What I haven't seen anybody acknowledge yet is that "critics" includes everyone who tiredly mourns comment quality. Everyone.
Depressingly, HN would rather front page an article about personal growth than admit that maybe, just maybe, all of this meta bitching is setting the tone. That's from the top down and I partially, and with respect, blame pg for carrying the flag of comments suck -- instead of taking an opportunity to turn common sentiment around.
Meta posts and comments may be boring, but based on pretty close observation I don't think they're setting the tone. I fear it is nothing so exciting. The most likely explanation is simply that HN is reverting to the mean for forums.
Common sentiment is now comments are declining in quality. Wherever that came from, that's now parroted fairly often and is undoubtedly planted in the back of everybody's head as they go about their business. That cannibalizes some comments, because people now think "am I contributing to a decline?". That makes people more inclined to snark, to discourage others from adding to the decline. This is the exact sort of thing I watch happen all day long in the comments now.
Take one recent example. Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it[1]. They presented no original thought on it themselves, they simply quoted it verbatim. Some asshole came along and berated him for it, as if he'd committed some kind of grievous sin. The fact is, I enjoyed the quote in question, and I upvoted him because I'm glad somebody else noticed. Worse comments have happened, but now there's such a fixation with "quality" that people are starting to up the snark. Which adds to the very problem we're trying to fix. Look at that entire thread.
The rub is that rather than focus on opportunities for improving going forward, this community has an inane fascination with returning to the way things were. Your thread was too late, I'm afraid, as the negativity has accelerated any decline that exists.
You're dead-on; HN is reverting to the mean. This navelgazing lament about the times that were is setting the pace for the future evolution of HN, though. The high-karma users have spent so much time wondering how to get back to the past -- a now completely unattainable goal due to growth, I'm sorry -- that there has been immeasurable lost opportunity on focusing on where to go from here.
I'm not sure that technological improvements are going to fix it, either. Even if the negative trend is as pronounced as believed (and I don't think it is), acknowledging it and spending countless comments focusing on it has cost precious time in reversing it.
Rather than embracing the inevitable evolution, understanding it, and finding ways to make the evolution more positive, we've established blood-curdling fear at the mere prospect of evolution. Now, that glacial evolution is sliding along on a trail of fear instead of a trail of positive outlook.
> Someone quoted a highlight from a linked article because it was humorous, and you could have missed it....
I may well the guy you're talking about who was berated and then downvoted -- even though two others besides you had posted that they liked my comment. And when I replied to the post that berated me, I was once again downvoted. At least one comment has been deleted but it's still a pretty interesting snapshot of what the mood is on HN these days http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437225
Your comment is ironic given the comment that you started with.
I am speaking from the perspective of improving HN, so I'm startled (should I be?) to find that the first reply is an admitting that the community will eventually split apart.
From my experience (which was as a developer of a browser game) this is not true. People who complain are people who care. And people who care will stay. People who really want to go will not complain. They will stop contributing and go without much fanfare.
In the end you stay with all the complainers, but none of the non-complainers. This is a real risk for a community. (In the case of the game it was 'simple' to fix this: change the game. It is far harder for something like HN)
Since you posted your thread asking the community for suggestions, I've been mulling over an idea that I'd now like to share.
I think jed is right; the navel-gazing is part of the problem and the more meta-discussion occurs the lower overall quality gets. This belief is informed by my experiences on a variety of fora, and is not HN-specific. Tackling the problem then, should occur in a way that doesn't draw attention to the fact that there is one, but fixes it silently in the background. This is partly why I like hidden karma scores; they (in theory) reduce groupthink and handwringing about karma.
My suggestion is this: pick a few dozen people who you think are good contributors, and write a quick script to dump their voting patterns. Take a look at how they're voting, and choose some number whose votes you think best represent what you'd like HN to be. Then make those people a class of superusers, but do so invisibly. Neither they nor the rest of HN should know they've been tapped.
I envision the superusers as being vote accelerators. Their votes would not only confer the typical +/- 1 karma, but would tag the comment they voted on. An up-tagged comment would gain, say, 2 karma for every upvote, and a down-tagged one would lose 3 for every downvote. Those values are provisional and arbitrary, and should be changed. Tags could stack or cancel each other out, but that's something else that should be experimented with.
If the superuser scheme seems to be having a positive effect, consider making it viral. That is, if some receives, say, 200 positively tagged comments, they too become superusers. Again, that constant should be chosen carefully. The idea behind making superuserdom viral is that it scales automatically (given a wisely chosen threshold), and offers insurance against decreased contribution from the original set of superusers.
Karma can be a very effective way of cultivating the kind of interactions the community desires, but can also lead to gaming and groupthink. By increasing the value of trusted users' votes, but keeping that mechanism hidden, I believe you should be able to maximize karma's benefits while minimizing its drawbacks.
Anyway, I apologize if this post is off-topic or should be addressed elsewhere. I figured a meta-thread was as good a place as any to introduce it.
I also wanted to say in postscript that although HN may be suffering the growth pangs of any forum, it still offers far better discussion than most sites I've found, so the doomsday-ery is perhaps premature.
Then make those people a class of superusers, but do so invisibly.
That actually reminds me of the metacritic scheme. IIRC they take reviews and then (a) translate them into a numeric score according to some method they don't tell you about and (b) weigh each critic by a different weight, of which they don't tell you about.
So your idea is not only interesting, it is probably workable.
HN was seeded with a group who had personal connections to YC or were hoping to be selected, largely using their own public identities. With the expansion of the community, the fraction of HN that has a personal stake in appearing intelligent and polite is much smaller than it was.
exactly - I attribute much of the priggishness of the HN community to this mercenary fact. Most folks who are obsessed with forging a strong online identity on HN are deeply invested in selling something to the rest of the group. I do not by any means disagree with this, but one of my first thoughts upon finding HN was how easily it might be lampooned. Everyone seemed to be self-promoting while trying to act casual. I will probably never have any kind of reputation here, because I spend my day either deep in thought at my computer, or reading/commenting HN. I don't forsee becoming a member of the web entrepreneur community, and because of my personality type I will probably never have a blog. But I know a lot.
Happens with every community as it grows, the only real solution is exclusivity and even then it comes with problems. The people who have the time to spend here are normally not those who create or produce anything worthwhile, there are of course outliers (patio11, jacquesm etc) but the average active user here will not be the sort of person that produce content we want to see. As the popularity grows the ratio of critics:creators grows ever bigger.
let's not get things confused - just because I am not a "maker" on HN does not mean I am not productive when I swivel my chair over to do my actual work. my god.
This. It seems that most often the top comment is a direct rebuttal to whatever the original post was. While there is nothing wrong with this, and it's actually healthy to have opposing points of view, it seems like the community as a whole has gotten into a rut of criticizing everything. There are other ways to have constructive discussions than always pointing out what's wrong.
There was a study somewhere stating that those criticizing are perceived as being smarter. I guess we know that instinctively. And I think this applies to self view to: when criticizing someone's else point we appear smarter to ourselves.
There's too much bubble talk lately and people's projects are still half-baked and aren't ready for the bubble to pop, so they're trying to slow it down by cutting each other down. Crab mentality.