I think it's better in terms of overall "health" (content, toxicity, moderation, privacy, spam) than other, more popular forums (e.g. Reddit), but that could just be directly because of its small size and relatively niche appeal.

My biggest problem is that it stopped being a community for tech entrepreneurs a long time ago. Everyone is now bearish on everything by default. Every idea is pointless. Every new product is useless. Every company is evil. There's no point building or launching anything. It's just people complaining about everything rather than improving things and building the future.

This is a big part of the reason why I dialed my contributions way back, and I've heard the same from many other great people in the IRL tech community that I respect. Unfortunately each time a positive person stops contributing on HN it just leads to the site becoming more negative. It is a vicious cycle.

The moderators here humor and even encourage it, despite it nominally being a rule not to editorialize titles they'll humor the people and edit it up 2 or 3 times.

It's the shallowest of content that contributes nothing to the larger discussion. I'm not sure if it's a weird way to farm karma or if people just tend to be a little bit on the spectrum, but some people just can't resist arguing about it.

Heavens no. We react the way we do to minimize off-topic title complaints. Otherwise they take over and make things even worse.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

For what it's worth, a few times recently (as well as on other occasions) I've submitted a title as-is very reluctantly, and knowing it will certainly be changed if the submission gets any traction.

I think the one that got the most traction was 'The NHS is looking for up to 250k volunteers' [0], original title:

> ‘Your NHS Needs You’ – NHS call for volunteer army

Of course that was going to get changed, and I mostly support that change, with only slight hesitation since the aspect I found most interesting (and provoked me to submit it) was the language; the article went on to talk about 'rallying the troops'.

My point is, yes it's in the guidelines not to editorialise titles, but it also says not to include numbers like '{6 }things you never knew about X' or superfluous adjectives like 'Show HN: {My amazing }whitespace to rust transpiler'.

It also qualifies not editorialising with 'unless misleading or linkbait', which I suppose I could arguably have used as a reason to change [0], and perhaps that's the basis on which they're all edited.

I and probably others generally submit the original thinking if it's popular as-is then there may be some discussion and collective (or moderated) decision on the title; who am I the submitter to make that call.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677209

Both sides of that rule are important: when to not change the title and when to do so.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I find the worst type post is "the website is broken / that css could use some work / when I see this site on Chrobar XX Turbo the scrollbar disappears".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

It's because they're devoid of any actual content and uninteresting to every other reader. I agree they might feel nice to the OP in the case of 'Show HNs', but in those cases there's probably another way to reach out (and the higher effort will make it more meaningful).

(I could've sworn there was a point in the guidelines on this even using similar language - 'devoid', 'content' - but there doesn't seem to be now. Perhaps I've just read someone commenting something similar a few times!)

Something like:

I've bookmarked this for later review, good post (this partially exists as the upvote)

I like posts like this (an overload of the upvote)

I want to read what other users think of this, but don't necessarily have a comment of my own. HN, please comment (an overload of the upvote as well)

I think this post is off-topic (this one exists - its called the downvote for users with ~520+ points)

I think this post violates the guidelines (this one also exists - called flag)

# "Changed my mind" (icon: graduation cap)

In most communities, this is a overload of the upvote. But it's a particularly good kind of upvote, the complement of the usual echo-chamber "upvoting because I already agree". The icon+phrasing combo reframes "I lost the debate" into a positive thing, more like "I was educated". It's my far my favorite reaction to receive -- lots of warm fuzzies. In order to avoid confusion/misuse, we did not make this the primary upvote (that's thumbs up, with the verb "appreciate").

# Sympathies (icon: blue ribbon)

It's a bit tasteless to "like" or "heart" sad news (eg, someone passed away). At the same time, a downvote isn't appropriate, either. This fills the role of "support for the person posting, not the topic they're posting about".

[1]: You can see some of it, as well as the full set, here: https://community.snowdrift.coop/t/custom-emojis-esp-as-reto...

The only thing that's 'missing' is the public declaration; putting one's name to the upvote.

Due to its roots, Hacker News started out with a community heavily biased towards people with entrepreneurial tendencies who are often optimistic by nature. Over time more tech people were told about Hacker News and started participating. These people in turn brought in other people from other academic fields (e.g. law, medicine, engineering, physical sciences etc). Many of the newcomers, especially those who had training beyond their graduate degree, are likely to have been immersed in an academic culture where ideas are put up to be critiqued. At a high level the goal being for ideas to be tested in a collaborative fashion and any weaknesses addressed so they can be improved. Everyone working together to move their field forward through the refinement of shared knowledge and understanding.

Having spent some time doing post-graduate research in science then transferring to working as a self taught software developer in industry - this difference in culture is something I've become aware of multiple times.

In my experience executives and business development/sales oriented people often struggle dealing with technical colleagues who point out problems in their ideas/plans. They perceive the challenges as negativity or pessimism instead of an attempt to refine the idea/plan to something workable or less risky. On the critics side, they have been sufficiently interested in the idea/plan to give it serious consideration so it can be disheartening to be ignored or rebuked for offering a critical response with the aim of refining the approach.

I've also noticed this difference in approach even when working with other software developers who went into industry straight out of university. From my perspective many of them don't routinely apply critical thinking in their work. They rarely question why the system is designed a certain way and simply try to jam whatever feature they are implementing into the current design even if it is a bad fit. This usually means adding many changes in lots of places throughout the code base, because it is quicker to do by the deadline (pace over perfection). Compared to stepping back a reviewing the business model at a higher level which would take longer to change but make the code easier to maintain in the long term.

You noted pedantic comments get upvotes. People who are deep in the details of a field have to be particular about word and language use to avoid misunderstandings and make communication with other people in the field more efficient (this often leads to heavy use of jargon). Marketing and sale oriented people like to be looser with word use to portray something with the best possible interpretation (ie "organic" products).

As a simple example, in a previous job I refactored an old code base doing Monte Carlo, Markov Chain simulations from doing each iteration sequentially in a single thread, to being able to run in parallel in multiple threads. For many workloads this meant a significant (many hours) reduction in simulation time. For other workloads the added overhead of collating all the results back into a single data set meant a slight increase in run time (a few minutes). The marketing people wanted to claim an X times speed up when promoting the new version (best possible interpretation for increased appeal to customers). I wasn't comfortable with that as I knew some existing users wouldn't have that experience (being pedantic).

I would see the marketing teams version as being way too loose with language (bordering on being untrue at times). They in turn saw my revisions as not sexy enough or too wordy. It took effort from both sides to get to something we were all comfortable with.

Having said all the above, I agree that sometimes HN can be unnecessarily negative of people's fun projects/weekend hacks. I sometimes like to play with sub-optimal solutions to problems because I have a sudden inspiration to try something and don't want to spend hours researching perfect approaches. These projects usually don't have any commercial or academic purpose, it's just an itch being scratched and an opportunity to do some greenfields coding with no restrictions (not something I get much opportunity for in my current job). I have seen other people's projects torn to shreds when they happen to make it onto HN and it always makes me a bit sad.

Is the critique and pedantry good or bad? I'd say it depends on the situation. Sometimes very good information or ideas will come from the critiques and the pedantry can help eliminate ambiguity from a conversation and lead to some new and interesting places (one of the main reasons I come to HN is the high quality of these conversations). Sometimes it can devolve into academic point scoring for no apparent purpose.

Maybe something for people offering critical feedback (including myself) to consider would be to lead or end their contribution with a positive note. This would at least signal their intention is to collaborate on getting to something better.

I'm sure what I've said above will be picked apart. I have generalised a lot to keep the response shorter. I do not believe all startup founders are optimists or technical people are all pedants etc. My point is more that the HN audience is composed of a wider mixture of people from different fields than when it started. This undoubtedly will affect the nature of the conversations.

I hope this response doesn't come across as negative :) It has been interesting to me to think about and speculate as to why it has occurred.

https://hbr.org/2019/09/how-to-create-an-online-community-th...

For what that's worth.

I spent a couple years not really participating on HN or anywhere else, just lurking periodically. Later I started using Twitter actively (mostly for work purposes). Many of the people in my community on Twitter are heavily critical of HN. Look up "the orange site" on Twitter for examples of a common way that people disparagingly refer to HN on Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=%22the%20orange%20site%22&src=t...

I wouldn't say that Twitter influenced my opinion of HN though, it just confirmed to me that there were other people who were also feeling uncomfortable with some of the personality types and commenting patterns on HN. Of course Twitter has its own serious problems with negativity as well haha.

Similarly, this is the place where valuable discussion and insights around WebGPU have been shared, even though some of that discussion is in the form of complaints ("Apple is trying to sabotage a SPIR-V based approach").

I don't think the better health is just because of smaller size and niche appeal, I think the reach of HN is considerable. I think we really do need to thank the tireless moderation work of dang and others for that.

As an aside, I don't read HN that way. Even when there's a pessimistic tone, I often read right through it and think to myself "that's some good advice". It will be interesting to see whether we become more bearish simply due to the COVID-19 environment we're all working in now.

Pragmatic: when hearing praise, my thoughts are sometimes, "yeah, yeah, cut to the chase." I guess you gotta read your audience.

Emotional: It IS easy to be negative. We also tend to over-experience/over-perceive the negative, which (partially) is how we get over-reaction to criticism or advice, even when asked for. And sometimes we really just want validation. I guess you gotta, uh, read your audience.

This is something I am trying to do in real life as well (although I don't always succeed). For some reason it's really easy for me to open my mouth to talk about weakenesses/problems with things, but it's not as natural to highlight the positive aspects. I also try to say aloud my positive thoughts about people when they pop in my head instead of keeping them to myself.

What happens when a forum or medium expands to basically the entire population? Twitter, at least for people who read both popular posts and reply chains that those posts inspire. It makes Eternal September look like a book club full of the world's most articulate English professors sipping tea and politely conversing about complex plot points while taking care not to say things that could be misinterpreted or incorrectly seen as a personal attack on someone else.

When people post good things (not necessarily positive things, but at least negative things that spark good conversations), those posts may or may not inspire other good posts. They probably won't inspire bad posts, worst case is that they don't inspire any responses but that's OK- good posts stand on their own and not everything needs to be a conversation.

Similarly, when people post bad things (not necessarily negative things, just things that spark bad conversations), it will hardly ever inspire good posts in response, but it's very likely to inspire many more bad posts.

So, good posts inspire more good posts, bad posts inspire more bad posts, but IME bad posts are like 10-100x more likely to spark followups. Going back to Usenet, you could have the greatest newsgroup in the world, but it could all collapse due to an influx of shitty posting from a teeny tiny subset of the people reading the group. It's like a virus that infects a forum. The bad posts explode in response to each other, the good posters slowly drift away altogether, and all of a sudden you find yourself in Slashdot or Usenet circa 1999. It's basically nothing but people insulting each other or using bad faith arguments or just writing at great length about how much they think stuff sucks.

That should be the single endpoint that every community optimizes itself to avoid.

Because typically, they have better things to do. And once they decide to leave, they're not coming back.

And once the ratio of those folks : total users drops below a certain point, there's no coming back.

By contrast, is there a case to make for when 'an un-informed, un-thoughtful, un-pleasant person decides they're not going to post anymore'? If so, what would you say that tells us about an online community?

Of course, Eternal September also applies and HN likely suffers from a low level case of it. If you aren't familiar, it's easily found on Wikipedia.

On Usenet, there was always the killfile and thread branch pruning (although the dedicated could somehow just create a new id, I suppose).

My takeaway being that it should be possible (or easy, even) for a user to shape their experience.

If we were designing a new community, which I guess we're not. :-\

I have been on HN for years but as I've not done much DMing and don't live in the Silicon Valley geographical area, I've never had an invite to join. Which is not a complaint as such, more like an acknowledgement that if there is a HN user who feels he's done at least okay in the effort to be a good HN user, yet has not been invited to lobste.rs, it probably would result in a more rarified user population for that site.

Exclusive clubs seem to correlate to good reputations, and for good reason.

I think part of the reason is that business has co-opted optimism and positivity. To the point where being positive seems to not be genuine. Furthermore, I think if the 80s-00s have taught us anything, it's that technology and business aren't going to fix the core problems us in the first world are facing currently... trust, community, health, environment, stress, etc. especially considering these are mostly problems caused by technology and business.

I think the industry has matured and lost its fun and sense of adventure. Once upon a time captain crunch and blue box, war dialling, or office-wide unreal ctf at the end of the day; now we have sprints, OKRs, and codes of conduct. It's becoming accountancy.

I've become a bit disillusioned with how negative HN seems to have become. Yes I'm well aware this has long been an issue (see: famous HN post from Drew Houston announcing DropBox), but it feels amplified these days. Maybe it's a sign of the times. There are certainly a lot of issues in todays world that seem to be increasing cynicism, but I'll see new tech posted on HN that is incredibly exciting only to see a bunch of comments tearing it to pieces over nit picks. It's like the community has lost ability to hold vision and have excitement for potential.

New creations are full of problems -- there hasn't been time to iron out the wrinkles -- but a lot of HN comments expect perfection from the get go and when they don't see it they rip the creation to shreds. It's demoralizing.

Because the central purpose of technology is to make things easier and simpler, not more complicated, every new piece of technology should have to justify itself. People who developed programming languages always understood this, new features need to have a real, significant purpose, or long term you have a big problem.

So I don't mind people being harsh or critical of new stuff. If what you have built is really useful (like Dropbox) it will survive and the critics will be proven wrong. It's tempting to sort of hype each other up and motivate each other but criticism has a more useful function even if some of it turns out to be wrong.

But HN has a skeptical attitude towards everything. HN, if we're being honest, stopped being a tech discussion forum a while ago. A user is free to ignore the multitude of other subjects that HN discusses in a day, and focus exclusively on the tech posts if they wish. But it's been my observation that a post about whatever political, economic, or historic subject will draw more mindshare per minute resident on the front page. And of course, posts will be largely negative. That's the nature of HN.

And, not only HN. I think this is the nature of most online discussion forums unfortunately. Before we can get to the point of comparing a healthy online forum with a non-healthy forum, we'd have to concede that it's difficult to find a healthy online forum at all. I'm not talking about online forums where all users are known to each other. Like the medical forums you find in use at certain healthcare delivery networks. You would expect such professional forums to be a bit more contemplative. I'm speaking of average, completely ungated online forum. In these environments, a healthy ecosystem will become more and more elusive with growth. Not really aware of any demonstrated working solution to that issue.

None of this is really the fault of HN, it's just the nature of user behavior in ungated online forums.

Not to mention, it seems like Steve Jobs was right about DropBox. It's a feature not a product. For the same price you pay for DropBox, you can get the full Microsoft Office Suite plus 6TB of storage. The same with Google Drive and GSuite.

> they have never been profitable

Technically true, but mostly b/c of stock comp. Free cash flow positive for quite awhile:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DBX/dropbox/free-c...

Not exactly burning money. $1.2BN in cash holdings and growing, projected for an additional $1BN this year.

> have said in their own filings they don't know when or if they will ever be profitable

.. in 2017, and this is basically just boilerplate. Just about every company that goes public says this in their S-1 these days.

Now, 3 years later: https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/02/22/investors-cheer-dr...

Sadly that mentality has found its way here.

Then again Europeans also hate how much "moaning" goes on amongst themselves. Honestly it's easy to be down on everything all the time, try being an optimist these days. Not exactly easy.

But that's the thing isn't it? Does it feel amplified or is it actually amplified? Our misleading perceptions and biases may play a role (see: perpetual complaints about "young people these days", a common tendency to think things become worse with time).

With that said, there are still many new super cool technologies, markets, articles, events and other insights on todays front page. Don't loose hope people.

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

(I'm sure the phenomenon isn't unique to Chicago, but rather shared among all major cities that aren't NYC or LA).

But most of HN doesn't work in startups; something like half of it isn't in the US. Without explicit norms-setting that HN seems loathe to do, it's probably not reasonable to expect the kind of enthusiasm you're talking about.

It's easy to spot in comments, posts, and articles–they have titles like:

"... is actually bad"

"... is actually good"

"... considered harmful"

"Actually, ... "

"No, you don't ... "

Reddit as a whole is huge. I think of Reddit like a megalopolis, not a community.

I think some of the subreddits are communities. It would be sort of like a strong neighborhood association within a really big city.

The neighborhood or neighborhood association can have a strong sense of local community. The city as a whole probably cannot.

HN gets about 5 million unique visitors per month. It's the largest forum I consistently participate in. I'm not personally aware of any other "tech" forums that are larger.

For example, Lobste.rs is much smaller. And that's one of the names I hear the most.

According to this source, there are currently 58 subreddits with more than 5 million subscribers:

https://redditmetrics.com/top

Some of them are for STEM topics and maybe Data Is Beautiful is sort of like HN, but I'm not seeing anything obviously aimed at programmers the way HN is somewhat positioned. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)

Facebook is also huge. I want to say it's got like a billion users. But it's not a community of a billion people. It's a bunch of individuals with a curated list of "friends."

There are Facebook groups. That's where you would look for "communities" on Facebook. I have no data on them and I'm not going to look.

I would be curious if anyone else can even name any other online communities with at least 5 million members that aren't on either Reddit or Facebook.

From where I sit, HN looks quite large and looks to me to be possibly one of the largest tech communities. I welcome any data that suggests otherwise.

I personally mostly participate on Reddit in relatively small communities with, say, 20k subscribers or 80k subscribers or a lot less than that.

There are different mods for different Reddits. If you don't get along well with one Reddit, you can go elsewhere. There can be membership overlap but you aren't necessarily subject to the "I shot the sheriff" phenomenon where no amount of trying to behave and fit in is ever enough because one or more of the mods has it in for you.

I have been on the receiving end of that. Such experiences help shape my conceptualization of the problem space and how to define a "community unit."

LinkedIn seems to be akin to Facebook in how it works. Twitter is extremely different in how it gets organized. I don't think it compares at all to things like HN or Reddit.

I'm not really familiar with Pinterest or StackOverflow.

People say HN is small and then cite Reddit or Facebook as examples of large forums. I would say that neither Reddit nor Facebook are communities or forums at all.

I would say that both Reddit and Facebook are platforms that host communities. Subreddits are communities and Facebook groups are communities and that's what you need to compare HN to if you want to gauge how big it is in comparison to other communities.

Comparing the 5 million visitors per month HN gets to the half billion members of Reddit is an apples to oranges comparison. I don't think it works.

As a platform, HN isn't very big. Reddit, Facebook and many other platforms have more traffic.

As a community or forum, I think HN is quite large. As far as I know, it's the largest and most influential (English language) tech forum on the planet.

Size does matter. The human mind only really computes a sense of community for a group of about 150 people. Above that size, you start having social dynamics like a big city, not like a tribe or village.

I generally define online communities in terms of "a group with one set of overlords." Platforms that have many subgroups with many different moderating teams strike me as platforms that host many communities. This is how Reddit works.

HN has one mod team. It has no subforums. So I think of it as a single community because it has some degree of cohesion provided by having one set of moderators (and a single space -- it doesn't really get broken up by topic, etc, the way some things do).

This is one of the reasons I feel HN is actually a very large community. Most platforms of this size or larger are more like Reddit and have been broken up into smaller subgroups.

Those subgroups are your communities. The fact that different people are in charge of different groups will foster different cultures, etc, even if the topic is nominally the same and the rules are nominally the same. They will be interpreted differently.

I've left a few other comments here already touching on some of this, chiefly these two:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704995

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707047

There is no point in positive comments. You know what they’re going to say and they rarely add anything that the article didn’t already express. Negative comments are more intellectually satisfying to unpack.

Most new products fall in two categories: bros trying to recreate mommy hotel by introducing new and new ways to exploit poorer people but since it's an app it's not seen as bad as hiring servants. The other is just pure rent seeking. Products genuinely creating value and making the life of normal people are extraordinarily rare.

I'm definitely not one of the more talented people here, but off the top of my head...

Python 3:

  print('Hello, world!')

  console.log('Hello, world!')

  echo 'Hello world!'

  Hello, world!

  #include <stdio.h>
  
  int main() {
      printf("Hello, world!");
  }

My point is just that Hello World is really easy.

As much as I hate the language, it's a great example of the absurdist pragmatism that has made it so popular.

I disagree with your implied dichotomy between "complaining" and "improving things and building the future" - when everyone who is "building the future" is chasing the exact same surveillance-capitalist business model, what do you propose our reaction should be?

A few reasons I can see:

1) It's text- and hyperlink-based. Multimedia forums become meme recycling centers.

2) It centers discussions around submitted links. This avoids endless, pointless discussions about the forum participants themselves.

3) The submitted links focus on technology and business issues, which attract more serious participants. There is no random board.

4) Moderation is professional rather than community based. Voting has an effect but can be overridden.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

Wow! Great article.

(Also: as of 2019, TWO, count 'em, TWO human moderators.)

Conversely, even if I agree a lot with what is said, if afterwards I'm angry, sad, etc. then it wasn't healthy. When younger, I used to think that more anger at what was wrong in the world, would help to fix it. Experience has taught me that actions taken out of anger, even if well-intentioned, are almost always unskillful. I want more insight, more understanding, and HN aids me in getting that far more often than, say, Facebook, which I now use only on Sundays, and not every Sunday, as a way of making sure I don't let its toxic stew of opinions infect my emotions.

I cannot honestly remember how I discovered HN, but I return because, even when I disagree with most of what is said on a topic, it is typically the case that I find my own thinking to be more nuanced or more interesting afterwards.

The moderation is reasonably effective against the most extremely toxic content, but IMHO has a tendency to privilege toxic opinions stated in measured tones against the pushback they create.

As for member downvotes, I can often predict which comments of mine will attract downvotes: humor will tend to get downvoted as irrelevant, while the relevancy of replies complaining about said humor is rarely questioned.

Certain subjects are downvote magnets: Criticism of Elon Musk, scepticism about nuclear power, support for intellectual property rights (especially in the case of music), support for ethnic and gender inclusiveness. It's possible, though, that these are just hot button issues, and the opposite opinions also attract downvotes.

The technology backing HN is still massively inferior in every respect to what Usenet was 30 years ago. I tend to read each thread only once, and then only follow up discussions of my own comments. Following a thread over several days is a near hopeless endeavor. Why doesn't anybody combine the light touch moderation of HN, combined with the tools that a decent newsreader like nn or GNUS could provide?

Encouraging selective quoting with interspersed comments, but having seen the triumph of top quoting in e-mail discussions, this might be a lost art anyway.

Also, personal kill files. Bring back the PLONK! Thanks to the thread organization of HN, subject kill files are no longer really necessary, but being able to mute people for 30 days or permanently may still be useful (And it might contribute to downvotes being used less for subjective differences of opinion).

I also used to like the ability to easily take discussions to email, but Usenet was a smaller place back then and this may no longer scale.

A modern example of this is lambda-the-ultimate.org, which has so many threads that have been running for years without any clear purpose that it's almost impossible to find a thread that hasn't.

Of course, that could be a matter of scale; with less posts to keep track of, I guess it would be easier to continue things eternally.

If I cared I could dive down and see where conversations were happening. as it is I really only spot a top couple.

I guess it's halfway between real state and ephemeral

Looking at HN discussions today it has very few of these, in fact you hardly every see the parent counter-replying to someone opposing his argument. Instead often others reply with a different perspective or the discussion dies because why argue with a troll. Maybe even the lack of quoting is a big contributor to the healthy discussions here.

Branch pruning, a la trn (threaded read news). Allows one to tune out unproductive flamewars. Kinda goes hand-in-hand with facilitating long-running threads.

Some version of killfiles, but somehow magically adjusted for a world in which trolls can make new accounts easily.

Or expanded ones, if I came into the topic w/all nodes collapsed.

Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22716127

I would agree that the site is pretty strongly pro-Musk and anti-copyright though.

I understand this as an intentional feature of HN.

And good newsreaders were also able to selectively skip a comment and everybody replying to it (e.g. if a discussion devolved into a tangent that was less interesting), instead of a whole subject.

I have noticed this as well.

Furthermore, the moderators definitely have a personal libertarian bent that regularly seeps into selective moderation. I routinely see someone declare an interesting political assertion and then any replies to it that disagree with the principle are shut down as being political, but the parent post is ignored.

Personally I inherently disagree that a forum can really be kept apolitical. Politics is the art of things that matter, the only things that are entirely apolitical are irrelevant and uncontroversial. As soon as you bring money, power, or status into the picture in any respect, someone will turn it into a political issue. I am not saying turn this into a campaign rally but many issues have underlying causes or worldviews that inch into the political domain, it is unavoidable.

> The technology backing HN is still massively inferior in every respect to what Usenet was 30 years ago. I tend to read each thread only once, and then only follow up discussions of my own comments. Following a thread over several days is a near hopeless endeavor. Why doesn't anybody combine the light touch moderation of HN, combined with the tools that a decent newsreader like nn or GNUS could provide?

You've just described a traditional threaded forum. Want to discuss some different aspect of a topic? Start a new thread. And in fact this significantly minimizes the amount of "redundant" conversation where four people are arguing similar things in different comment trees of a topic and you make a similar post multiple times.

Furthermore, a threaded model contributes to a more collaborative discussion. It's not upvoting my viewpoint and downvoting yours, as Reddit-style models inevitably turns into, it's just people discussing something because they want to discuss them. Not that arguments and flamewars don't exist, but when you turn it into a points-scoring game, you get sports-team mentality.

But people like the dopamine rush, so everything has to have upvotes and downvotes and scoring nowadays. It is what people congregate to. Traditional forums still exist and yet here we are, all of us.

(I do kind of agree to your point that having an "inbox" model like newsgroups could allow better discussion than a purely comment-tree based model like reddit or HN, but I'm not entirely sure that allowing the discussion to "branch" arbitrarily much is actually a benefit. You can still follow multiple discussions within a single thread on a regular forum too. However, I am very much of the opinion that "voting" systems inherently turn into "sports teams" and eventually a hivemind. The fact that Usenet and traditional forums aren't "gamified" is a huge plus IMO. The fact that "winning" means the dissenting viewpoint is suppressed is extremely problematic - I browse HN with 'showdead' on for exactly that reason.)

I believe this is entirely due to the strict rules in place here and the great moderation.

However, there's obviously a couple filter bubbles at play. For example, if I write a post claiming that [insert tech company] is doing [insert thing] to abuse privacy, it will reach the front page and be accepted as fact regardless of whether I made it up. This applies for numerous themes/topics, ie. VC is evil, Marketing is evil, etc. HN tends to be cynical about everything.

Don't get me wrong, I've probably learned more from this community than any other place on the internet. It is my preferred portal through which to explore the internet. But I also wish we could improve on the undercurrent of frustrated cynicism here.

Really, the best way to use HN is to keep a list of the interesting blogs that get posted here. I check in every now and then and add the blogs to my RSS list and away I go.

Year after year, HN gets worse and worse. It's constant complaining and whining, the discussions are INCREDIBLY trivial and just vapor-y. Show HN, for example. In Show HN, someone is presenting the community something they designed, created, implemented, polished, there's weeks or months or years of effort involved. Most of the time, the comments of these posts are "Oh, well the text-margin is 1px off" or some stupid detail that nobody using the product actually cares about, and then the rest are complaining about those comments, like what I'm guilty of doing right now.

I don't really know what could be done to fix it. Finally, let me add this: If you want the most pleasant HN experience, click the LINK, and stay far away from the comments.

I don't remember how I got into HN... I stay because I happen to appreciate the comments, often I get more from the comment system than the actual articles. There are a lot of people with diverse technical knowledge and insight.

It's far from perfect, but it's still healthier in that you get a relatively diverse set of topics and opinions on those topics in a mostly rational discussion. There are some subjects that will see an unbalanced level of moderation based more on opinion than hard fact, that said it's still better than most.

I think the only area that tends to really flow emotional is when the topic of politics comes up. People are very tribal in terms of what they believe and support and will up/down-vote instinctively, regardless of merit. It tends to cut in every direction. I would love to see counts of up and down votes on a given post, as I'm sure there are many that while they are -2 to +2 have seen many votes in both directions...

All in all, I think the moderators are relatively fair in their disposition of the rules such that they are, and in general fosters discussion in good faith. I've seen many opposing views discussed at length, and don't recall anything that went over the line (calls for violence or personal assault), with minimal ad hominem.

Yes

The moderation scheme makes it harder to troll, so you actually have to come up with some clever insights in order to troll effectively. Though, when people need to back up their comments, the quality improves. Articles/links that are voted up are often interesting or insightful.

On the other hand, participants are still somewhat married to preconcieved ideas, so moderations and comments are sometimes shallow and predictable. It's still hard to come through, though better grounds for free-thinking than many other forums. Humour is often lost here.

You can almost guarantee that any mention of WASM will include a comment writing it off as just another retread of Java or Flash, and another predicting it will lead to the death of the web. Lisp threads will include tedious discussions about parentheses. Anything to do with web dev will probably have a tangent about how the web was ruined by javascript and advertising. Go? No generics, lame. PHP? The memes about how bad PHP is are endless, and most are still a decade or so out of date.

I will add two more 'HN tropes' in the forms of factions that are out there and tend to show up pretty often.

The Rust Evangelism Strike Force and its close cousin (of which I admit to being a card-carrying member who tries not to be too pedantic / indiscriminate with my strikes) the F# Evangelism Strike Force.

PS: I wonder if there is a recent listicle for Top 50 most common Hacker News comments / memes / tropes ? DDG says not much about it, just surfacing the nGate.com Hacker News weekly stuff.

Also - paywalls. If a site has a paywalls it's all but guaranteed that most of the thread will be consumed by complaints about it.

I found this Hacker News simulator in the archive. You could also look into /r/subredditsimulator for related stuff.

So there is no way to assign the label "healthy" to an online community, only a way to compare it as more or less healthy.

For any social media site, there are two things to separate out: The aggregation aspect (information distribution) and the community conversation. A site that disseminates low quality articles, slanted articles, or a limited varied of articles is not as healthy in terms of the aggregation aspect as one that is rich in variety and quality. For my own opinion, HN has made me aware of a lot of great resources, so I think it is very "healthy" in this regard. Typically the political posts are significantly less quality.

In terms of community engagement, one thing I personally pay attention to is how often my buttons are being pushed. Sometimes that's due to a flaw in my own biases and opinions where I can't take any alternative views. However, usually conflict of opinion that is highly emotional, imprecise in statement, and poorly thought out are the types of comments that work me up.

Generally, on HN, I don't get worked up on anything except for the political posts. Flame wars about writing documentation in markdown or not are actually kind of entertaining to me. Those kinds of posts don't push my buttons, and I suspect most other people's, to the same degree.

I'll note this idea itself is a poor approximation for what is really going on, which is that there are multiple aspects being mapped and they don't all match the traditional political spectrum line. That said, it's still a useful way to think. E.g. there are are two paths to fascism, but people usually only see the one their opponents are on, not their own.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum

Well, I did say it's a poor approximation. The usefulness I alluded to is to understand that all these approximations are flawed in various ways, firstly because they are approximations, but more-so because they are all hopeless simplistic representations for what is being modeled. Biaxial is better than a single axis, but that doesn't make it better. The thing the horseshoe theory represents is something that the biaxial representation doesn't represent at all, a similarity of some aspects of though in the common extremes we see in reality.

There's often a difference between diagrams that allow everything to be represented clearly and diagrams that help steer you into associations that are useful. Both have their place.

I will try to keep my personal conclusions out of it and allow you to form your own, but will at least hint at my methodology. First, you say "healthy" and I say "not dead." Having seen a lot of communities declare themselves healthy and vibrant, doing all the right things, and so forth, only for them to wither and die, statements of health are meaningless.

Look for multiple measures. You know it is dead when they pull the plug, but what about the withering before that? What does that look like? Identifying that is going to be key to determine what health looks like, because it looks like "not dying."

User turnover. Moderator turnover. Account creation. Account retention. Rate of comments per user. Is the "old guard" still present? (This sound subjective but can be worked on)

Less objective are incidents of "purity spirals." These are a great way for a community to die. Find incidents and examine them. Look for commonalities that can be abstracted into numerics.

Another positive trait of the community (imo) is that -- unlike, say, reddit -- it explicitly opposes, and downvotes into oblivion, silly jokes, puns, and even polite or enthusiastic agreement that fails to contribute anything of value.

Substance is king. Or, if you're less generous, the appearance of substance masking all the typical biases is king. Either way, it's a community norm I appreciate, and is what keeps me coming back here.

What makes a forum "healthy" to me? I'd say a few things stand out to me (this list is not comprehensive, mind you).

1. The question "do I learn something from interacting here?" In the case of HN the answer is very often "yes". Now, by "learning" I don't mean "mastering" anything. I just mean "I learned about some person, topic, resource, book, article, field, etc., in a way that deserves further exploration and may be of benefit to me." That happens quite often here, both from the submitted links and the ensuing discussion.

2. Do I take away anything actionable? Again, quite often yes. The action may be "bought this book based on a recommendation", or "downloaded this new framework to start experimenting with it", or whatever, but I definitely find actionable, valuable information here.

3. Is there an absence of most racist / misogynistic / jingoistic / xenophobic / bigoted rhetoric, conspiracy theories, complete snake oil, etc? Mostly I find the answer to be "yes". You will see accusations of misogyny here from time to time in certain threads, and you may see little flare ups of nationalistic sentiment or whatever ever now and then, but on balance I find HN to be pretty good in that regard.

The reason I say that it is not healthy is that it is full of misinformation and sensationalism. I get upset at reading things I know are lies or errors perpetuated through confident ignorance and end up attempting to even it out by sensationalizing the other side (and perhaps in my anger doing some of the things that annoy me). I've noticed this weird behaviour in my parents arguing with their friends about politics and for the most part I'd removed myself from that but HN brings it forth.

What is valuable about HN is that you get some real experts talking about stuff they know well and startup entrepreneurs engage here in a way that's often closer than just posting on ProductHunt, and I like talking to other people like that.

Actually, thank you for asking this question, I think it's pretty obvious at this point that I should just stop using this website. But I needed the question to be asked. Should just use that time building and spend it on my private groups.

1) Strong moderation.

2) Being apolitical: ideological/political/religious debates are generally off-topic.

3) Meta comments being discouraged: insinuations of shilling, soliciting down votes, complaining that a submission is off-topic, etc.

Other communities that's not always clear

Displaying intent online is difficult through text, especially when correcting someone, and a lot of people come off as rude when they're not trying to be.

That said, I disagree with other commenters who describe HN as people discussing about things they know nothing about. Some people may lean out of the window too far, what I find interesting though is the amount of expertise assembled here. No matter how exotic a topic is, somebody will show up who has first hand experience and actually is an expert.

And one of the nice things about HN is that usually when that happens, others do acknowledge the expert status and those contributions get moderated up to higher visibility fairly quickly. Interesting discussions often result, sometimes on quite surprising topics that might not be among the usual "core topics" for this forum yet still interest a lot of the same people.

Very easy to add comments though. So guess what? You end up with a lot of 'noise' in the comments and very little 'signal' elsewhere.

I don't have a proper 'solution' and maybe HN is just perfect the way it is, flaws and all.

I now find it annoying when looking at other links that I don't have the usual skeptical/thoughtful HN take on it.

One thing I like is a lot of people back up their statements with links or examples. or other reasoning.

Here's what a healthy online community has: respect for other members, maturity, empathy, self-awareness, strong moderation, and a diverse enough set of views from participants to make conversations well-rounded and thought provoking.

How and why I arrived here: the subreddits I frequented degraded in quality to the point where I wanted a less-mainstream tech news aggregator, and several redditors recommended HN. I actually had no interest in commenting here until I got far enough along in my career to have actual insight to share on relevant topics. I suspect I'm quite a bit older than most HN participants these days.

Why I stay: a larger portion of content here aligns with my interests and career than elsewhere online and the overall experience has not yet degraded to reddit levels of picking through trash to find gems.

How do you know this? What data verifies that this is what a healthy online community looks like? Why is strong moderation part of a healthy online community, where strong moderation in a real life would be a signal of unhealthiness (it's censorship)? If an online community is mature, empathetic, and self-aware - why would it require strong moderation?

Seriously, next time someone goes after you, try it. Laugh and move on. It's really, really fun to watch what people do in response, because their anger at not landing the desired effect often manifests in physical twitches. Don't give people what they want until it benefits you.

Isn't that what the GP said?

Membership criterion is central to maintaining the competency level of the members. And competency on the topic (along with intellectual honesty) is the single most, perhaps only, important component to a useful discussion: It would be insanely destructive for the New England Journal of Medicine to publish every single thing it ever received with equal weight in massive weekly tomes.

Moderation acts as competency monitoring to a degree.

The problem with literal membership is that it precludes autodidacts, people new to the field and people who can't be bothered with a complicated process for joining. Thus unrestricted membership with moderation. And indeed on reddit, the highest quality subreddit, /r/science, is the one most aggressively moderated

For fact based, purpose driven venues, if you believe you were censored because of your opinion, you should not have posted an opinion in the first place. That's certainly how it works in the workplace which is how some people need to use the web.

There can be unlimited venues where partially informed people post their opinions, maybe we can call them "healthy" or not. But some people want to work on problems that actually do require knowledge and should not have to have their discussions constantly vandalized. A "functional" venue one might say.

Although IMHO their extreme stance on moderation is not always a good thing. For example, they have an unwritten (at least, the last time I checked) policy of nuking entire threads where there are some poor comments, even if this also results in deleting many useful comments later in the same thread.

The first time I contributed substantially to a discussion in /r/science, on a subject where I did have something resembling an expert opinion to offer, my entire contribution (which took several hours to write across a handful of comments, with carefully backed sources etc.) was summarily deleted without warning. I queried this with the mods, and they explained the policy about nuking entire threads. Given the nature of some of the early comments around that thread, I couldn't disagree with the assessment that they were not a constructive contribution. However, I also immediately filed the whole sub in the same dustbin as SO and have made no further attempts to contribute, for much the same reasons.

First off I think you make a point. However, the reason I think strong moderation is still required, even if those previous qualifiers are met, is that online communities are generally built off of focus on some shared interest. Real flesh and blood people, even if they are mature and empathetic etc, will invariably have a variety of passions some of which may conflict with the focus of the community.

If a passion that conflicts with the focus surfaces in a discussion it may _ignite_ that passion among a subset of the members of the community. This causes conversation to derail, the community loses focus, and the members abandon the forum. Strong moderation keeps the community focused, and for that reason the community thrives and is "healthy".

Think of the evening news on TV. You have half an hour to fill, you are going to have to pick the most relevant things. Some things will make the cut, some won't.

Once you get to 24 hours news then it is another thing, because they are repeating the same 15 minutes over and over again. The model to describe that is not censorship, it is spam, electronic warfare, jamming -- an entirely disingenuous communication that superficially looks like "speech" but has nothing to do with "free speech" and such. In fact, it inhibits real communication the same way weed killer kills plants.

Or, put another way, computer programmers ;-). Sure there are plenty of other people who armchair quarterback, but there's just enough truth to this that I wonder if programmers are a little more prone to it. Like we think everything can be solved with an algorithm, and since we're pretty good with algorithms, we can solve any problem in the world.

Your view it's very interesting. When I took a psychology course one of the first things that hit me was the fact that what in psychology is considered "normal" personality is full of internal struggle, sometimes violent - depending on the particular circumstances of the individual. Whereas the absence of such struggle is associated with some personality disorders. When you look at it from that angle, the HN community, in spite of its flaws, is very healthy. And I really appreciate it, in spite of occasionally getting 10 downvotes a day.

Which communities do you know, if any, which are better than HN, in your view, by these two parameters?

The actual discussion is medicore for the most part and heavily policed.

I've only been using HN for ~3 years now (lurking, mostly) but I've noticed that a lot more people use their real names and identities. I would think that helps towards not spouting bullshit without resources. (but controversial threads, e.g. highly political ones, tend to throw that out the window). Lobste.rs has the concept of "hats" that are given to specific people, and they can wear them to answer something in a specific capacity. [0] I wish HN had something like that. HN is moderated enough that I think a system like that could work.

Other things about HN:

1) There are no thumbnails or image links, just links to articles or similar. Reddit suffers from images being allowed, because images take a few seconds to process and upvote, versus a longer article. Reddit is very good for sharing memes and cat pictures, but not so good for lengthy articles. Tild.es [1] is how reddit would be if it were text only (and orders of magnitude smaller). Picture and joke/meme replies also completely derail threads.

2) HN is highly focused and consistently moderated (in my opinion). At times more controversial discussion happens with political news, but it generally is focused on business / research / technology news, etc. Reddit is a mishmash of subreddits and each one is moderated differently (usually very minimally).

With HN's culture I usually feel no need to comment on something unless I have experience with that or it's something I'm interested in.

[0]: https://lobste.rs/hats

[1]: https://tildes.net/

These are all the reasons I love HN.

I don’t know of anywhere else that approaches it from those perspectives.

I’d sincerely love recommendations for more like it, tech-related or otherwise.

I asked for information hoping to expand on a position so far from reality that it's almost nonsensical. Asking that question more nicely is orthogonal to empathy.

I agree with these criteria (except "thought provoking"). Mostly I expect to be able to learn something from some of the comments, and I don't want to lose my time with political debates, flame wars and trolls. I think HN works pretty well for that (better than any other forum I know), which is why I stay.

I agree it's somewhat insular and US-centric (as expected from an English language forum). It reduces the set of views and some opinions may be hard to express. But overall, I feel it's reasonably balanced, and it's possible to have "non standard HN views" if they fit the guidelines (they may not receive a lot of upvote, but they shouldn't have negative vote count). Besides a lot of the articles are technical so it's usually possible to avoid ideological discussions.

I've noticed this more recently on HN as well.

There are a few areas where I'll actually know what's going on under the hood in the specific niche area of industry or wherever, but then I'll come on HN and see the top comment completely off base, with maybe one or two refutations of that comment way down at the bottom. There's no actual verification by experts for each topic (not sure how there could be though).

I also notice this happens more the farther away from HN's core focus area the subject matter is on. Internet security? Tons of great advice. Boeing? It gets a little iffier, with a lot of armchair small prop pilots, who give you a completely different outlook than going and talking to a pilot who actually flies large jets for decades (but then wait a bit longer and pilots who fly large jets for decades show up on HN, which is cool - and no offense to the small prop pilots, I actually enjoy reading a lot of that discussion). US Patent law? You see some very outright false info on HN, I guess because while there are some very good patent lawyers here, there aren't very many. Also HN being a global platform inevitably leads to discussions on law getting completely mixed up.

But then of course Gell-Mann Amnesia sets in and I keep reading anyways. :)

The moderation here is pretty strong for keeping it civil and polite, which helps HN be a much less anxiety-inducing place.

Aren't those two clauses basically antithetical? The experts are the ones who don't group think. You can't be full of both.

> Hacker News is a great reflection of SV at large

More than 90% of HN's community is outside of SV, and the bulk of the community here is actually rather disposed against it (or their image of it).

I think technical concerns are underrated in the general population. The other day I was watching some lectures by a quant finance prof who started out telling people that "you can still be smart even if you don't like repetitive math" -- there is so much mollycoddling of people whose main ability is the "social skill" of coming up with the same wrong answers that most other people come up with.

I like HN because it is a place where technology and business are taken equally seriously. I think of the programming subreddit which is overrun by communists who think that if money has any effect on your motivation as a programmer you're like a pedophile or something.

Also HN is mostly free of the unproductive "culture wars" discussions that have led to the heat death of so many fora.

Theres a level of irony in trying to claim some sort of level of superior intelligence and then following it up with a paragraph of nonsense demonstrating you know little about the community you've attacked and the ideology you've attempted to label it with.

This is objectively and demonstrably false. The wars just manifest differently and happen to lead to an outcome that you prefer.

There's a reason this site has "avoid controversial topics unless you have something new to add" or however it's phrased in the guidelines. Let me be completely and plainly clear: there is an HN culture. You will be banned, often quietly, if you wander off that reservation.

---

Edit: Dan, I'm rate limited, so you get the edit here because I can't be bothered to account hop again.

Grandiose? You ban people for not adhering to a culture. How is that even a remotely controversial statement? What else would you ban them for?

There is a set of guidelines and approaches you want in place for HN behavior. When people fail to meet those, you give them a couple chances and then remove them from the community. Examples: "We've asked you to be nicer," or "we've asked you not to bring up gender politics," or whatever nice explanation you give.

There's a word for that kind of thing; that word is culture.

I wasn't even criticizing moderation, because I'm not sure what I could add there because it's your employment to manage this stupidity, but you sure showed up fast assuming I was. Is it really like that now? Nobody can speak objectively about how this site works and point out an incontrovertible fact without you taking it personally and trying to rally a bunch of usernames you've never met to believe you?

While I have you, I appreciated that you declined to share your age in that fawning profile you and Scott got. That was tacit admission of your own site's culture, and you know it.

---

Edit 2: I'm really enjoying watching your comment evolve via edits into reading back exactly what I'm saying from a position of authority and then challenging me to find authority.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Edit: it's easy to make authoritative-sounding claims, but to be taken seriously, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds. In the majority of cases, we ban accounts for breaking the site guidelines after multiple requests to stop (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). (I'm talking about established accounts. We handle brand new accounts that break the site guidelines differently.)

I am wary of entering this sort of meta-discussion and usually I would not, but given the slightly unusual topic today, I feel obliged to defend dang here. I have been a participant in HN and various other online forums for a long time. The moderation here, or at least its visible effects, has consistently been handled better than almost any other forum I can think of. That is due in no small part to the calm and incremental approach dang typically takes when someone in a discussion is making unconstructive comments or lowering the tone.

One of the original questions in this discussion was about what makes a healthy forum. I don't really know what "healthy" means in this context, but I have found that dedicated moderators with a soft touch are something I associate with a lot of the most useful and enjoyable forums I'm familiar with, social media or otherwise. If generally constructive commenters occasionally drift towards incivility, as many of us sometimes do if we have strong feelings on a subject being discussed, I would prefer to see a gentle push to keep the standards of discussion up, rather than see the admins wielding the ban hammer at the slightest opportunity. That said, I also appreciate the admins of a forum wielding that ban hammer if someone is persistently making comments that are unpleasant and contribute little value to the discussion. Obviously I don't know what if anything happens invisibly here, but the visible part of HN has consistently tracked closer to those two ideals than most of the other online forums I know over many years.

It's frustrating, but it is a good thing.

The core way billionaires control our discourse is through spamming the agenda with junk. If we are always talking about why billionaires shouldn't be taxed (abortion, white privilege, lame woke people, ...) we aren't talking about everything else.

Rate limiting answers that. It's OK to talk about those subjects, it just shouldn't be more than 5% of the discussion or so. If things are too heated, people should get slowed down.

I've noticed that I'm more likely to get rate limited after I flag something. That makes me feel like flags are a limited resource so I use them wisely.

We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do so) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.

I think on those metrics HN does pretty well. Obviously not perfect, things fall through the cracks all the time, but way better than other communities that strive for the same thing.

I don't remember how I originally got into HN, but what drives me to stay is alignment in goals. I _want_ the things HN is optimizing for.

As for HN's civility, relative to many other places (twitter, reddit, news sites comment sections), I think that's a credit to the moderation policy and not something that would happen on its own. I see the effort in moderation as being cause+correlation of the community civility. And if civility were to noticeably decline, I'd take that as a sign that YC was less invested in maintaining and growing HN as a community and discussion forum.

But I think most anthropologists define community as traditionally involving shared resources and problems. Traditionally this entailed a geographic proximity, but it didn’t have to (e.g., the HIV activist community in the 80s and 90s). Given that geography isn’t actually a requirement, you might ask a fair question: what proportion of online “communities” are communities at all, and does that relate to their “health”, however you define it. In that instance, you might refer to health as the ability to marshal resources to effectively manage those problems. By that definition, HN isn’t a community at all - it marshals no resources, tackles no problems, and has no common set of either. Health is orthogonal.

In some sense pushing back against any particular usage of a word with such a range of meanings is not a particularly useful task. On the other hand, community is often used as a positive term and it is useful to unpack it in more detail in that circumstance since it is often abused in its generality for marketing or political purposes. One aspect to consider is why the word community is used in a particular situation rather than some other word. I think it is more useful when looking deeper to consider to what extent particular aspects of community could be applied in a particular case and how different people might use the term rather than "community? yes or no".

Often the word community can relate to how people relate to each other in terms of providing daily needs. From that perspective the term is including the regular and excluding the occasional. Many people do interact with HN regularly over extended periods.

In another sense it can relate to personal rather than professional or impersonal contact with others. Personally I find it a bit jarring in the context of HN being described as a community to see people talking about how it would be healthier if people didn't try to have personal conversations. But it is a feature of HN to generally discourage personal conversations and at the same time many commenters do know each other outside HN for various reasons. Additionally, most topics get very limited attention after the first 12 hours or so so it is common for later comments to be more personal.

In another sense it can refer to more vital connections, at least in a wider sense of long term importance and not just necessary to survive but also not including any casual connections. I think this would vary quite a bit among readers and participants on HN.

It can also imply a bidirectional influence even if not a balanced influence. I think the term would generally exclude anyone without some form of presence in the community, even if very minor.

Anyway, the word community can be used to start any length of writing so I'll stop there. How does your class define community?

Lots of users on HN are actively contributing for years after sign up. This to me is a good sign of health. The counter point is of course, the rapid drop off in engagement after the initial month. Where a large number of users each month never return to the site.

The average comment on Hacker News last month was written by a user with 5 years of tenure on the site. Depending on your perspective you could argue this is a good or a bad thing (new users aren't contributing as much as old users, or old users are continuing to contribute!).

This doesn't come without a cost : HN is highly addictive, like every other social media website.

This is not necessarily the criteria I use to determine 'health' in offline communities. There is a "human" side that is more important offline.

What I miss the most about HN : the ability to have discussions around political and controversial topics. I can't understand why a community like HN isn't able to have thoughtful, well reasoned discussions around political and controcersial issues. When those don't get flagged or hidden by moderators, I enjoy them a lot.

One of the things I notice about Hacker News is that it wants things. It wants all sorts of things. There's clash but there's also recognizable consensus on want. What I also see is that HN won't get what they want, and I don't believe they're any closer to effectively organizing to get what they want, whether it's unions or racially fair hiring or a different scheme in how money works.

HN is not effective, and that is why I view them as unhealthy. HN wants things and it shall not have them. You can put warmth and love in that package, but it's still impotent.

I'm particularly curious about communities that are "similar" to HN. Use whatever definitions of "healthier" and "similar" you think are appropriate.

I recommend you explore the concept of "agonism" – which claims that (certain forms of) conflict and disagreement are essential components of a healthy democratic system. Many parallels could be drawn to online communities (specifically) and the curation of productive, social spaces (in general.)

In this era of conflict avoidance and information siloing... promoting the right sorts of disagreement might actually do a great social good!

Good luck with your assignment.

1. The commenters here have some common interests beyond the lowest common denominator of politics/pop culture/humor(memes). In larger networks this part often breaks down.

2. It genuinely has shared values - particularly curiosity, skepticism and debate. Plenty of negative ones too - cynicism, anger, grandiosity but hey :)

3. It is NOT a ad-click-maximizing dopamine slot-machine like FB. When networks go down that path, i think they stop being communities altogether and become something more like TV.

4. It is more resistant to group think than e.g Reddit subs like /r/investing because it has a broader scope I think.. networks with a overly narrow focuses inevitably become echo-chambers the network converges on a consensus view. HN is somehow not completely defined by "i'm interested in X, so lets go to /r/X", its broader than that, but narrow enough to not

Maybe i'm behind the times, but HN is one of the very few places I'd even call an online community, forget healthy. "Healthy" at the scale of a global community can only be a sterile echo chamber. HN is as unhealthy and flawed as its members, which is something to be proud of. I've never seen a real community of people I'd describe purely as healthy.

I happened to agree with what he said at the time (scares me to type this), because he talked about AVERAGE differences between genders as group, and i thought it was ridiculous to assert that men & women are identical in all ways from a biological perspective.

But i'm definitely kind of aspergersy/autistic, and after a LOT of reading and some private discussion with friends, i came to understand why everyone was so pissed at him. My friends know me, and they didn't stop being my friends the second I said that. This is what his girlfriend had to say:

"But after reading it a few times, and discussing it with him, her position mellowed; she even came to agree with one or two of his points. She maintains Damore was, for the most part, naive and wrong,"

So in happy offline world, a naive guy said a dumb thing, people got mad at him, but they forgave. If the memo had been only between him and his girlfriend, he would have learnt from that experience and come out a slightly better person.

------

But what happened in the online sphere, orchestrated by people who did not know him? He lost his job and any prospect of ever being hired again for years at least.

Consequences in the online world are FUCKED. There is no safe way to engage with controversy when the stakes are that high. Everything you said will be accessible to all people, for all time. And remember, everything from the heliocentric universe to the idea that gay people deserve equal treatment was controversial at one time.

Hence, online forums with real names attached become "sterile echo chambers" as I said.

HN is able to engage in some amount of controversial discussion without devolving into a lynch mob. Its a very rare thing. The whole idea of calling online forums "communities" at all grates at me because people forget how truly different these artificial spaces where we engage with context-less pieces of other people are to the real world.

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I think healthy at a truly global scale can only be either communities that completely stamp out controversial thought but end up saying nothing interesting , or those that don't but involve mob mentality and lynching. Those are the only 2 global level endgames for online networks, and they both suck in their own ways, but fundamentally because of human reasons. Only networks that aren't used by everyone have any shot of being in the healthy middle.

I would say that HN is the healthiest comment driven site I’ve been part of in the 27 years I’ve been on the internet. It’s big, and still doesn’t succumb to the trolls who tend to be the biggest problem on anonymous comment threads. There are a few rules here that are pretty well policed, bit I think the single most important one is to read and respond to comments in the most positive light possible. It keeps threads civil, and tends to starve the trolls.

It also helps that we have very good moderators.

I will say that it feels it feels like the heart of what made HN isn’t as apparent anymore. Many of the strong core that was here isn’t as prevalent anymore, but despite this, and it’s seeming growth it still hasn’t succumbed to the poor behavior of a minority of users that tend to disrupt and subvert communities like this after a surprisingly short amount of time.

I keep coming back because the comments tend to have good gems, and a good take on the main article, without having to deal with most of the vitriol of most comment sections.

I've been on HN since before 2008. I've seen it change a lot. Before then, I was a regular on Slashdot, on IRC, on various phpBB boards, and, before that, dial-up BBSs. I've got a fairly healthy offline life too and have been a part of climbing communities, business communities, and outdoor communities, and have had organizational roles in some of those. So my opinions aren't worth more than anyone else's, but I've spent a lot of time developing them nonetheless.

Whether a community, online or not, is "healthy", or not, is largely a matter of perspective. You'll see a lot of people say some community isn't healthy, and then a lot of people say the same community is healthy for the same reasons that other people find it unhealthy. The only metric that makes sense to me is whether the community helps me to be a happier or better person. A community might have a lot of faults, but if the overall impact of the community on me is a positive one, then it's healthy -- for me.

So from that standpoint, HN has been good to me. I learn a lot from it, it helps me stay sharp in my part of the industry, it challenges me to learn new things all the time. Some of the stuff I've learned here, I've gone on to teach others (as faithfully as I could) or just shown other people how to find it here on their own.

There are a lot of smart people here and a lot of interesting content on all kinds of subjects. Sometimes a subject matter expert shows up to point out everything that's wrong with some content that I thought I was learning something from; from their perspective, that content made HN a little bit worse, but from my perspective, that content led to their participation and together that made HN a little bit better.

Sure, there are some "personalities" on here that some people disagree with from time to time, or maybe that a lot of people disagree with often. Well, those people are in every community and I don't think HN would be more healthy without them. They could, maybe, benefit from a little more humility, but so could I.

I'm a bit mercurial and I'm passionate about some topics, especially those involving the health and welfare of the people around me. And, honestly, I'm just a bit of a jerk sometimes, a fault that I developed young and something I have to work on every day. That's made me an "unhealthy" part of HN from time to time. It's also my humanity, though, and I don't think that the things I've written in a dispassionate voice have necessarily been better, or more impactful, or even received better, than the things I write passionately. But, I don't want to become a part of the problem, so mostly I try to be quiet and let the smarter people lead the discussion.

One of the healthiest parts of HN is Dan Gackle (~dang). Okay, so some of this might be interpreted as boot-licking, so you'll have to trust me when I say that nobody's ever accused me of loving authority. I have never, in any of my communities, online or offline, seen a more even-handed, fair-minded, or restrained person in a moderator role. There have been some articles written about his work here (https://thenewstack.io/the-beleaguered-moderators-who-keep-h..., https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th..., https://qz.com/858124/why-y-combinators-hacker-news-silicon-...). I keep hanging around here in part because he and the other moderators here do such a great job overall. So, anybody ever wants to get rid of me, there ya go.

Their positions necessarily mean that they're going to piss somebody off now and again. They have the unenviable task of often asking people not to talk -- well, argue -- about the subjects they most want to talk or argue about. I'm amazed at how many people though instead say something like, "You're right, I was out of line, sorry." I wish this was a skill they could teach, I'd sign up for that class without a second thought.

I do wish we had a little more balance here. We need more outspoken women here for instance. I appreciated ~jl's presence here and a few others early on and was hopeful there would be more. We need to hear more from people who are experiencing the industry, or life, in a different way from the rest of us.

I wish also that there were more opportunities for people here to be, well, a little more "human", I guess. HN's nature leads it to sort of discourage humanity in the discussions. You have to make an effort to get to know anyone here, and mostly that happens outside of HN, in email or elsewhere. So to that extent, HN often feels less like a real community to me. I knew much more about the people in my old IRC communities.

The only other weakness I think HN has is the really short-lived nature of its discussions. In the past, online communities all had software that would allow discussions to continue for a little while, so if you read something interesting and wanted to say something interesting about it, but needed time to compose it or maybe do a little research before saying anything, that was fine. You could take a little bit of time to write something better, and people would still read it. On HN, once something isn't on the front page anymore, nobody reads it. If something is on the front page for a long time, then it usually gets so many comments that there's no point adding to them, because nobody will navigate through hundreds of other comments to find the new thing you wrote, even if it's good. And if something's on the front page for a short time, you have to rush to add to the discussion before it disappears forever. It's a bit like the whole forum is always doing a bit of methamphetamine, and that's not great.

I never know what to put in the last line of comments like these.

The main thing I would point to justify that it is healthy is that the vast majority of the comments are informed, well written and productive. They add to the information in the linked article, and provide insight from multiple points of view.

To borrow from that analysis I would say that HN do exhibit some tribal thinking tendencies but over all dissenting perspectives are tolerated enough to allow new knowledge about a wide variety of topics to bubble up.

As someone noted the seemingly large amount of subject experts present for those topics might contribute more to this than the actual culture though.

And often enough some self proclaimed expert, or an entire clique of them, spin off into some thread sharing their take. But I’d say there just enough skepticism presented to prevent things to devolve into pure cargo culting.

1. "I don't know who would have smart speakers at home. " Most people don't care.

2. GOOGLE is Lord Voldemort.

3. FB is Sauron.

4. Startup life > Big company

5. "Who would live in the bay area. I am happy at my ranch doing remote work."

I am old enough to remember the anti-M$ days. And how Slashdot childishly posted the Gates-Borg image on a lot of articles about Microsoft. Slashdot was a far unhealthier community than HN.