What happened there is no different than what happens when someone posts a spreadsheet with useful stuff here. Within minutes it will get destroyed or defaced.

The 'griefers' have definitely discovered HN. I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have, and that some others are simply here because they can't see a good thing without being tempted to try to destroy it.

Anything - and I really mean anything - that you put out there on the internet needs to be designed with abuse in mind, because no matter how small it is the abusers will seek it out and will try to destroy it.

That's something that you need to be aware of as much as you need to be a coder or a designer when you plan on making a living online.

Better get used to it.

It's almost entirely the latter. Only a small percentage of HN users actually apply to YC, and I can only think of one who became abusive on HN after being rejected (and he sent me an email recently apologizing).

Most of the nastiness we get here is from new users who show up and think they can behave like they do on other sites. This has been happening for years. But I wouldn't attribute to them such complex motives as not being able to see a good thing without being tempted to destroy it. I think they're just 13, or nuts.

Slightly off-topic, but what about the inverse of that: how many YC applicants are active HN users [1]? Just curious as to how much of the applicant pool comes from HN.

1. Since you have to create a HN account to apply, I'm assuming 100% of YC applicants are HN users, so maybe how many actively participate?

    > (let ids (applicant-ids "w2011") 
        (percent (/ (count [> (uvar _ karma) 100] ids) 
                    (len ids)))) 
    17

Anyway, not that it matters since a good application is still a good one (and vice versa), but it's possible to find a higher YC/HN participation rate if you include the cofounders.

I think it's more revealing this way if you are interested in how increased traffic and site participation is effecting this 6% you mentioned above or that "days alive" value; IOW, how is increased traffic and new user participation effecting the rate at which this sample is posting comments?

In the end, I don't think increased traffic is effecting the discussion to the extent that it really matters; I think what really keeps everyone else in check is the frequency at which older members are posting comments.

I was amazed that PG recognized my username at the acceptance brunch...I guess his statistics might explain why (I had ~1,000 karma but it was built up from small posts/comments, nothing too controversial).

This was in part because some of the stuff I saw tossed around was very strongly targeted at YC and you personally, not so much against HN.

But I'll take your word for it and I really hope that those that get rejected by YC see it for what it is and don't take it personal.

But people lacking the same incentives will probably unknowingly slide into some form of bad behavior even if they've been active on the site for years - it will just happen naturally, because their economic equation is "amuse myself" with no mitigating factors. But most of the time it probably doesn't cause overt vandalism, just poor commenting hygiene.

I am not so sure about that - I come here and post comments in the hope that people will like them (doesn't work that well) because I derive my sense of worth from how much karma I have

Can't be the only one.

Arguably selfish motivations, but they work out well for everyone.

I never read comments under the articles linked here because I know they are polluted by a lot of useless noise, so I just read comments here on HN. But it could be interesting to see if nasty comments related to HN, like the ones mentioned by the OP, appear in other places as well (not that we can do anything about it, anyway).

What percentage of HN users apply to YC?

  >>  I suspect that some of them are people that took rejection by YC a bit harder than they should have

What does a hacker have to gain from taking something apart, poking at it, and putting it back together again?

Also you gain skill of knowing that you can take something apart and be able to put everything back together again, which is often harder than it sounds.

The answer that's related that I was trying to elicit is "because it interests me to know how things work." By the same token, trolls derive the same sort of intellectual pleasure from trolling: to anger someone is to own them. They do it "because I can."

Real trolls aren't the ones that are going "lulz obama is a socialist," "ruby is better than python," or anything so obvious. The real trolls are the ones that sound reasonable, but slowly end up destroying your community by creating discord much more subtly.

This is a worrisome statement. You get enough flags on a submission and it's automatically deleted, right?

The YC deadline is coming up in two days. Should we not submit cool new hacks to YC right now? It seems like people who are insecure about their applications might be incentivized to kill submissions where people demo something cool, under the premise that they want to stifle potential competition for YC slots. (Which is dumb, because the URL will still be on the application, but I never said this was rational.)

[edit: I know jacquesm was talking about previous YC applicants, but this led me to speculate on whether flaggings were performed by current YC applicants.]

I did not mean that you should not be submitting cool new hacks here, that's no problem at all.

What I meant was that there may be characters out there that have been rejected by YC in the past that vent their frustration by being less than good citizens of HN.

So it's nothing to do with people that are insecure about their applications or submissions to HN today, it's got to do with people that were rejected during previous rounds that took it personal instead of as constructive criticism and/or limited resources.

You can add to that list the medium of books, articles, presentations, artwork, fiction, poetry, non-fiction, drawings, music, film, interviews, and and other vehicle for personal expression.

To those who would be abusive, all I have to say is to remember that everyone begins somewhere. There was a time when you yourself was very mediocre at coding. And if your work had been completely trashed, how likely would you have been to pursue a career in programming?

I suspect that same sentiment speaks to quite a few HN'ers as well.

I don't think HN is getting worse, really, but I do think it's getting faster. Sometimes posts get lost in the flood of new stuff. Or sometimes posts just get stuck with a bad crowd who happened to click.

And it is a bad crowd, too-- it's one thing to give bad feedback; it's another to actively go on a site to misuse it only to insult the creator. Who does that?

That said, most of the time you still get the usual HN crowd, the good crowd, when you post things like this. And maybe those things boil down to "Your site sucks," but it's delivered in a helpful, constructive fashion.

Submissions can't really expect more than a 4:1 ratio of upvotes to downvotes. Say anything negative about Python (even things that are demonstrably true like the performance degradation of CPU bound tasks on multi-core machines because of the GIL on CPython) or positive about Apple (even something demonstrably true like "the iPad is a successful new product launch") and get downvoted into oblivion (sadly, HN is starting to get a few knee-jerk Apple haters /sigh).

Someone posted a "Physics of Angry Birds" post here in the last week and someone took the time to post a snide, self-righteous "this doesn't belong here" comment, which is similar to what you're talking about. Frankly I don't understand this attitude at all: if the post doesn't interest you, move on. 3/4 of the HN posts are of no personal interest to me. That doesn't make them objectively bad.

I'll have you know I've always been a knee-jerk Apple hater, and I've been here for years.

Knee-jerk hate might be a beneficial strategy if you're trying to survive in Darfur, but we safe people should try to minimize it for the benefit of our own minds. We learn and grow by studying things, especially the things that rub us the wrong way. The other benefits of arbitrary hate like feeling you belong to an in-group seem out of place on HN, a site mostly devoted to curiosity (from what I've seen).

I'm not saying you should or shouldn't feel or act a certain way, but for all of our sakes lets keep it mental and not bring that sort of thing into the public light here where it might be perceived as community endorsement of that point of view.

But, that I shouldn't say it at Hacker News?

I'm disappointed. First, I'm disappointed that you've suggested that my comment, whether a joke or sincere (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to whether I intended the former or the latter), is unacceptable speech. Second, I'm disappointed that 12 other HN readers agree with you.

I now have to conclude that, as others are talking about, HN is losing the culture it once had, and that saddens me.

HN discourages "+1" type comments, anything that doesn't add to the conversation. I suspect your quote was trying to be funny. If so, it really falls into that same category of adding nothing at which point you have to ask: who exactly is losing the spirit of HN was/is all about?

Yes. He was obviously joking, and I smiled. It was funny.

The same simply can't be said for proggit. Proggit has gone the way most mature forums go: elitist, dismissive, intolerant and reactionary. You saw the same thing on Usenet (eg comp.lang.c) in years gone past (if you're old enough to remember that).

There is a certain personality type that seems to float to the top of such dank, stagnant pools of water. I call such people toxic. You see it on forums, in open source projects and the workplace. Such people seem to be attracted to the ability to exercise power without actually contributing anything (although they're convinced they are contributing). Once a certain number of such people are entrenched it's very difficult for any such organization to ever turn itself around rather than fade into irrelevancy so much effort needs to be spent simply keeping such people away from the controls.

Much of Zed's famous anti-Rails rant revolved around such people (a classic example being someone writing security code assuming there were 30 days in every month).

HN is not that way at all and any stay on Proggit should tell you how far off HN is from that in a very short time.

In one post about shebang (#) being used in Facebook and Twitter, the discussion was about crawling Ajax pages. I asked a question on good practices to make a Ajax site crawler friendly. It got downvotes! I was truly puzzled. The question was purely technical, non-controversial, within the topic, and extending the discussion. Yet, there were people (long timers with downvote power) trying to discourage it. They were acting exactly like toxic as you described.

In another post about Joel's statement of SO being more scalable than Digg, people were giving this and that explanation but ignoring the obvious elephant in the room - .Net was faster PHP. I made that statement and got downvoted to oblivion. Of course people here hate Microsoft, are into dynamic-type languages, and prefer open-source but a technical fact is still a fact. This just shows how narrow-minded people here are who can't tolerate diverge approaches to problems.

Oh well, if they want it to be a toxic playground, they get it.

At the time I'm reading it, your second comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799442) is neutral at 1 point. That is not a symptom of people acting "toxic" and trying to "discourage" you. It was a good question, but nobody seemed to know much about it, so it just sort of sat there.

Your first comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1787833) is at -3 points. Unfortunately, as it's five days old, I can no longer put it at -4. You stepped into an admittedly poor discussion about specific reasons why SO might need less servers than Digg, and posted a flamebaity generalization with absolutely no support; you didn't suggest a reason that .NET might be faster than LAMP, nor any evidence that it might be faster, or what it might be faster at. You just dropped a one-line load of an opinion and left. I absolutely am on board with being maximally toxic and discouraging toward the comment you made there.

For the first comment, it's pretty well-known that C#/VB.Net is way faster than PHP/Python/Ruby in raw performance. Benchmarks after benchmarks have shown that fact. Often it's just a matter of bringing it up as a reference in discussion. I don't want to prepare a benchmark for every statement I made.

I've seen plenty of opinionated single liners got plenty of upvotes, admittedly those stated the popular views, so single liner is not a good reason for downvote. But nevertheless I'm not into a popular contest. If HN can't tolerate diverge view/opinion, that's its loss.

I posted an article a couple of weeks ago. The point of the article was that get-rich-quick-by-blogging stories are a dime a dozen, when the formula is really very simple: write for yourself, make friends, and keep doing it.

Because it was so simple, I thought it was cute to do a 1 or 2 paragraph format. Here it is

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/10/how-to-make-a...

Of course, it only got one vote. (Thanks mom!) But the weird thing was that somebody from HN came by my site and took the time to add a snide comment along the lines of "Why did you post this on HN?"

To which I (logically enough) replied: then don't vote it up.

Seems to me we are getting a fair share of drive-by trolls, downvoters, and flaggers. Ten guys hate you that are on HN all the time? They can zap your article no matter what it is.

Why folks from here would visit blog submission sites and berate the blog authors is beyond me.

That's not reddit, but that's definitely a change in the atmosphere.

The unpleasant thing is that people expect to be hand-fed their daily dose of intellectual stimulant, and got upset if the dosage is off. I've seen comments like, "Your submission/post/blog are lame. It's very annoying it wastes my time." WTF?! The guy spent lots of time writing a blog and asked for feedback. If it's not up to your level, just move on, no point in bashing the guy on wasting your time just because you don't find it stimulating.

What is more disheartening is the upvotes for those kinds of comments. It's really a turn-off.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1800252

It's one thing to interrogate if a link is valid on here (eg, by downvoting or through the comments), but taking the time to interact with the site itself and backreference HN is pointless, and damaging to the reputation of HN (regardless of if they are an accurate representation of the community or not).

Here's the url: http://www.notanewyorker.com/

One thing I would suggest to the OP: use a more descriptive title. Instead of "Are you a New Yorker?" maybe something like "Show HN: My one-day GAE project for New Yorkers".

Because of that episode, I immediately recognized the purpose and intent of the website, though I'm certain it was far less obvious to those who didn't see it.

Of interest, the criteria they came up with were:

You're not a New Yorker until: - You've stolen a cab from someone who needed it more than you, - You've killed a cockroach with your bare hands - Seen Woody Allen and, - Cried on the subway, oblivious to what anyone else thinks

- A highly skilled professional

- A highly skilled, non-professional

Just because someone has a very well developed skillset, it doesn't necessarily dictate good conduct. Most art / illustration forums suffer from this problem - to generalize, they will have a subset of highly skilled people who ultimately aren't professional in their conduct and reply with some severely inappropriate responses.

It's the same scenario too - when a user submits content that is significantly below the general quality standard of the community (in earnest, being a legitimate effort on their behalf), two responses are generally provided due to the difference in these groups:

- Professionals tend to ignore the content or provide some indicators of which basics to cover

- Non-professionals flame and attack the user due to their level of ability

It's regrettable but the latter often has quite a negative effect. If you can look at someones work and recognise that they are highly skilled, but not understand that they are of poor professional character, you will take on board what they say as being correct or fair.

It's the kind of conduct that stunts a lot of people who aren't thick skinned about their trade.

On a side note: I think that too many people misunderstand the purpose of voting. If you agree, upvote. If you disagree, do nothing. Downvote only if a comment is trollish or completely off-topic. If you think that the commenter doesn't understand the topic, help him overcome his ignorance, don't downvote him.

Amazing. There are downvotes on your comment. This just shows what kind of community this is.

Additionally, due to a generally positive bias (supposing we all generally like YC, HN and have a common positive attitude towards startup culture), the downvotes are more noticable / memorable than things that are frequently upvoted.

Same reason all you can focus on is that chip in your windscreen when realistically its only 2% of the entire window. =)

personally I think, HN needs to put some filters in place to stop newly registered spammers. Even a simple 200 point requirements to submit new posts should be enough to trim the "check out the awesome prices on this nikes!" posts.

Then again, perhaps it would just encourage me to be more active in discussions.

People are weird.

You have fewer people around to upvote you.

*To be fair, the list is quite sporadic. Min = 1.2, Max = 19.61, Avg = 4.909.

The debate forum for ideas like this is at "Feature Request" link at bottom of page.

So it's fairly common for some initial votes/comments to be negative, and occasionally even legitimate articles get auto-killed by a group of grumpy flaggers before sufficient upvotes arrive. But then in time, the sentiment rises as other more good-natured people pass by. (It seems harder to reverse a hair-trigger auto-kill, though -- maybe upvotes are no longer counted and it requires an admin intervention?)

Some of the grumpiest people have the most time on their hands, so can constitute the first unrepresentative wave of downvotes/flags!

I was at the Tokyo hackernews shindig. Everyone was quite supportive of each other and everyone was willing to offer constructive criticism.

Your princess is in the castle but you do have to squash some gombas to get there. It's just an unfortunate reality.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1801814

I didn't see the posts you describe, but, if they did say what you're describing, good riddance at them being removed. Moderators exist for a reason, although its better when they don't have to do anything.

If we want to keep HN purpose-focused, then perhaps we should just stop growing (or perhaps shard/undergo mitosis evenly, rather than dividing along topic lines and creating us/them enmity.)

How?

If helping eachother build cool projects is a tenant of the community, then it should be included in everyone's feed. If it isn't, than we should not have such postings. Having splits of sections splits the community as well.

I posted a self post on Reddit about my startup, and the first comment was "Go F*ck yourself". The second comment, QED.

I ended up deleting the post. Not cool. :(

You just have to pick your communities. It takes a bit of evaluation to see just who is on the other end of a forum.

my account is less than a year old yet I attended Startup School 2006.

passwords get lost, hard drives fail

EDIT: I'm getting downvoted for this but I think I'm bringing up a valid point. "HN is not turning into Reddit" is taken to be true a priori and the guidelines call for us not to question this. This seems to go counter to the general spirit of HN of allowing intelligent discussion and opposing points of view. (However, if a comment merely says "HN is turning into Reddit" it's not valuable; it should go into more detail and contribute something new and useful.)

"and not because it appears incendiary to suggest that the HN community may be changing for the worse."

That'd make for a convincing argument.