Dear sw007

The fundamental problem is that people like reading things that are written by people that have a slightly higher IQ than them (at least for people this side of 100).

The reason that this is a problem is that the average person has more friends closer to the median IQ than they do further away. So when people share new sites with one another they are generally sharing it more often with lower IQ people than they are with higher IQ people. These people come, love the content, stay, and repeat the cycle.

Countermeasures are just fighting this effect. It happened to Reddit, Fark, etc. One countermeasure is smart-flight evidenced by people fleeing to other subreddits like "TrueReddit" or making nearly identical subreddits "CanadianPolitics" vs "Canada". Or "LibertarianDebates" vs "Libertarian". It's like "white flight" only the division isn't racial, it's cognitive.

In my opinion HN suffers far less than it reasonably should, given its popularity and influence. Probably due to good attention, moderation, and direct involvement by pg. It's likely that when I joined HN I knew far less about the world and tech; upvoting the 500 mile email posting or a basic article on split testing. But I've grown and the community probably became a bit more mainstream and less intelligent.

The only community I haven't really seen it happen to so far is Less Wrong, but over there they are absolutely fanatical about keeping out poor discussion. I don't know if that is worth the effort.

To me, the best thing to do is to just leave once it gets bad enough and a better alternative pops up. Something else will come along. Maybe a secretive invite only HN, or something that customizes which articles you see based on what you upvote. The problem with the former is that secret societies are generally self-important and word always gets out (remember fight club anyone?). The problem with the latter is that it absolutely ruins a feeling of community. So those probably won't happen, it will probably just be a new community, much like this one, but with a clean slate.

"And this is not a passive experiment"

This seems to be the most important thing here. In any community, you have the chance to play an active role. If you stay and do good, you help it in your own way. If you jump ship, you leave the community with one less person that cares.

this was a great post. its hard to deal with negativity when you're so close to the things you share on HN. But I agree just getting one positive and constructive comment is worth filtering through a lot of negativity. Its where another guy shows you something you've never thought about and it makes the code beautiful, or a critiques that helps make your app a better experience for people who have gotten a genuine interest in it.

Am I missing something here? This post makes it look like the conversation is surrounding the increase in negative comments vs the decrease of positive reinforcement. I don't think that's the crux of the issue at all. I come here for an interesting conversation. Lately, I haven't been getting it. Replacing overwhelmingly negative but unconstructive comments with overwhelmingly positive but unconstructive comments isn't the way forward. That's just trading one kind of troll for another. And to clear up any misconception - I don't think anybody's explicitly saying "say nicer things, no matter what!" But I think a focus on the positivity vs the constructiveness of a comment will take people down that road anyway.

The author asks to ignore all the negative advice and pick out the positive crumbs. Not everyone can take negative comments effectively. I for one agree with sw007 that it is demotivating to receive a bunch of negative feedback. Also genuine entrepreneurs posts seem to struggle to come up on page 1 of HN, when mostly controversial or sensational topics seem to take the prime space.

Kudos to pg for observing and listening to us. It would be awesome to have guidelines and incentive structures to keep HN as entrepreneur friendly as possible.

Good post, Reg! I think you made Steve's day, and it is good advice for everyone on HN as well. I would be in favor of allowing people on HN to downvote overly negative comments. That would help I think. Not allowing everyone to downvote is a problem. HN karma != helpfulness.

So the general sense is that HN used to be great and a more open place. I agree. Here's an idea to prevent and reverse the decline of HN:

Set a large karma threshold for upvoting rights.

If you give a bunch of new users the right to upvote they'll just upvote each other based on their ideas on what makes a good community. There's no way to maintain or enforce the culture of the community when the new members can just bootstrap their own culture base with little to no input from the existing community.

If pg was inclined he could set this threshold, normalize/zero-out the karma scores for all accounts created after date X, and effectively go back in time to that date in terms of who has the power to set the tone and culture of HN.