Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

Let's not get too self-congratulatory here. Yes, the civility on HN is much higher than on many other discussion sites, but it's still a lot lower than you'd find in most real-world situations.

I agree that throwaway accounts are useful, and that there are times when anonymity is advantageous, and that the added civility that comes with real names is a bad tradeoff in this case.

However: in this case, the second point (downvoting) didn't prevent an uncivil (yet insightful) comment from becoming the highest ranked comment in the thread.

I'm not saying Suster's suggested fixes are good ones-- but I don't think we should dismiss the problematic out of hand.

Unchecked nastiness and incivility are the broken windows of the online community.

His complaint seems to partly center on the amount of swear words... one reason I prefer HN over other communities is we are not scared of the word fuck. Swearing is a part of honest society (and, luckily, gratuitous swearing is downmodded to oblivion in my experience).

Why did pw0ncakes get upvoted. a) because he is probably right but b) mostly because he accurately represents his generations reaction to things like this (and, lets face it, the original post was rather silly/incindary)

My suggestions (which will not be popular with many of Ycombinator’s hackers but may meet your goal of civility).

And here's the problem with this entire post; it adopts the same slightly sneering, "peering down on us" tone. It's not overtly rude - but no better, really, than "fucking asshole" (once you get over the swear word).

It's not, actually, a post about improving civility on HN - it's a thinly veiled attack/return shot :)

Ok, I'm not going to support calling the guy and asshole (he sounds like a bit of an idjit, I think, reading through the various posts/comments etc. and the original post he made before the updates did sound a bit "asshole") and, yes, there is a slightly growing problem of attacks over fair argument here in HN comments. But this is still a stellar community; positive suggestions are good, sneering resentment, probably not :)

Send me alerts when comments come in on a story I’ve written

That's silly; just monitor your logs if you want to see when HN comments come up (or set up a google alert etc.).

But actually I would prefer not encouraging people to come here to write about their posts unless they are already a member, reasoning:

- they are probably not "up" on how things work here, and so it risks going downhill

- comments here can be acerbic and honest, and people do take offense at that (which seems unfair to the writer)

By all means if it benefits the discussion invite him/her in. Otherwise leave it be :)

I actually rather like that HN doesn't do email notifications or an RSS feed of your own comments/replies.

I think a lot of the criticism of our generation and of job hopping is projection. The whining about entitled, self-centered young people sounds exactly like the complaints that were made of the Boomer generation in 1970, and they're just as exaggerated-- somewhat true, mostly not.

What's lost in this mess is that very few people actually want to job hop. They do it because they have to do it in order to have their career progress at an acceptable pace. It's risky and painful and the vast majority of people would rather not have to do it. So it sucks to be criticized for a behavior that we're forced into.

Loyalty has to be earned. If I'm pigeonholed or passed over for a promotion, damn right I'm going to start looking for another job.

Also, with all the complaints about people job hopping to increase their salaries, this wouldn't work at all if companies paid fair salaries. If companies are slow with raises and promotions, leaving their people underpaid after a couple of years, they get what they deserve when people stream out. (Obviously, this matter is different for cash-strapped startups, but people who join those aren't especially concerned about salary.)

I'm pretty happy with Hacker News as it is. I think the comments are generally insightful and the few trolls are dealt with swiftly and ruthlessly.

Let's face it, we're not Olde English Lords here in polite discussion. People have opinions and occasionally get animated. Really, who fucking cares if someone curses, if they've got something good to say?