What I've Learned from Hacker News (2009)

The dumb joke comment definitely resonates with me. Personally its the reason I stopped reading Reddit. I used to love it but now every comment thread is some self-referential inside joke. Or some other combination of “this” or “your mom” or something equally as stupid. Im glad there is a culture on here of downvoting those comments and keeping things fairly on topic.

> Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly.

The kudzu comparison is excellent. If you've never been to the US South, kudzu is a vine that was brought in from Japan by the Works Progress Administration in 1935 to help control erosion. It sounded like a great idea, as it grows fast - really fast (up to 30cm a day, in the right conditions) and adds nitrogen to the soil. But it's essentially unstoppable and it will use existing plants to support itself and get access to sunlight, smothering them in the process. When the vines droop and touch the earth, they can start a new root system from there. The only way to control it is via goats, and there aren't a lot of goats in the South.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_in_the_United_States

So if bad comments get a solid hold on your site, they can be really painful to remove. Like kudzu, they support themselves on legit comments. And will smother them if allowed to spread unchecked.

There is an ideology for web businesses based around the 0 cents customer model that starts to view accounts and their customers as worthless too. A lot of the web business model is that the cost of many customers is almost 0 cents so you push it to actually zero and then fund another way. But these companies also often adopt 0 value customer attitudes as well, viewing the cost of support and maintenance as an unnecessary annoyances and attempt to do it as cheap as possible and usually algorithmically.

There is little attempt by most web companies to try and raise the bar of discussion or promote it, only to do what they are legally required to do. A lot of them are desperately trying to police their platforms with algorithms (Google, Youtube, Facebook, Discord, Ebay) and throwing away legitimate customers all the time when they have been wrongly identified by the algorithm or reported by a nefarious organisation or individual. But because every account is effectively 0 cents to run they view the value of any individual customers as nothing as well, whether they pay the platform or not, as worthless. Customers don’t view their accounts like that, certainly Youtubers and social score sites especially those with bands of participation when they target legitimate customers in this way drive them away and build an ever increasing list of detractors. Everyone will one day get scammed on ebay, its their business model. Every one will have their account nuked on Google, facebook and discord because none of those companies value their customers accounts and never will. If you post content on youtube you will get copyright striked despite never actually copying someone elses work. In all cases you’ll find support worthless.

I haven't seen that attitude and philosophy on hacker news, maybe it exists and I am blissfully unaware of it but its definitely something Reddit and many other big sites are doing regularly. It is never quite the same thing, but the core attitude of accounts being worthless and throw away to the business but not the customer seems to be very common. Its a very inhuman way to treat your customers and I doubt it leads to a company that will last the test of time. There is no doubt it leads to massive profits sometimes however. Its also clearly not the only way to do things as Amazon has shown that good customer service can be a focus at web scale for all its other faults.

> I wouldn't want the site to go away. But I would like to be sure it's not a net drag on productivity. What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to a site that caused them to waste lots of time. I wish I could be 100% sure that's not a description of HN.

"Reading the Hackernews comments makes me lose a bit of faith in humanity."

— someone I forgot to warn about HN comments

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1389891571718443010

> Hacker News has two kinds of protections against fluff. The most common types of fluff links are banned as off-topic. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on are explicitly banned. This keeps out most fluff, but not all of it. Some links are both fluff, in the sense of being very short, and also on topic.

Not explicitly covered in the Submissions section nor the Dilution sections is the trend toward more general and larger volumes of less tech-focused or leading-edge content. Perhaps it was not as noticeable in 2009.