Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

I'm not sure about it, but some of the comments about no karma have kept me thinking about "no karma for submissions". For any submissions.

As I see it, HN is about the conversation. I don't care who brings up a topic, if it's interesting. And then, I'd prefer to see discussion focused on that one submission thread, instead of spread across 3 or 5 or more follow-on submissions, particularly those placing #, ?, etc. at the end of the URL.

If posting does not bring karma, maybe this would help reduce the number of threads and increase their concentration of ensuing conversation.

I'm not sure, though. Something subconscious tells me I'm not seeing the other side(s) of such a change.

Also, if possible, I think the duplicate checker would benefit from being enhanced to detect at least the more obvious/prevalent workarounds, e.g. those same #, ?, etc. Of course, this, of itself, likely leads to an arms race. But maybe it would have at least some temporary value.

You could even have everyone's HN be seeded by his own upvotes/downvotes. Everyone would then get their own HN with stuff they like on top and stuff they don't like on the bottom. A tagging system would also help a lot. People who are interested in politics get politics, people who are interested in science get science. I'm not sure if these are good ideas however, because you might get multiple ghettos (and it would be hard to implement).

David, I was coming to the same conclusions as well. One downside is that to the new user, the articles appearing would be what is considered interesting by the "average" user.

One way to counteract this is to have the new user match, say, pg's profile.

The problem is that as a group of geeks get diluted by newbies the intelligence level of the group goes down. As the intelligence level decreases the ability for this group to filter for the conversations previously highly voted decreases. More intelligent people filter for more intelligent stories and comments. (Is reddit a worse community? No. Does it have a different audience? Yes. That is what is happening here.)

I know this is an offensive idea, but you simply have to decide whether to cater for the elites or the lowest common denominator. As time progresses the people just joining now will look back on this time as a golden age of HN -- it will get worse -- and in the future there will be a new wave of lower intelligence HN'ers. That is how it always is.

The solution I would prefer is (1) allowing users to curate their own experience with far greater granularity than allowed on a site such as Reddit. That is, use twitter like ideas of followers and lists. Allow us to choose who we see comments and stories from. I care about the votes from these people much more than somebody who just joined a couple of weeks ago and hasn't programmed or owned a startup company. (2) giving users with popularity in the community, moderation power similar to the kind found on StackOverflow. The power to close topics. Respond to bad usages of the vote button. Respond to flags. Perhaps even the power to moderate comments.

> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like.

I wonder if it wouldn't make sense for the front page to have a few "new" articles show up as well. Like, sprinkled throughout the list, or maybe just show three of them at the top. Get them in front of the whole audience, rather than just the small subset of users that visit the "new" page regularly.