To my fellow Hacker News contributors

The system he is suggesting is exactly what /. had, and that didn't work out too well. I have a theory that the decline of any great community begins with a conflict. In the case of /. when the SCO matter started, the issue was so black and white that there was no need of discussing it - and the community itself was so homogeneous in their opinion on this matter that there was no real discussion going on. In the case of HN, I think we're seeing a variation of the same thing - it's Apple vs everybody else, and the issue is so polarising that the discussions are almost never real discussions, they're just a bunch of people trying to prove they're right. And that is where the rot starts.

I am as guilty of this as anybody else - since I find myself rarely able to comment on any technical discussion on HN, most of my posts have been on these topics, where one does not need any more than an ideological standpoint from which to talk. Perhaps the recent precipitous decline in the quality of the comments is directly linked to the kind of stories that we've been discussing, and the kind of people who tend to comment on them.

> Speculation: it may have been taken away for "abuse", either automatically or by an editor who disagreed with too many of your flags.

Hmmm I guess no good deed goes unpunished:)

I try not to pay attention to articles about Apple here, because it really does bring out some strong emotions. Logic goes out the window and everything reads like a love sonnet written by a retarded monkey. It's stressful and unfun.

Reddit solved this problem, kind-of-sort-of, with subreddits. If all you care about is programming, visit the programming subreddit. Unfortunately, the comments on Reddit are extremely low-quality (even on /r/programming), so it's not actually worth visiting. But maybe this could save HN for a few more months.

I have a friend that says an addiction is something you do not for enjoyment, but because you have to. I sort of feel this way about HN now; I come here out of habit and feel weird if I pull away, but most of the articles aren't that enjoyable. The ones that are are easily ruined by jackasses (someone called me "an internet toughguy" for suggesting that he might be misusing the debugger).

It's probably time for moderation or something like Stack Overflow's editing and flagging system. It's too easy to post bad comments (look at my history, I do it), and while one bad comment is OK, 100 bad comments is not. If we could just kill the flamewars or edit them to be nicer, the would could be a better place. People will whine about the integrity of the site, but you know what? Who cares. We already have too many users. I don't think anything else will save HN from becoming another Reddit.

Or, maybe HN is "done" and the cool people have already found another place, and we just aren't invited.

The only thing that really worries me is that some of the content-free negative remarks about Gruber/Apple/Groupon/et actually seem to get upvoted rather than buried these days.

I always felt HN as a community was a little too strict by even downvoting some genuinely funny remarks, but it seemed to work in keeping a high quality of discourse. It baffles me how the same community can nowadays upvote ad hominem attacks. Something about HN's ability to police itselfs seems a bit broken lately.

> Reddit solved this problem, kind-of-sort-of, with subreddits. If all you care about is programming, visit the programming subreddit. Unfortunately, the comments on Reddit are extremely low-quality (even on /r/programming), so it's not actually worth visiting. But maybe this could save HN for a few more months.

I think there's a very simple solution to this problem.

First of all, I feel that Reddit has an excellent codebase - for example, it is much more feature-rich than Arc (HN's codebase). So I'd recommend using the Reddit codebase for a site that fixes these issues, but that's a minor concern and can always be changed later.

Now Quora has taken the approach of removing anonymity, which I feel isn't correct because it can stifle discussion. A better approach would be to simply charge a nominal fee (a few dollars per month) to enable posting, which would make it much easier to keep track of and ban trolls. Moreover, if the community were to grow large enough, this money might actually be useful in terms of maintenance costs, etc.

Of course, just like Quora, viewing the site should be possible for anyone. The aim should be to set a high enough standard for discourse that people are willing to pay requisite few dollars per month to access the site.

Edit: I don't know if this would be a good idea (haven't really thought about the repercussions), but perhaps adding a "penalty fee" to the next month's monthly fee if one accumulates a large number of downvotes would be another way of stopping trollish comments. And perhaps doing the opposite as well - reducing the monthly fee for users who generate a large amount of insightful discussion.