Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?

This is the unfortunate entropy of any online community. I've seen it in the community I managed as well.

First you have the founder(s) of the community and the early adopters. These people all are like minded, and all appreciate the mission or goal of the community. They contribute great things which makes it an awesome place to hang out all the time.

The next group of people who come in hear about how cool this small community is. They for the most part have the right idea but sometimes they are too enthusiastic and want to contribute right away instead of building cred slowly. This causes them to do things that doesn't quite fit with the original intent of the community. This annoys some early members and they leave.

The next wave are people the enthusiastic 2nd wave people bring in through evangelizing the community. Unfortunately the 2nd wave choose to highlight not the mission of the community but the benefits of it. This 3rd wave group are often in it for self gain and promotion rather than to be contributing members of the community. The original mission of the founder(s) is lost in the shuffle as the number of people who "get it" are quickly being outnumbered by those who are new and "don't get it". More of the early community members, people who made the original community so great, leave leaving the 2nd generation as the elder members. The remaining original members get into confrontational debates about what the community is supposed to be with the newer members.

After that, the community continues to degrade, eventually most of the original community resort to just lurking instead of engaging with the community which is now pretty much filled with self promotion and self serving. The community from the outside looking in appears to be the same on the surface but is a shell of its former greatness and actually quite sad for the original members and the founder(s).

The sad thing is there are people who come in the new waves that do get it, and have appreciation for the original mission and purpose of the founder, but they are always outnumbered by the others.

I am not sure that the moderation is aggressive* enough to shape the growth that the site is experiencing. I feel like the smartest most insightful people in the community should be being more decisive in their flagging/moderation/conversation. You can non-aggressively tell somebody to not be rude and I don't see that happening...

Perhaps something should be done to alter the direction that the content is moving, too. I personally agree with tptacek that gossipy advocacy/techpolitic issues are now far too important to the site. I enjoyed them a little, too, but I feel like the community is now addicted to them. Honestly I don't want to see anymore gossip pieces from torrentfreak...

* For example, (1) give people limits on how often they can post while their average karma is low, (2) allow people to flag for more reasons (hivemind posts, aggressive posts, bigotry, rudeness), (3) give people a couple of weeks/months to time-out from the site if they get flagged and there turns out to be a problem with their behaviour. I think there is a danger on a site like this of people over-complicating the problem when there are simple things you can try. :)

It's not just the quality, but quantity. A lot of articles have no comments, but vote high enough to hit front page on 'classic'. Comments are clumpier. To me it's a signal the article is good enough to skim, but not worth the effort to add detail. Reading the comments prior to the article is/used to be my default because of the added insight.

===== Why It Happens Theory #1 - "Community Size Syndrome" ==== I am guilty of this. And I think I know why I/we do it. When a topic comes up, and you feel your voice isn't/won't be heard, it tends to make you over-emote, yell, and stomp though the place to get more attention / vent frustration.

Think about it. It wasn't like this when Hacker News was smaller, because when HN was smaller there were less people, less comments, and everyone had a voice that could be heard. Now that the place is bigger your "voice" is easily lost, your comment ends up at the bottom, you feel like your opinion won't matter. This stresses you out and pisses you off so you go and piggyback off of someone else's comment near the top and just vent.

We see this in political ralleys, demonstrations, protests. When humans feel they are NOT being listened to, they get loud and angry.

I don't think it's really an issue of passion. Rather, it is an issue of demographics: almost everybody is affected or at least mildly interested in politics; only smaller subsets of the population are interested in Haskell/Erlang/complexity/aglorithms...etc. Frankly, I bet some people are as "passionate" (for a loose definition of "passionate") about, say, functional programming as others are about politics; there are just more people with at least a casual interest in the latter than the former.

Also, as HN gets more readers, it becomes more diverse. I've seen doctors, medical students, lawyers...etc post. It's no surprise somebody like that is going to skip a post about using abstract mathematics to model programming or about optimizing lunch at your startup; they are probably gravitating towards the political articles. On the other hand, just being interested in start-ups and CS does not preclude looking at politics.

So really, I think this is a function of diversity: in a purely democratic system--everybody has an equal vote--less specialized things really have an advantage. This is why I don't bother reading the newspaper or front page of reddit, but still enjoy /r/haskell.

I'm sure there are also plenty of confounding variables; I just think it's more broad appeal than passion. (Seriously, have you read the responses to people's blindly disparaging functional programming? At least as passionate as most political posts ;).)