Hacker News: Unknown or Expired Link

You are using his toy. Big distinction. You have not paid him anything, and are here by choice. He owes you nothing.

Good recommendation, didn't think of that. I will do like that from now on. Thanks.

He did say experiment but that implies that PG wishes to manipulate the site in order to observe outcomes - when you manipulate something without due regard to the possible detriments it is known as "toying with" that thing. Ergo I asked the question as to whether PG's goal was merely to observe the community and manipulate it with no regard for the community itself or if it was perhaps something more lofty.

From what I've seen I think the community has grown organically out of the noble work of Ycombinator and that largely the tool of HN has been a relatively passive element in that growth. PG appears indifferent to HN as a tool - neither wanting to experiment with it, develop it, improve it, nor disregard it.

>nobody's forcing you to be here //

Nice.

Do you feel passive-aggressiveness is the way to build a valuable community?

It was not spin it was enquiry with an attempt to dig in to the nature of calinet6's statement: calinet6's response makes it apparent that the important feature of the statement was not the choice of the word "experiment" but instead the apostrophe-s, ie that HN belongs to PG. I feel that by asking the question in the way I did that I shortcut to this result.

[Aside: in general, would you say my presence as part of this community is to it's detriment?]

pg puts his time and effort into managing the community, rather than the page controls.

He's repeatedly, periodically made comments on efforts to improve moderation, filtering, ranking, etc. And those efforts are evident in their effect upon content.

"Stagnant" is not an accurate description.

Finally, HN is a tool -- a tool for communication. In that respect, it works pretty well, and is actually somewhat UNIX-y, I'd argue. (E.g. leaving notifications to external add-ons, private communication to email et al., etc. HN focuses on its core purpose of posts, comments, and ranking (public discussion).)

P.S. This is, obviously, just my observation and opinion, FWIW.

P.P.S. Sorry -- rereading the parent comment, I think we are more like-minded than I first thought.

One might say pg has focused on the message, rather than the presentation. Which has worked rather well. Although I think I and some others are also just fine with the presentation -- readability over eye candy, and with the effort put into other aspects of the site.

And... as some have observed, sometimes it is suspected or outright apparent that supposed "limitations" are actually a feature. For example, limiting disruptive, low S/N back-and-forth commenting.

I guess I've written all this in part for the benefit (if any) of some newer members who happen to read this. Experiencing HN over a longer period of time, I've found perhaps (presumptively) somewhat deeper insight into pg's and the moderators' approach and management.