Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

yes, but maybe show things a bit differently as well. when items in /newest make their way to the frontpage, remove them from /newest. links with 0 upvotes and 0 comments should fall off the page faster, or rather, any link with at least one other upvote/comment should stick around longer to try to gain traction.

I think it's an interesting idea to be able to "group" related posts that occur within a certain time range of each other. If five posts on the new iPad 7 come in within the same three days, someone can drag them all together into the "iPad 7" thread.

But this?

the duplicate posts which happen a few months later

Once we're up to a timescale of months, or even weeks, we're no longer being sensible. Instead we're exhibiting FAQ Syndrome: The irrational fear that someone, somewhere, is saying something that isn't entirely original.

I think the cult of originality is actually a big problem at HN, and other "news" sites as well. The important things in life are not particularly original, and they do not change particularly quickly. A site that is determined not to re-discuss previous topics is doomed to discuss nothing but ephemeral trivia. The great thing about celebrity gossip is that it is always new! We can manufacture celebrities at whatever rate is needed to keep the front page fresh. But we can't manufacture Knuths as needed; we've only got the one set of Maxwell's equations; new books on the scale of K&R or SICP don't come along every day. But if we discourage the constant reexamination of these classics they will get placed on the dusty shelves and we'll see nothing but discussions of the latest gossip and bling. You know, like we have today.

I always wished HN would feel more like academia, which cycles like the seasons. Every year, you discuss all the classics again for a new audience of newbs. After a little while, you've heard all the classics and are ready to graduate, or become a professor. This is what makes me miss the days when this was "Startup News" and was more explicitly tied to the YC cycle, the time when you could tell that a new YC class was starting by watching for the influx of new people.

I think I am too late to the discussion already, but I think all of pg's a), b) and c) are caused by people who think that this is OK-behavior.

I think a new user should, by default, get "read-only" access. Once the account ages, so the user sees what is acceptable behavior, should you get write-access.

Another idea is to actually make good the name of the site (Hacker news). EITHER a) Show us you actually are a hacker-- do you build things, or just troll? Is your relation to technology deeper than "I read techcrunch?" This could be a simple matter of adding a text-field or a mandatory homepage/startup URL field, and asking (say) 3 longtime HNers to decide if the "applicant" is interesting enough to the HN community.

OR b) get invited by a long-time HN-er to join (There should be a strong disincentive to invite indiscriminately: for instance, everytime a person you invite gets downvoted, you lose 0.2 karma points).

I know, this scheme sounds elitist. And it is. Yet, I can't think of a single interesting HN-er this would filter out.

I think that having more content on the front page that isn't shallow industry gossip would have a positive effect on discussions overall - they tend to drag down the other threads, and bring in a lot of people who don't understand / follow the commenting culture here.

The new page is out of hand, IMHO - there's a huge incentive to be the first to submit an article (and no cost), so new content is continually posted. Many interesting posts fall off the bottom of the new page within an hour - a post has to quickly appeal to lots of people, or it's gone. This leads to lowest-common-denominator submissions.

Instead of moronic "first post!" comments, we've got a plague of "first submission!"s.

The sum of the scores on the new page divided by the oldest's age may be a good metric. Currently, the total is 217, and the oldest two say "1 hour ago" and "2 hours ago", roughly 90 minutes. That's only 2.4 points per minute, and this thread (118 points, 1 hour ago) is a major outlier; without it, it's 1.1 per minute.

Whether you make submitting articles cost karma (3-5 points?) and/or add a penalty for posting an article that was subsequently flagged and deleted, fewer dull submissions would improve discussions. (It would also help with spam.)

I just wanted to float this option out there for discussion to see if people thought a tighter clique would be better. I would also be cut out of the community if it were invitation-only.

I note that the /old experiment (a Hacker News whose voting data set was limited entirely to accounts > 1 year old) demonstrated no obvious improvement in quality.

It seems to be entirely a question of the public choice of what is acceptable content to submit.