I'm sorry but this just doesn't ring true to me. HN is not a uniquely civilized forum, all same rules apply (are you really telling me people aren't trying to look smart around here?), the only difference is that PG founded it based on a set of principles carefully considered to combat the slashdot / digg / reddit culture as the site grew and seeded it with his fan base who naturally appreciate good conversation by definition given PGs essay style.
The problems facing HN today are not due to a few bad apples, to the contrary I think it's pretty clearly a function of size and there may be nothing to do about that short of pulling a Metafilter and charging for new accounts (something which brings its own form of elitism, but may be better than the alternatives).
HN has been often been likened to a mob, but that's not a good analogy either, because I believe 95% of HN is always in full-on critical thinking mode which is the opposite of mob mentality. It just feels like a mob because of the number of criticisms that you can be pelted with based purely on volume, each individual post tends not to be all that harsh, but the wall of text is overwhelming.
I tend to believe the biggest true problem of Hacker News is the nested comments.
Too easy to lose track, too hard to mantain a proper, nice conversation.
It's an amazing community, and we could be exchanging a lot of knowledge and experience, but usually we're just feeling hopelessly lost looking at the 70-something comments, most of them nested in all kinds of crazy levels.
I don't think collapsing comments is the perfect solution, but is better than nothing. I don't have an answer, I don't believe anyone has it ready. If anyone knew how to fix the way we talk to people over the internet, that person would be rich by now.
I agree. I'm often struck by how threads on HN, Reddit and Google+ about some topic go together and pick up on where past threads left off, or duplicate them unnecessarily. (brings to mind that David Byrne line "Say it once, why say it again?")
However, i wish to register the fact that i chuckled on seeing that the response to a comment arguing that shooting down someone's argument is not the HN way was a comment shooting it down!
The problems facing HN today are not due to a few bad apples, to the contrary I think it's pretty clearly a function of size and there may be nothing to do about that short of pulling a Metafilter and charging for new accounts (something which brings its own form of elitism, but may be better than the alternatives).
HN has been often been likened to a mob, but that's not a good analogy either, because I believe 95% of HN is always in full-on critical thinking mode which is the opposite of mob mentality. It just feels like a mob because of the number of criticisms that you can be pelted with based purely on volume, each individual post tends not to be all that harsh, but the wall of text is overwhelming.