Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?

That's just part of having a bigger community. It always becomes more general over time as it grows.

You can't usually get around this as it's a natural part of the lifecycle of a forum/group/site.

Site fail when they refuse to recognize this and start mucking around trying to revive the past glory.

Quite a few users agree with this general opinion, with differing values assigned to "didn't further the conversation in any way." One problem is that many users who are not furthering the conversation don't seem to notice that about themselves, and then demand an individual explanation for each and every downvote, which seems too much to ask for in response to comments that are, in pg's words, "(a) mean and/or (b) dumb."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

While many users share the opinion that downvotes should mean something mostly about contribution to the community rather than disagreement with the point of view expressed, the opinion that downvoting is okay when used for expressing disagreement with the content of a comment has also been expressed by many users over the years, including by pg, the site founder.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

If someone who disagrees with me on factual or policy matters has made a thoughtful comment that introduces me or other HN participants to new information, I am happy to upvote it. But if a comment indeed doesn't contribute to the discussion, because it merely expresses one user's opinion with no verifiable information, it's within the current site guidelines simply to downvote the comment, so that the person who posted it is made aware that he or she should try harder to make a substantive, evidenced comment next time.

Hi, patio11, I'm sure I'm one of many users who appreciates your comment here. I'll definitely try, in light of your comment and other comments posted here, to broaden my definition of "politics" to exclude more submissions and more comments that I might otherwise make from HN. (I have a good group of Facebook friends of diverse political opinions who civilly and thoughtfully discuss politics with me there.) There seems to be quite a broad community sentiment, which perhaps needs more reflection in the community guidelines,

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

that political posts and commments have no place on HN.

That said, looking at the guidelines, I see on the one hand a statement

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. . . . If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

I'll interpret that statement broadly and both reduce any tendency I have to post political stories or make political comments, and also flag political stories and both downvote and then flag political comments. I'm trying to listen to community consensus here.

I see on the other hand in the guidelines the statement

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I discovered this site by following links from Paul Graham (pg)'s personal website, which links here and also hosts very interesting online essays,

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

which are the first way I became aware of pg's career. The first pg essay I ever read was "Why Nerds are Unpopular,"

http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

and in his later essays "What You'll Wish You'd Known"

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

and

"Undergraduation"

http://paulgraham.com/college.html

and

"Is It Worth Being Wise?"

http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

among others, I noticed that pg seems to have a certain interest in education policy, which is one of my strongest reading interests. You too, patio11, tend to make comments about education policy in HN threads, and those are particularly valuable for American readers because they are informed by your time abroad. Thus I hope it will still be considered fair game here to discuss reform of education, whether in the private sector or the public sector, as long as we are honor-bound to seek facts and verifiable information about the subject of how education works and how it can be improved. I think education reform can provide start-up opportunities for hackers and is also of interest to anyone doing business in the modern world, especially anyone with a growing business who wants to hire competent workers.

What do the rest of you think about leaving scope for the possibly politics-connected subject of education reform here, as long as we take care to submit good sources, make best efforts to post thoughtful and civil comments, and don't gratuitously drag partisan politics into the discussion?

Dissenting opinion (from someone who generally believes in positive reinforcement as the best policy): I tend to be a very controversial figure, wherever I go. I have dropped out of a lot of communities in part due to the degree to which I get attacked. Some of my comments here get upvoted, downvoted, upvoted, downvoted. It can be entertaining to watch it. It usually doesn't result in some pissing contest. I am content with having people who don't like me/my opinions vent their spleen by viciously giving an entire downvote to my comment and then moving on. I'm very cool with that. It beats the hell out of anything else I've known so far.