Solving The Hacker News Problem

They are basically a grown up 4chan...amazing things like Copenhagen Suborbitals http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/ but aren't all pretentious and srs business like Hacker News likes to pretend it is.

Once you've read 12 months of Runners World, you've basically read every Runners World that has been, or ever will be, written.

The constant stream of front-paged political arguments and noticeable increase in mean-spirited commentary in the threads has caused me to spend most of my time on HN logged out. It used to be that I'd read the comments before I'd even read the story to see if the story was worth reading. I wonder if it's possible that pg doesn't notice the degradation in comment quality as much because the trolls have been here baiting him since the very early days.

I don't think HN is irrevocably broken; I'm glad that pg is helming the ship and I think he's doing an admirable job of it so far (I think the ranking algorithm in use for the front-page stories is one of the best anywhere). But HN used to be great, and now it's merely good.

I think that a lot of people who have been here for a long time have thought about what's changed here, and how it could be fixed. I know I've littered more than a few mailboxes with lengthy emails about what I think is wrong, and what I think the solution is. Reading this thread kind of tells the story - a point has come where the community is large enough to have factions that value different things. "Anything that good hackers might find interesting" works when you have a small group of people engaged in conversation. It's less useful when you have mobs of people who have come with different ideas of what they want to get out of this site.

In the early days, HN felt like it was a problem solving tool; a way to find out what cool things people were working on, and occasionally to ask for advice. The community was humble, competent, and full of people who actually made things. Those people are still here, but there's a self-aggrandizing element here as well. The group of people who seem to think that someone else's success somehow reflects poorly on themselves, the bloviators and blowhards who believe that a volume of arguments somehow makes up for the measurable factuality of arguments. I don't really know what the solution is to this. I thought if there was a way to ignore people it might make a difference, but after some experimentation I think that that's a dead end - there is too much chance of missing something truly interesting from doing that.

All this being said, HN has had an immeasurable positive impact on my life - The people that I've met through HN (both in person and virtually) are some of the smartest, most amazing people I've known. I'll get to use the things I've learned from HN (and more importantly from the people in it) for the rest of my life. I can't think of another site on the net that has come even close to making such a huge impact.

I can't imagine missing out on all of this if HN had been invite-only when it launched. I didn't know anyone when I first came here. I didn't even know who Paul Graham was.

Instead of complaining about it, I think those of us that have been here for awhile owe it to pg to actively try to improve the community. It's become too large for him to handle on his own. Yes, there are moderators, but they're an invisible hand that only act as a corrective force.

We're a creative lot. I'm sure we can figure out some way to improve this community from the inside.