Solving The Hacker News Problem

I guess I don't really agree; HN of several years ago typically had much briefer and less "weighty" articles and discussion than r/truereddit, and a lot more offhand stuff, like the typical techcrunch stories, and "here's how you do a thing in vim" type quick-tip articles. Certainly some good, in-depth technical articles and discussions, but that's the case now too. I've been digging through archives to try to remind myself of whether I had missed some sort of golden age (I was a lurker then, and considered it an interesting but not amazing site), and I still don't really see the golden-ageness, even in retrospect. Nothing like the Kuro5hin golden age, anyway. ;-)

The mere fact that you took the time to compile this lengthy response and have received meaningful responses is evidence enough that HN has not "jumped the shark."

It is a people problem, but I feel the biggest problem is that people are pointing out that there's a problem. Communities evolve; that is, in fact, practically all they do. Perhaps HN isn't the same as it was 2 or 3 years ago, saying that it's worse is a bit of a stretch.

I've yet to find a community where people have meaningful discussions in the comments without some snarky response like, "lol wut"." On HN these comments are self-moderated; those with the karma downvote the meaningless comments and they disappear into the aether.

Simply put, I don't think HN is dying. Rumors of its demise are highly overblown.

It's important to separate concerns, and I think there are three main things people are complaining about:

1) quality of submissions 2) quality of comments 3) quality of community

It's the second and third that I think have declined. It's not because the people are any less smart, it's that there are just too many of them. It becomes difficult to keep a mental model of everyone in your head, so you start seeing everything as disembodied text, rather than human beings speaking to one another, with a history of shared experiences.

IMO, this is a solvable problem. You can use avatars and display our locations next to our comments, or even just make our names a little bigger. Anything to humanize the conversations.

I sort of agree, but I meant it a bit tongue-in-cheek (hence the smiley). I'm sure plenty of people would argue that the Kuro5hin golden age was nothing like the WELL golden age, or the Usenet golden age, or various other possibilities.

One thing I did like about the Kuro5hin model was discussion organized around original, substantive stories, written by the same userbase who were the commenters. That, and stories posted at a rate of one or two a day. Sites like Slashdot/HN/reddit are instead mainly based around discussing offsite links, which K5 allowed but sort of discouraged as "mindless link propagation" (there was a section for it, but people didn't want too many submissions to it, and you typically had to add some substantive commentary to the link to get the submission accepted). The articles were also directly written for / targeted to the K5 community. People do sometimes write blog posts specifically to target HN, but they're often more multitargeted--- stuff submitted here might not be written with an HN audience in mind at all, or HN might only be one of several intended audiences.

Some classic Usenet groups were sort-of in that style as well. You could start a new thread with a one-line post or "what do you think of this?" query, but some groups had a culture of starting new threads only when you had a significant, well-thought out post to make; otherwise you were supposed to stick to existing threads.

I'm afraid it's harder to attract good content to a community these days, though. The people who used to consistently write good stuff for Kuro5hin now have their own blogs, and post their content there instead. In the early 2000s, it was a win-win situation: Kuro5hin provided an outlet for people who had things to say, and people who had things to say provided interesting content to read and discuss. These days if you have something compelling to say, you can just start a blog, and then try to get readers by submitting links across the web.

What about disabling voting until a user reaches a certain amount of karma? Of course, you'd have to give the upvote ability to the original members (hand selected?) so that the system could actually get off the ground.

It would be similar to the "invite only" community idea where older users have to actually approve new members, but less restrictive. Perhaps even have upvotes on users instead of just comments. It would be similar to an "invite", but just for allowing them to vote. I'd say also keep the hellbanning that we have here. There will sadly be some false positives, but it seems to work very well for keeping out the worst.

Perhaps upvoting users could affect the reputation of the folks doing the upvoting. If you upvote a bad user into the community, your reputation suffers as well.

Now, this does nothing to solve the problem of groupthink, and in fact somewhat enforces it. However, I think some amount of groupthink is inevitable if you want to create a strong sense of community. Because you're trying to cluster users around a core set of values, it's probable that they'll think similarly in other ways as well.

Edit: I think multidimensional voting helps as well. Ignoring the comments voted "funny" on /. helps to filter out what people liked just because it was amusing. I think "agree/disagree" voting would be useful as a separate thing, because too often that winds up conflicting with upvoting/downvoting for quality.