Negative comments

Sigh.

I have no idea how big this Hacker School community is, but I imagine it is a good bit smaller than the traffic one sees on Hacker News. It is much, much, much easier to have a "positive" atmosphere when you have a community of under roughly 150 active members. I have seen stats that suggest that Internet forums typically have about 10% of the community very active and another 10% intermittently active and the rest lurkers. So, my experience has been that at around 700 members or so, you hit that roughly 150 mark of active members, above which you start seeing spin off communities, sub-communities and so on as some of the ways the community copes with having exceeded normal human bandwidth for community-making (based on the size of some brain part, etc).

This post strikes me as being written by someone who has zero appreciation for the sheer scale of Hacker News. It felt a LOT more like a real community when I initially joined it several years ago. In recent months, it seems to me it is a bit more female-friendly, and I suspect there are multiple reasons why it is evolving in that direction. So there are some good points and bad points, but it seems it has not managed to return to that same sense of community it once had.

The fact of the matter is that in all of human history, being able to bring together so very many people from such diverse backgrounds in real time is unprecedented. It should hardly shock people that this involves a high degree of friction and a fundamental need to invent new ways to interact, new cultural paradigms that have some hope of keeping things in that zone of warm sense of community. I think Hacker News is a victim of it's own success. It's sheer scale and level of traffic make this challenging. That doesn't mean it cannot be done. But that does mean it is kind of crappy to thump your own chest and brag about your pet theory as to why your undoubtedly much smaller community is running more smoothly at this time than Hacker News.

Edit: clarifying, I got very, very angry replies and dozens of downvotes at the time. Monoculture leads to fixed mindset and drives smart people away.

Edit 2: I didn't downvote you (I prefer words in this case). My comment was in the negative when you replied, but surprisingly it's risen to positive. Thank you, whoever you are. This gives me hope on HN community.

Looking at the first ten articles on the front page right now:

  Streem: "I am glad that someone is working on a new stream processing language, it is a very interesting paradigm. "
  Margaret Hamilton: "What a truly inspiring human being. I can only dream of aspiring to her levels of contribution."
  Sony Hack: "This is the angle on the Sony hack that I find most interesting/troubling/etc. "
  DeepDive: "It does probabilistic inference![1]"
  Youth metabolism: "I don't really understand the comments here, and especially on the article itself, deriding this research because "people should just get off their butts and exercise" or similar."
  Other Money Problem: "One of his essays from a couple of months ago [shows philosophical opposition from essays from 10 years ago]"
  Irregular Verbs: "As Steven Pinker points out in this very interesting article... [discussion of verbs]"
  LLVM developers meeting: "For those who are curious, Part 1 of Chandler Carruth's Pass Manager talk is avaliable here:"
  Overhaul law enforcement: "I'm getting to the point where I can't stand local law enforcement."
  Prismatic Android app: "As someone who is rapidly becoming an old-timer, I have to say I miss the old days of Make."

The trends continue on with the following articles, but I couldn't be bothered setting up the quoting - this is left as an exercise for the reader.

its always seemed to me that there needs to be more dialog and questioning vs "hers's by the op was wrong".

hacker news also needs more humor. maybe the best argument I've heard is that there are other places to get humor on the net and people come to HN to get the non-humor part. For me though ... I like joking with like minded folks ..and I don't often find them on the funny sites.