> What criteria do you use to determine 'health' in online communities? Level of activity, quality of discourse (that's hard to measure, but like art vs. the p

> What criteria do you use to determine 'health' in online communities? Level of activity, quality of discourse (that's hard to measure, but like art vs. the pronz, "I know it when I see it"), ease of use, and the ability to get and give useful feedback on relevant topics. > How do these differ from those criteria you use to determine ‘health’ in offline communities you are in? Mostly the same. "If you're the smartest person in the room... find a new room" is true in real life as online. Things like culture, language, and hygiene are more of a consideration in person; I don't care what you smell like when you're posting on reddit. > How does HN exemplify or not exemplify 'healthy' behaviors? What behaviors of your own would you acknowledge may or may not contribute to the overall ‘health’ of HN? Active, knowledgeable, and able to refute obviously bad points (though it still has its circlejerks at times) -- I would characterize this as healthy. HN also has a specific focus -- highly technical -- and is free of ads and other unwelcome overt marketing (though I'm 100% sure there is covert marketing happening). It is an organ of YCombinator, so some degree of start-up shilling is expected and tolerated (even welcome, sometimes), but again it is expected and thus easy to avoid or ignore. HN also is able to get rid of or generally marginalize the few, obviously toxic posters. They show up, no doubt, but are fairly hard to find compared to some of the clearly bad-faith subreddits like fatpeoplehate or the like. >How did you get into HN? Who introduced you? What makes you stay? Regular reddit and slashdot user, lots of overlap with those sites. I stay mostly because it is a fairly healthy tech forum; see the reasons above. HN also represents (generally) an older (as in, not 19-year-old wanna be hacker, but like 29-45 year old who has been around) professional crowd, with a very heavy focus on tech. That said, HN also has enough people who aren't in IT to keep it interesting. The level of education and overall work experience is considerably higher than a lot of other forums, as is the "grown-up-in-the-room", peer-to-peer feel of the place. By comparison, some subreddits like r/relationships or r/legaladvice is full of people talking entirely out of their ass, or with no sense of reality or self-awareness (or just straight up trolling).