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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

And HN is arguably better for not being invite-only. There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provides some kind of original insight that fits into the low length and polish expectations of a comment, but would never have become a formal blog post. Invite-only communities intentionally give up on that kind of discourse for... what? Easier moderation?

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I will jump on and add that the filter options that the OP talks about are a weakness, not a strength. I like HN because I get exposure to ideas and topics that are out of my normal orbit. A lot of the web is very narrow these days and I know HN has it's limitations but it still feels very diverse.

I’m this case you can have your pie and eat it too. All that is missing is a popularity page.

It’s true that random professional posts are the best part of HN but I mostly care about the posts that appear in /best for things outside my interests.

I think that when our reputations are on the line, that we act much better but also discard the grit and sharp edges that are the catalyst for interest and growth. I believe that we begin to converge on a single, aggregate pseudo-personality that is the most accepted register for communicating within.

Karma points enable this convergence because they are the only metric that we can do data analysis on comment quality, and so build into the various user interfaces.

So we can all think of many combinations of karma and account - 4chan, reddit, hackernews, youtube (which was trying to require given names); The concept of a website displaying account progeny is both an affront to privacy (in both directions) and a remarkable way to improve comment quality, which I make no effort to define.

The invitation only model seems to scale only so far, as all "cool parties" start off cool because only the cool people are invited (cool in this sense means compatible: consider both artificial and natural boundaries such as a physical party of people congregating for social purposes, a private web forum, or even the internet itself, which was initially available to only those that could enter and navigate it). We have euphemisms such as "Eternal September" to connote the perpetual ruining by outsiders infiltrating what was previously more private.

I vastly prefer to allow the unsanitized comments to enter a feed, and root through them so that people are not behaving as though being watched. It's exhausting but because both extremes are allowed to exist, the comments with the highest signal to noise ratio are often the most honest. Anecdotally I have found (exceedingly rarely) the most honest, insightful, or inclusive comments are on a site like 4chan, with the least restrictions and the least incentive to build a reputation (it's impossible). On hackernews, and I know I am projecting, I believe that we artificially act better than we are, on average, because we have something here to lose. A clever post turns into a job reference, or a reference to work becomes discovered by a future boss, etc.

Ultimately I am glad that all of these combinations exist. Losing a cultivated registry of who's who would have an immediate loss of largely high quality comments, but losing the wild west of anonymous bilge leaves us with no place to be our most honest, regardless of how much or how little it contributes.

you've accidentally hit on a strategy that might work well.

Have a site with one public user account that is linked to a reputation and a shadow one created simultanously for snark / sharp riposte's / unpopular opinions.

Can confirm.

>I believe that we artificially act better than we are,

Most of the time when I see unproductive conversations go back-and-forth here, it's often clear (or I'm quick to give the benefit of doubt) that at least one of them is a newbie trying to meaningfully contribute to a conversation where they don't know how much they don't know. But there's a sizable number of posts where I'm convinced the poster is a passive aggressive asshole that knows exactly the game they're playing. As long as they can hold a conversation with the surface level appearance of someone acting reasonable and polite, they get to be wildly disingenuous and/or cut people down nastier than the kind of comments that would be immediately moderated away.

I agree...

I've had my projects (see my hn profile) or my blog posts hit lobsters a bunch of times and finding myself unable to respond to the comments as I don't have an account there.

Content authors usually get an invite when one is asked for in the lobste.rs chat.

Agree 100%. I know people who are domain experts but also very introverted. They don't blog, promote themselves or claim to know things that they don't. But, thankfully, they can and do post here on HN and that benefits us all.

My thoughts exactly. Diversity is really important if you're open to your assumptions being challenged and learning from those with different perspectives.

Invite only tech communities can actually be harmful if these open access communities don't also exist. Closed communities end up reinforce existing inequalities and in-group biases. If it were as large and influential as HN, inequality like this would be a real issue.

I don't go to HN for the articles, I go for the comments.

That's a good point.

Indeed sometimes the most insightful comments here come from one time use anonymous/throwaway accounts.

That just indicates people are so worried about loosing their reputation on their main account that they resort to throwaway account for projecting their views thats just sad.

Not true. Sometimes it's whistleblowers and people who rather not have their identity doxxed in case they end up fired at <insert FAANG>. Sometimes people want to share extra info about their startup but w/out divulging who it is... where as their REAL profile has all their personal data so you can easily figure that stuff out.

There's plenty of reasons for throwaways besides just being 'nefarious'.

> There are so many articles on HN where the top comment is by somebody with deep domain knowledge who provides some kind of original insight that fits into the low length and polish expectations of a comment

This is now a myth. HN used to be like this but look for yourself, it's no longer like this. It's no longer worth my time to dig for worthwhile nuggets in the HN comments nor is it worth my time to post a high quality comment because I know the only responses will be nitpicks and a few worthless internet points.

PS: There's a vague rule about not criticizing HN that gets invoked fairly often. Be prepared for this thread to be gassed.

EDIT: Dropped off the internet due to a DOS? Snort is fun. Hi dang and friends!

I disagree. An example that immediately comes to mind is the 737 MAX grounding. People very experienced in flight systems and the way the Boeing software is designed appeared (from where!) with some absolutely fascinating insight that I haven’t read elsewhere.

It doesn’t happen often, but HN doesn’t often discuss things outside of its wheelhouse either. Usually we’re litigating matters of opinion, usually about whether JavaScript is bad or not.

I come across one of these kind of comments every other day. Some of my favourites are from green accounts that registered just to share their knowledge. So many of HN viewers aren't even registered, but when the urge arrives to share, the low barrier for entry means they can. We all get something from it.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but if it's the ranking of the current submission, that's because users flagged it, which is the usual reason why stories drop in rank.

As for comments by people with domain knowledge, I was just looking at this a couple weeks ago. Here are a few I randomly ran across:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22025961 ("I'm the lead author on this paper")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21997642 ("I can remember when I first met Gary [Starkweather] in 1988")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21906624 ("I’m actually one of the architects of this processor.")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012453 ("I'm a dentist who regularly treats OSA with dental appliances")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21963509 ("As a working scientist" followed by "Biology postdoc here")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22127746 ("I'm an anesthesiologist")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744337 ("I wrote the original software for Long Bets")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670257 ("This is my father's family doctor and was my doctor throughout my childhood. He actually birthed me")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21635488 ("I was the person who blabbed about the top-secret _callback parameter the weekend Pipes launched")

Edit: from a few minutes ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148337 ("I am a computational cognitive neuroscientist")

Edit: from a few hours ago – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146986 ("I'm a researcher working on exactly this problem")

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22141584 ("I’m a b-school prof/associate dean")

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22148438 ("I used to do the soil lab testing for a guy that dealt with this waste in my state.")

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22161404 ("I started this project")

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22172066 ("I was a grad student at the Media Lab in its early days.")

There are tons of these, many of which don't get much notice. We've periodically published a highlights list, but I'd like to come up with a way for users to nominate such posts as highlights when they run across them... something like a positive 'flag'.

Having a smaller community doesn’t mean "same composition of people, just fewer of them".

I think Lobsters has done extraordinarily well in attracting domain experts while keeping out the valley-style surveillance capitalist blockchain AI expert “investors”. Non-tech articles are explicitly off-topic on Lobsters.

Lobsters may have fewer experts in total numbers, but experts make up a bigger share of the community, which means that the amount of pointless, fluff, snarky comments is way lower.

The hats¹ also means that experts are easily recognizable, because they can display the badge when they comment somewhere as an expert-on-that-topic.

¹ https://lobste.rs/hats

I’d politely suggest reading the post, especially the “Polite & Knowledgable Community” section. Afterwards, you could have a look through https://lobste.rs/hats

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