.

2 - Hide handles on comments until a user votes for that comment.

3 - Set guidelines for the semantics of karma voting -- is it agree/disagree, great comment/garbage, what is it? Nobody knows.

4 - Require a comment for a vote. Up or down, a user has to supply reasoning for their opinion. Right now, people get hammered for supplying views that other may feel uncomfortable with, but in and of themselves are not incorrect, flame material or similar. If people can't bothered to type a response, they probably shouldn't be participating anyway and they're just a member of a voting mob, not a contributor to the discourse. Similarly, other people get huge amounts of karma for rather banal and non-insightful comments simply because they are well known or liked here (see #1 above).

5 - Allow filters. If I could just filter out the posts that had Haskell, Lisp, SEO or TSA in it I would be a happy man and it would reduce the amount of that stuff users have to see.

6 - Ask HN posts (and similar) should decay slower than the rest of the stuff, not faster. Those used to be some of the best parts of this site. With the influx of new content (most of it rubbish), I've found I miss most of them (and I check the site several times a day).

All is not lost, I'm starting a second business while still running my already successful primary one, so the time-sink that HN can be is something I won't have to worry about. Despite my bitching, I've learned a ton from this community and this site, and I'm eager to build a new business around that. I've met a few new associates from this site that I stay in regular contact with and overall it's been more positive than negative.

But at the end of the day, I have to ask myself, "is this true anymore?". And I've had to come to the regretful conclusion that HN, as it is at the moment, is no longer a net positive for me. I've gone to the mountains to meditate and seek enlightenment and found it, no further meditation is necessary.

Thanks pg for all the great times and good luck to those who are working hard to build great companies in 2011!