The definition of crap may have to get broader. We may have to kill stories related to politics even when they're intellectually interesting. We'll see.
The most important thing is that the comments are kept useful by constant vigilance on the part of the community. Did anyone see the reddit t-shirt thread yesterday? That sort of thing needs to remain unthinkable here. Not just the sophomoric sexualization and laughter-excuses-any-misconduct, but the parts of Internet culture which aren't relevant to programming/business/etc. (I like lolcats, anime, and politics myself -- just not here.)
As you commented in "What I've Learned from Hacker News", it's not so much the stories, but the comments, which see the greatest tarnish as new users enter any community without necessarily understanding the culture.
I love Hacker News, and I suspect I'll remain a member as long as you will permit me, but it disappoints me when I see comments along the line of "So what?"..
What's more subtle is the increase in sarcasm- It's not that any particular comment is terribly hurtful, but it indicates a culture of people who are showing off, or attacking one another, rather than working together.
I'm ashamed to admit that at the worst of times, it reminds me more of 4chan than a college coffee shop.
Of course, such feelings are mostly isolated, at least for now, but I'm more worried about preserving the commenting culture than the submitted stories.
I would not object at all to linking what I say here to my real name. Indeed, my name is Thomas Doggette. My username is my first initial and last name. I don't use my real identity on sites where I argue with others about sex and religion and politics (in rather mixed company), nor where I play games, but something like HN provides a benefit to me (reputation among potential future colleagues and employers) in exchange for being upfront about who I am.
Thank you for the wonderful post- That's exactly the point I was trying to make in my article.
"I don't use my real identity on sites where I argue with others about sex and religion and politics "
People avoid certain subjects and behavior when they're using their real name and identity. They focus on building an account which will help their reputation.
It just so happens that the best way to do that is to civilly discuss news and information that's relevant to a Hacker News site ;)
If the goal is to keep conversation civil and on-topic, encouraging people to post under their real names, using their reputation as collateral, just might work.
Metafilter and other communities have used such tactics with reasonable effectiveness, but I think that it may be a bad choice.
If I were interested in the Startup Community, but were based out of Louisiana, I might not have anyone who would 'vouch' for me, even though I might be a very productive member of the community.
Further, I were a new member, and able to convince you to sponsor me, unless I know you outside of the forum, there's no incentive for me to respect that I might make you look bad.. If I make you look bad, I can just disappear, and all is forgotten, at least so far as my username is concerned.
That's why I had hoped we might find a way to give usernames more weight, either by using the same username as multiple other projects, or by using birth names.
Regarding your example of the person in Louisiana interested in the startup community, I think that person would still have a reasonable shot at joining the HN community. Remember, I'm only talking about write access to HN, not read. So that person could still read all the great discussion and links here. If that individual is interested enough in hacking or startups they must know some other people somewhere who might be members. I would guess there would be enough HN members sprinkled around open source projects and small companies around the country that a person who has a decent footprint in another hacking community would be able to find someone who knows them well enough to invite them. Are there going to be people you miss with this strategy? Clearly there will be. However, I would be willing to bet that a motivated person who genuinely wants to join the community would still find a way in. I see that as a bonus: anyone who works that hard at it probably has a lower probability of being a troll.
I love this community and I do really hope we find a mechanism to keep it from degrading!
If the commenters aren't civil, almost no topic is going to work. You can have lots of flame wars and trash talk about OOP vs FP -- heck, we've done it many times. Same goes for relational databases verus column-oriented databases, or Erlang innards vs. the JVM.
It's not the topics, it's the behavior of the commenters that make or break a site.
As a hacker and somebody who is interested in just about anything, I'd like broader topics and stricter commenting behavior, although I understand you can get to the same point with a limited topic list -- it's just real boring. Bascially what you're saying is "let's limit discussion to things that are so technical as to not emotionally involve but just a very small subset of the readers" That's great, but success in this case means the site is bland and stale.
At some point, I think about 1.5 years ago, we had a discussion on here about the reason for other topics. Fact is, after so many startup articles, they all start to look alike. I don't know about other readers, but I'd like a reason to come back every day. The "nuances of database scaling" is wonderful, overdone, and we all wish we could have those problems. 3-D printing? Economics of drug legalization (not the policy)? Working a startup in a down economy? Effects of the Innovator's Dilemma on military power? Comparison of various country's economies and the impact on trade? These are all startup topics: they're exploring problems and issues where startups can get involved.</soap box>
EDIT: I'll add another statement: the best startups are those that emotionally-involved founders come at a unique and interestesting problem from radically different worldviews using technology to make people's lives easier. That means that discussing unique and interesting problems that emotionally charge and divide us is the best way to form groups to begin to solve those problems.
That would only make sense if there were too many intellectually interesting articles about politics. There aren't. The vast majority of articles on politics say nothing new at all.
A quick and dirty solution would be just to delete any articles if someone can find a link to an earlier article saying essentially the same thing. This would get rid of more than just the junk stories on politics, it would get rid of all the rehashes of the ethics of nootropic drugs, or the link between race and IQ, or whatever. We have all these topics on this site where people find it necessary to upvote thinly rewritten versions of the same dumb ideas every few months; that's what needs to be banned, posts with nothing novel except the URL.
But now that you mention this, maybe the problem is that it's easier to recognize articles with identical data than articles with identical ideas. So people say "oh, I've already seen an article about bailout X", but not "oh, this is just another flavor of libertarian blathering."
One thing I found interesting, and what may be very effective, is something like robot9k. The gist of it is that no comment that has previously been posted can be posted again. I've spent some time in the #XKCD-Signal IRC channel (Where Robot9000 came from), and it forces rather lengthy and interesting discussion. While it would have to have some modifications to work in a commenting situation rather than a IRC situation, I think it largely helps with the amount of trash posts.
Note that while it removes all the "First post" and "Wow. That sucks" posts, it does nothing about post attitude. It doesn't fight against trolling, but at least it has to be original trolling, and you will thus have to have some sort of moderation to beat that.
I used to be a regular reader of Kuro5hin, but I've fallen away as I've had less time to read general interest articles of late.
The article seems to focus on several suggestions all of which presupposing the idea that user accounts can't be the same as the list of members, so you see an increase in trolling. I suppose I'm not sure I agree.
I'd be interested to find out if people would be as willing to troll, or even just be vindictive, if the had more at stake than simply a disposable username. There would always be some, I suppose, but my hypothesis is that it would greatly diminish.
A deep strength of hacker news is that when someone goes to the trouble of responding to a troll in a factual rather than inflammatory way, it is supported with upvotes. Responding like this can be difficult, but it's very effective - and good for the soul.
A weakness of HN is that intelligent, articulate writing is sometimes used with harsh attitude and connotations. That is, it's just as nasty as elsewhere online, just elegantly phrased. This is accepted, because HN favours intelligence over attitude (could just be my perception).
Eliezer posted an article on denotations vs. connotations recently, which gave me a new perspective on this old idea: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4h/when_truth_isnt_enough/
The irony is delicious :)
- Ron Tackle