Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?

Here's an open-ended question for all of you. I saw the recent thread on the main page about "honeypot" submissions, including a comment by pg, the site founder, that the quality of comments on Hacker News has declined. What can I do about that? What can we all do about that? What voluntary cooperation can we engage in as users of Hacker News to make HN a more useful, friendly, and informative online community? I invite open discussion of this issue here, with any and all suggestions welcome, including suggestions directed specifically to my own online behavior.

One suggestion I have made before is actively to upvote comments that either 1) ask for follow-ups with more details or facts to clarify or back-up a parent comment's statements, or 2) provide asked-for details or facts (especially with links to reliable online sources or citations to dead-tree reliable sources). I also like to silently upvote comments in which users are polite and say "please" or "thank you," as a measure to promote civility. What else is good to upvote? How else besides upvoting good comments and asking follow-up questions can each user here promote better comments?

Thank you for any ideas you share here. And many thanks, of course, to the dozens of users here whose posts and comments make HN a valuable community to me and to other users.

IMNSHO there are two things that would help HN be a "better" place - of course as with most folks who respond to this better will correspond to what THEY would like to see. So you should take any comment in this discussion with the requisite boulder of salt...

1) Hire a Benevolent Dictator/Community Manager. Usually the second title is just a euphemism for the first. I will go ahead and state that said person should have some history on HN, should be evaluated on a reasonably consistent basis by both pg and the community, and should have a commitment to be here more often than not. They should be able to cull some stories and promote others not only based on their personal interests, but also to the betterment of the community (even if the community doesn't always agree). I am also willing to put myself up as an applicant for said position assuming pg is willing to work with someone remotely - as much because I don't want to see the argument that no one would be willing to do it as that having run a few BBS and forums I have some reason to think I could actually do it.

2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have more control over how much of HN they view and participate in. As any community grows you get more diversity, and it becomes harder to ascertain a common "always good". Instead give folks the ability (preferably through tools) to modify how they participate in and view the community. If there's a subject that always bothers you, perhaps it's best for everyone if you can avoid having to even see it. If there's something you're particularly interested, being able to see more of it is probably worthwhile.

My .02 worth for you :-)

Does PG listen to the StackExchange podcast? There's some great information on there sprinkled throughout the various conversations they have. Jeff Attwood is very passionate about online community management and he and Joel Spolsky get into some interesting debates about some of the community-related problems that they have to deal with on StackOverflow and the other StackExchange sites.

Absolutly no politics, current mainstream news, or anything that comes near them. No OWS crap that keeps getting submitted. There's a lot of pieces from the Atlantic, Vanity, and other places that are being submitted and upvoted that are essentially political in nature but seem to be viewed in a good light simply because of their publisher. Cut out all that and the biggest problems will go away.

Promote civil discourse and find a solution to all the pedantry. There's lots of threads now where people are arguing for a long time essentially over semantics. It's really bone-headed and doesn't reflect well on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555595

Who has time to read the comments when HN blasts us with so many uncategorized articles. Perhaps you should consider what percentage of comments are even read.