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Comment by EwanG | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is that we all KNOW what the answer to the problem is, but no one is going to go out on a limb and say it. So let me do so - HN needs a paid, full time, editor who will go through the submissions not to approve of what he/she likes (though you could go with a council of three if you're really worried about that), but to make sure they are real links to real articles - and that have the time to do the research to insure that the article is what it claims it is about, and hasn't been posted 20 times in the last week under slightly different names.

I always found the boards I enjoyed best back when I ran a C-64 BBS (yes, that was a BBS running ON a C-64 with a 1200 baud modem and two floppy drives) were the ones with appropriately benevolent "dictators" who used a light touch to keep things real and on track. I can't say I've seen anything on the internet to convince me that there's been a notable improvement on such.

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I didn't feel like I knew what the answer was, so I was very curious to see what it would be.

I'd actually been considering hiring someone to run HN, though not to moderate it in quite as hands-on a way as you're suggesting. Interesting idea though.

Hey PG, have you read Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody? It has lots in there about the problems inherent in big communities, especially in how they function on the internet.

The later parts of the book (chapter 8 and beyond) seem applicable to the problems HN is facing.

PM me if you want, I'll send you my copy of the book.

I haven´t read that book, looks interesting.

On the topic of moderation I would suggest the ability to somewhat "follow" good commenters, and even perhaps block bad submitters. This way, reputation is not only karma, but quality of followers.

Please get in contact with Matt Haughey, he's the best possible person to talk to about this, having run Metafilter for over a decade.

Be warned, he's going to strongly advise you to set up a backchannel for public metadiscussion. Jeff Atwood resisted it vehemently at first when another metafilter moderator was a guest on his podcast, but they did eventually set up their meta subsite in the same vein.

Yes, please do that! Reddit's turnaround from slow decline might have happened because they hired a full time community manager.

Isn't this the role of Slashdot's editors? Or do they choose the stories as well? Either way, Slashdot has almost no interesting stories these days.

That could simply be what they are chosen to look for isn't what you would consider interesting. If you had an editor here you could define what they are looking for.

Metafilter uses this, so it is a valid model. I'm supporting you on this.

EwanG, this seems contrary to the democratic spirit of community news sites. Who is to say what's good and bad? I don't trust a dictator (editor).

Pure democracy doesn't necessarily scale, which is why we elect representatives and have electoral colleges and such in real life. Maybe HN's reached the point where a pure vote system is not enough.

Don't want to start a political argument, but isn't the way to make democracy scale more to do with federalism? And sub-reddits do just that.

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