In my official capacity as "representative of people dorky enough to have karma this high", we do officially declare: stuff's broken. Needs unbreaking.
HN started as a way for YC guys to communicate. It was about startups, the tips and techniques to make one, to grow one. Once PG opened it up, it became "stuff hackers like", which meant cool deep tech stuff. But the tech stuff was there because after a while, all the startup stuff just ran together.
Then "stuff hackers like" kept drifting wider and wider. I was happy with that, but now that the traffic numbers are through the roof, what I'm seeing is the 1% snark factor is out of control. If each member of HN said something truly snarky only once a month, there would still be thousands of snarky comments a day on here. It's just too much noise.
HN has always been driven by emotion: the only reason to click that button is to express your emotional response, good or bad. Sure you can rationalize that in various ways, but in principle it's about how the thing makes you feel.
Now we have the love-fest stories, the hate-fest stories, the snide jokes that get upvoted, the trashing of "rate my startup" posts (I still can't believe how some of the startups are treated). It's becoming less of a community and more of a mob.
I think maybe the story titles might look mostly the same, perhaps, but the quality of the stories and the quality of the conversations have changed quite a bit.
I use to comment regularly on HN (member since Apr 2007 and former #1 on leaderboard in the ancient days, haha), but have found that I very rarely do any more.
When I look at my thought process now when thinking about posting something that may be of value, I find myself very reluctant. This is due to the snarkiness and hot-headed emotion that often disregards logical arguments as worthless and instead values breathy spittled anger.
Cowards become brave behind anonymity.
Who enjoys "lawyering" their comments? Basically trying to anticipate and address all the possible concerns hot-head users will bring up. Yet, I feel like I've had to do that more and more. In the end it seems an exercise in futility - particularly when I can just move on to interacting directly with the thoughtful hackers I care about and avoid those that spit when they talk.
I can understand the lament of the OP since I've really enjoyed the community and associating with the gentleman-hackers I've met here.
Thanks especially to those who have added true value here - I've learned a lot from the thoughtful ones who share and help.
This would concentrate power slightly in the hands of those long time dedicated commentators ('the community'), and slightly lower the strength of newcomers who are still getting used to the ettiquette ('the mob').
Hopefully this would go someway to lowering the effect of newcomers, until they rack up enough karma themselves to 'graduate' into the higher karma ratings.
Stories, yeah, they're a bit worse but that's not the main thing. I skip stories that don't appeal to me, and you can always go a few pages deep if you want more stories.
It's the comment quality sliding down that's scary to me... it's becoming much more okay to engage in standard-internet-level discussion here, which is to say, much less civil than HN used to be.
Perhaps liberally killing any comment that's primarily insulting, sarcastic, pedantic would help?
For instance, I just saw a link to this two year old thread today, look how civil and friendly it is:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=554889
The only halfway insult on there - "Dunno but she has a Twitter page. Not sure why PG would quote such a weirdo." - was voted to zero. And the 2-3 jokes/sarcasm stood still at 1, none of it voted up.
Also, I'd love to see people who just consistently left substance-less comments get put on auto-kill, but I know that'd never happen for a ton of reasons.
I'm thinking of one guy who just posts about how outraged he is about anything remotely politics related, and nothing else. Joined in the last six months. Actually, that probably describes a lot of users now, which might be part of the problem...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236808
You couldn't get anywhere near that today. Discussing tough and interesting subjects civilly with some of the smartest people I know wasn't what brought me to hn (startups were), but it was a big factor in keeping me here. I knew if I posted some crazy half-assed startup idea that might piss people off that the community could talk about it logically and dispassionately. That allowed each of us to open up more.
Those days are gone.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237127
Admittedly, it wasn't voted up, but there was some agreement with it. You're looking back wistfully at a point where another user thought HN had fallen off precipitously.
I don't see a significant difference between HN now versus about 3 years ago (when I first started lurking), and I believe the community could and (on most days) would have the very discussion you've linked. There are cycles where many of the submissions aren't interesting to me. I usually chalk those up to slow news days. And there have been situations where I've been appalled and infuriated by (what I perceived as) the poor quality of articles/comments that the community was voting up. Some of that is the community offending my own biases. Some of that is just bad days. You can't discern the climate by just looking at today's weather.
The other cycle I've noticed is these efforts at self-policing and reflection. I'm almost annoyed by them because I don't see HN as getting worse. But I'll allow that others are more sensitive to HN's quality. Perhaps these reflective posts are what keep HN's quality high enough for my tastes. Or maybe, as I suspect, they are more about the tastes and perceptions of the long-time users changing. It's more than a little reminiscent of the "golden age" thinking of older generations, where the past was simpler and more innocent because they were younger and insulated from the time's complexity and injustice.
(Sorry for rambling there.)
Yes, I think that's what made it a good example.
The other cycle I've noticed is these efforts at self-policing and reflection. I'm almost annoyed by them because I don't see HN as getting worse.
Yes, it's almost an inside joke. One of the "classic" HN stories is the meta story where we all lament the decaying state of HN. The "naval gazing" stories. You learn either to ignore them or vent (politely) After watching them for a while, I think they serve to help release a lot of frustration people have.
I would note that many of the folks early on who said HN was fine are now also saying there are problems.
To me, HN's core problem was the problem you always have when speaking to more than five people: trying to anticipate reactions. You end up trying to cover every possible response, and it kills the tone. One of the reasons my comments run on so long is that I have to cover every obvious way they could be misunderstood. You're stuck either not replying to anybody, writing long comments, or getting in endless debates. All of that is distasteful to me.
One of the hard lessons I had to learn blogging was not to tease people. I used to put pictures of girls in bikinis up or joke around about making money tricking people online -- to me I was just playing. I live by my reputation: being an internet porn mogul is not on my list of future plans. But there were a heckuva lot of folks who didn't understand my posts, who thought that made me some kind of evil person. It was really sad to have to give up the playful part of my personality simply to get along with people because of the many ways things can be misunderstood. I hate that.
But the real problem is that everybody's personality will piss somebody off somewhere. I know I probably rub thousands of people the wrong way just because I'm the way I am. Others do the same. So then I end up commenting something like "Looks like it is raining outside" and I get 3 or 4 downvotes. Sure, the upvotes outweigh them, but it's just silly nonsense. Vengeance voting.
Hey now I've rambled too, so we're even :)
I blame karma. I know it existed back then too but I don't think people talked about it. There should be no "top users" page. Having a measuring stick drives competition and there should be no metric to civil discussion besides the rewarding feeling of discovery and helping people.
One of the final straws for me was when the title of my submission about being replaced as CEO was changed -- a topic of significant relevance to this audience I think. What frustrated me most was that I had picked a useful title and the not only was the new title worse in my eyes, but it was surrounded by rather inane posts about the "top X reasons for Y" or something about Apple or Google. It just didn't add up for me.
And on a tactical level, there is unquestionably a tendency for people to respond to the top post rather than start a new top-level thread. The lack of collapsing of threads is quite frustrating on long topics.
For now, I'm mostly done here.
Many forums have been driven to civil war by a clique plotting on a secret IRC channel. (Note: I am not suggesting that is happening here! Just that I've seen it before.)
The mention of the fact that the higher-karma, "ingroup" members of HN seem more likely to communicate with each other on twitter and in private emails than the rest of the population reminded me of bad situations I had seen on other forums.
I then thought how glad I was that here on HN it seems to happen on twitter which is still largely public. You commented quickly here about private conversations regarding HN with other high-karma members. It is reassuring that you were open, and happy to be open about this.
This gives me faith in what I find to be an excellent community that the inevitable psychological group-dynamics type phenomena are playing themselves out here in a relatively benign way, due to its high calibre membership. Your later comment "I'm too high drama for that" came across as an amusingly wry confirmation that you feel the same way.
As I said, this put me in mind of situations I have seen in lesser communities where this dynamic had led to ugly scenes. I posted about them. I then felt bad that you or someone else might misinterpret this as an accusation against them. Thats why I added my parenthetical note. Perhaps I should have reconsidered the whole thing.
I would also encourage people to look up folks' email and email them with questions and such. Great way to make new friends. Many a time I've tracked somebody down from an HN discussion only to have it continue via email. (It also brings the noise factor down over here, which is always a good thing)
I know a lot of guys follow everybody they can from HN on Twitter. I don't know if I would personally go that far -- Twitter has a hecuva lot of noise and I get easily distracted -- but it works for some.
So yes, there's a lot of out-of-band chat going on, but as far as I know, none of it is exclusive. If you'd like to participate more, the same channels are open for anybody. I know I keep my Twitter, Facebook, and email addresses in my profile for just that very reason.
Do you mean through here: http://www.ircnet.org/ ?
If so, either I'm doing something wrong or the Secret Cabal is not in session tonight (darnit).