I don't suppose you have a, like, a blogpost or really in-depth comment that talks about this? It elucidates something that I intuitively felt before, especially as a reddit mod, but had trouble articulating.
I also really liked your comment about contrarianism that you went in-depth on, that one is pretty easy to Google for though.
HN Search is the best way to track down past posts. Here are some links based on phrases I know I've used repeatedly:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... (note that I used the Algolia query to exclude unrelated words)
If those links turn up the comment you remember, please let me know—I'm curious which one it was. All these past moderation comments are beginning to crystallize into discrete topics about which I've said similar things many times, and I intend to eventually distill them into a kind of commentary on the site guidelines, to fill out the picture of what HN is intended to be.
The underlying phenomenon, I think, is that people feel insecure in an internet forum, especially a large one, because the sheer quantity that shows up there is bewildering and our wiring did not evolve to process anything like that. Instead of seeing it as a statistical cloud produced by thousands of people (which is what it really is), we interpret it as the productions of a small group of individuals (which is how we're wired to see the world). Since that's such a distorted interpretation, those imaginary individuals seem weird and dramatic in our imagination. Either they seem super smart (because of all the information we had no idea of), which makes us feel dumb, or they seem monstrous (because of all the views that seem outrageously wrong or offensive), which makes us feel surrounded by enemies, if not demons—and so on. Because these feelings are uncomfortable, we end up creating an image of the community that we can diss in order to restore our sense of equilibrium towards it. The problem is that if everybody's doing this, it makes community really hard.
There's a long sequence of past comments on a related mechanism here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Also these: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
That may sound like arcane psychologizing, but I think it's the biggest issue HN faces. It's astonishing how many people have a negative image of the community, even among users who love HN and come here every day. The negative images differ depending on what people feel most offended or threatened by: if you're political, it tends to feel like the site is politically against you; or it might feel "full of toxicity", "nitpicking by know-it-all techies", and so on. There are many variations.
HN is particularly prone to this because it's a non-siloed site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...) - we're all in the same boat and nobody gets to factor away the things they dislike (via subscriber lists and whatnot) so they won't notice them anymore. The much larger sites like Reddit and Twitter all grew by sharding. It feels safer if you have your own shard, and on HN we don't do that, so we're really up against the problem of what happens when everybody faces everybody else and nobody realizes that's happening or how unprecedented it really is. I wonder sometimes whether HN is on the leading edge of this phenomenon; if anyone knows of other cases, I'd love to be pointed there.
I think it's sad, and limits the community, that even when people have a deeply positive relationship to HN, their top-of-mind model is that it’s “toxic and negative”. This showed up in what patio11 said in a recent interview about HN—even when praising HN, he feels obliged to bow to the “toxic and negative” meme both at the beginning of his answer and at the end: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153475. Just saying directly what's good about it would seem outrageous otherwise!
Ultimately this challenge is more interesting than it seems at first glance. It's about whether we can have a true sense of community here over time.
And yeah I'd love to read those insights in a more structured form when they're ready.
My purposes for doing so are a combination of fighting against the tendency to underrate the importance of the Internet and, and this second factor is a little unfortunate, pre-emptive innoculation against a genre of attack that I'd be exposed to professionally if I were to jump immediately into "HN has positively changed the course of my life for the better and is one of the best communities on the Internet."
By the way, the thing that most struck me in that quote of you was not that part. It was what you said about HN's potential for bringing people together in the real world. Those effects are little-known relative to how powerful they are, so I was impressed that you put your finger on that point. It's just the right point, in my view. I think it is by far the biggest unfulfilled potential of HN, I'm convinced that there is room for those effects to become much more powerful in a way that would be good for everybody, and have been dreaming for years about doing something serious about it.