This is equivalent of saying, "The rise of organic farming is bad for non-organic farmers" or "The rise of solar panels is bad for the petroleum industry" or "Reddit is bad for Chrome and Firefox because it competes with bookmarks" it's all highly subjective and biased — it's hard to take articles that essentially say X is bad because of Y or I hate X because of Y seriously, especially when they don't even make a valid argument or back up their claims with an ounce of credible and non-biased evidence.

If it weren't for Hacker News I honestly wouldn't know what is going on half the time. You can't get the type of news and useful resources you come across on a daily basis on HN anywhere else in my opinion. /r/programming on Reddit might come close, but HN to me is always the penultimate resource for tech news relating to not only programming but investment, startups and other industries I wouldn't generally go searching for like biotech, medical research and other various areas of tech you would normally have to read several sites on to get.

Plus, you can't deny Show HN is also a great way for people to showcase cool things they've made as well. I've come across some great projects and resources in the years I've been using the site via Show HN alone.

I think most people here realize that the content here is not simply whatever gets the most upvotes, there are fairly complicated rules and penalties that get applied (many of them automatically). If you want democracy, there are plenty of other venues for it. The value in HN is that the quality of content is high, and the moderation is a large reason for that.

I challenge you to show me another site that has as good a combination of quality articles and quality comments. I'm sure improvements can be made, and if you're paying any attention you'll note that improvements are being made (see the recent publication of the name of the main moderator so that we can ask him questions).

What HN is doing works. If you've got a better idea, show it to me.

I'm always amazed by blog posts that say "xyz sucks" - someone should fix it and then offers no practical next steps to do so.

Complaining is easy. If you really want to change something - if it's important enough to you - then fix it.

> 504 Gateway Time-out

Agreed, its appetite for destroying small web servers is unquenchable.

More generally, the truth is that we go out of our way to avoid censoring stories connected to YC. That was the very first thing that PG told me about HN moderation.

That said, there are things that irritate the hell out of me about the community; banality, lack of relevance in posts, lack of clear context in posts.

To expand - the posts that I consider banal - 'New framework for X' or 'Blan, a X for Y.' - Relevance Posts, the post that was about the libertarian police force that briefly surfaced on the front page today - Context Posts that require you to know all about the subject before you can understand the posts content (the one about the game jam, or the one about keybase.io) in most cases I've never heard of whatever it is that they are posting about, and I need to try to glean context from the post - which is often missing.

I don't begrudge the above, its as much a part of the local flavor as anything else is - so I accept it as a part of being in one of the best places to get interesting tech news on the net.

There is no algorithm that's going to change human nature. Sorry.