To my fellow Hacker News contributors

I'd very much hope it's not just like Slashdot.

Any strict voting/counting based system is going to be biased to highly popular (vs. interesting) articles.

A Likert-scale ranking system (vote on some scale, usually 1-3, 1-5, 1-7, etc., occasionally even (to exclude uncommitted median votes), and including a multiplier (log-based) for popularity) seems to be one of the more reliable ways of meaningfully indicating general interest in content.

Tracking the variance / standard deviation in votes is also helpful in identifying whether an item is of low interest (or disliked), vs. polarizing.

I suspect at least a part of increased tribalism is that, without visible comment scores, people aren't being shown as clearly that "that's not the HN way" and "this is the HN way".

On the rare occasions that a tribal comment gets downvoted to gray, this is often misinterpreted as "tribal downvotes", and therefore the tribe responds by upvoting (a power even new users have). As long as the comment gets back to 1, it appears the same as comments at 5, 10, or 100 -- so the tribe doesn't see how differently tribal and non-tribal comments are treated, and therefore doesn't learn the community standard.

I think visible comment scores would help. I also think it would help to aggressively flag such comments, and to respond to such comments with "this sort of tribalism doesn't belong on Hacker News" (especially if that response was, visibly, upvoted to 10 or 20 points!)

I don't know how best to moderate or otherwise encourage better HN participation (or how to improve forums, or mailing lists, or tweet streams, or whatever they invent or rename tomorrow), but I have a thought.

Can we apply a "who cares?" ethos/filter to our comments? I.e., if I am about to post a comment, before I do so I ask myself "who cares about this comment?" If the answer is Probably Nobody, then I don't post it. Simple, right?

I do this all the time. I probably write and delete five comments for every comment I post here.

A second question to ask the question is, is my comment adding anything to the discussion that isn't already glaringly obvious? If it's obvious, but I want to nitpick or clarify...maybe just sit on it for a while and see if the urge to comment fades?

With smaller communities, we don't have to apply such harsh filters because hey, who cares, there's 10 of us. We can hash it out amongst us. But with a huge community like HN, if 9999 out of 10000 subscribers resist the urge to comment but just one does, that makes what, 50 comments? 500 nowadays? 5000?

What I'm saying is, I think HN comments would be a great deal better off if everyone just sat back and said "hey, do we really need yet another armchair CEO quarterbacking on Monday (I'm not going to bother getting those idioms right) about Steve Jobs' legacy and the future of Apple, from the wizened perspective of another college student (or in my case, .NET dev)?" Even I'm following the Book of Graham and disagreeing properly and writing well-formed sentences and generally making my points clearly, am I just adding noise? Does it matter if anyone reads my comment?

HN would be better if everyone just, just resisted the urge to comment and let the real experts talk. Most of us already do, but there's just too many of us now for "most of us" to be good enough.

I was hoping that the OP would use that post as a chance to discourage "disagreement downvoting".

To my fellow Hacker News contributors: Use downvoting on comments that are in bad faith, do not add value, are ad hominem or are otherwise low quality. Do not use downvoting to disagree.

Find a place on the internet where discussion of Apple doesn't erupt into controversy. I also disagree with the sentiment that something needs to be done to fix civility on HN. This entire meta-discussion is a self correcting mechanism in action, we'll see a wave of civility for a week and then things will go back to normal.