My Hacker News account is 1859 days old (just over 5 years). Over those 5 years, I've gone through several stages of my entrepreneurial career.
HN has been there from the time when I just was dreaming about launching a startup, through the gut check when I finally quit my full-time job to found a startup, selling that startup to another company, being fired by that company, and finally joining a friend's startup as CTO. I've changed throughout, and I've seen Hacker News change as well.
The problem I have witnessed with Hacker News is that over the years, it's transformed from a place where civil and intelligent discourse can be had to a place where each comment seems to be made for show. Rather than making solid arguments, each person seems to want to be seen as more intelligent than the rest of the commenters. This phenomena is the reason for what in my opinion is a breathtaking level of pedantry about the most mundane topics.
For example, there was a post on the front page yesterday about scalability at GitHub. It was an interesting and insightful article from a knowledgeable author. The top comment was something along the lines of, "I can't believe they wasted so much time making the UI look this good." HN used to be a place where insightful articles were rewarded with intelligent conversation and debate. What happened?
Another example. Someone launched a site earlier this week involving the sales of hobbyist electronics. The site was definitely interesting, and they experienced a large volume of traffic from HN and Reddit. The top comment? Something along the lines of, "when a startup can't keep its site up, it makes me question their abilities." HN used to be a site where you would be congratulated for launching. What happened?
It's this kind of stuff that has to go. I don't think Hacker News was ever perfect -- and maybe I'm just rooting for the site because of the potential that it has -- but it's definitely gotten worse over the past few years.
As a community, we need to stop the posturing and the pedantry, and get back to civil and intelligent discourse. We also need to act as the site's immune system, and stop promoting content that is clearly written to be seen but adds nothing to the conversation.
I am new to Hacker News. I have to say that I too despair at some of the comments posted on the site. I believe that open discourse and communication is great, but when someone posts in jest it belittles what we all desire from a community like this.
I find myself filtering comments on HN. I still go and read them (as opposed to Reddit where I don't read comments), but this is a location where comments should be meaningful and less of the "Herpty Derp" we get on YouTube. I don't believe HN is comparable to YouTube, but at the same time I can see where content in comments could be improved.
I would be in favor of a system that taught new recruits to listen and watch the community before commenting, much like what this article suggest.
I personally think the problem isn't with HN but us Developers.
We tend to be analytical by nature and hence whenever you show one of us something, our brains are always go into "Yes, but..." mode.
It's that "but" that says we are always looking for flaws. Looking to show others we can find a problem with their plan.
Example:
The biz guy tell the devs"we need to get this done for the client"? The devs immediately look for flaws in the plan such as "what about this...", "not sure if it will work because...", "yes, but what about...".
Some of us have seen this too many times.
The minute a Dev starts on the "Yes, but..." path they remain defensive and on the look-out to be smarter than everyone else. Looking for problems. Looking to show we know best.
We do this all the time. In my company I have barred my Devs from "Yes, but..." conversations.
Instead get you mindset into "Let's explore".
It just changes the whole tone of the conversation when we Devs start with a "explore..." mindset and not a "but...".
Try it. Go back and read the top 10 HN posts and keep thinking "let's explore" when you read a post. What kind of post comment can you then come up with then? Much more helpful I would say.
I feel that you are talking about an issue that is MUCH BIGGER than HN story replies. Society, as a whole has become much ruder. I attribute it to the passive-aggressive frenzy that is Social Media. All of a sudden you can call someone ANYTHING YOU WANT without fear of direct (and many times indirect) retribution. This phenomenon has saturated our daily interactions. Now, instead of a courteous phone call requesting my presence, my boss chats me "come here". What?!?! Am I a bad-dog?
C'mon people ... remember your manners!
Italics and other text modifiers are essential for clear communication using only text. However, as a new user myself I was frustrated by a lack of documentation for comment markup. As far as I can tell, the only text modifier for HN comments is italics which are specified by surrounding a word with asterisks.
I wish there where more text modifiers (like bold and underline), as well as some kind of documentation for them.
HN has been there from the time when I just was dreaming about launching a startup, through the gut check when I finally quit my full-time job to found a startup, selling that startup to another company, being fired by that company, and finally joining a friend's startup as CTO. I've changed throughout, and I've seen Hacker News change as well.
The problem I have witnessed with Hacker News is that over the years, it's transformed from a place where civil and intelligent discourse can be had to a place where each comment seems to be made for show. Rather than making solid arguments, each person seems to want to be seen as more intelligent than the rest of the commenters. This phenomena is the reason for what in my opinion is a breathtaking level of pedantry about the most mundane topics.
For example, there was a post on the front page yesterday about scalability at GitHub. It was an interesting and insightful article from a knowledgeable author. The top comment was something along the lines of, "I can't believe they wasted so much time making the UI look this good." HN used to be a place where insightful articles were rewarded with intelligent conversation and debate. What happened?
Another example. Someone launched a site earlier this week involving the sales of hobbyist electronics. The site was definitely interesting, and they experienced a large volume of traffic from HN and Reddit. The top comment? Something along the lines of, "when a startup can't keep its site up, it makes me question their abilities." HN used to be a site where you would be congratulated for launching. What happened?
It's this kind of stuff that has to go. I don't think Hacker News was ever perfect -- and maybe I'm just rooting for the site because of the potential that it has -- but it's definitely gotten worse over the past few years.
As a community, we need to stop the posturing and the pedantry, and get back to civil and intelligent discourse. We also need to act as the site's immune system, and stop promoting content that is clearly written to be seen but adds nothing to the conversation.