Have you considered hiring someone full time just to improve Hacker News? You have built an incredibly valuable forum, and there is no other place on the internet like it. But the quality of the comments is definitely degrading over time. I worry that if serious time is not dedicated to fixing the problem Hacker News will go the way of usenet.
How do you pay someone to improve the quality of discussion? There is an open problem for lots of services, and yet everyone on those services is still complaining about declining quality.
HN is undergoing the transition that every community undergoes, from ultra-exclusive and underground to more populist. There's always gnashing of teeth from the entrenched userbase as a site becomes popular. That said, right now HN still has an interesting balance of technical and non-technical content for me, and an amazing group of commenters, I don't see it going anywhere soon.
HN is undergoing the transition that every community undergoes, from ultra-exclusive and underground to more populist. There's always gnashing of teeth from the entrenched userbase as a site becomes popular.
Well yeah, and in my IMHO the teeth gnashers are right. Every community that undergoes this transition turns into a wasteland, at least by my elitist tastes. I'd hate to see Hacker News go the same way.
A full-time programmer could try to design new features to stave off the decline. For instance, maybe up-voting power could be adjusted based on karma, so that the mob has less power to up-vote the nasty comments to the top of every thread. Maybe a better flagging system could be put in place so commenters could be warned when they are breaking the guidelines, but warning a way that does not create a long thread discussing the flagging. There are many ideas, it would take a lot of time to figure out which ones actually worked.
There are sites with full-time moderators that do the job pretty well, actually.
There have often (OFTEN) been times when I've wanted to ask someone if they truly thought their comment contributed to the discussion, and if not, why did they post it? At the very least, ask them to reflect.
I almost never do, because then I'm just cluttering the forum with more posts of my own that aren't contributing to the conversation.
And really, it's not my place to do so, regardless of whether I think it would help or not.
I do try to ask myself that question, and have edited or deleted comments as a result. I'm not perfect about it, but I'm better than I was, and the only reason I started making the attempt was because pg (the owner of the board) has indicated he'd like to see that.
But it would be interesting if there were some sort of feedback mechanism from active moderators that did the same thing, but only to the poster, not in the discussion.
I honestly think if you had respected mods who did that sort of thing you'd see a notable improvement in the quality of this forum.
