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I can relate to this through personal experience (in a galaxy long ago and far away). Early on in HN's life, emphasis was placed (in early comments) on removin

I can relate to this through personal experience (in a galaxy long ago and far away). Early on in HN's life, emphasis was placed (in early comments) on removing (well, reducing) the emotional aspects and focusing on the information. At the time, it seemed the majority of the HN population embraced and welcomed this attitude. (And what emotion did manifest, was more welcome for its genuineness and respectfulness. For example, people really did celebrate each other's launches -- often in a rather informed and informing fashion.) Emotion is a principal item that concerns me about the original post that started this thread. There's too much of it. I don't have a solution to HN's current situation, either. But getting amp-ed up about it won't, I think, help. Some time ago (after forgetting, for a while), I switched on show dead. The newest/ page probably, on average, had (well) under 25% dead items. Since then, the number of dead items on newest/ has grown to often be well over 50% of the page (over 75%, not infrequently). I agree with almost all of those post kills. It's utter crap: Irrelevant, promotional, having nothing to do with the real ("traditional", whatever) HN community. And I see that as indicative of HN's overall situation. It's no longer a niche market. The world has found it, and unless the door is closed (not that I have a means to suggest of making that a solution), they will come in and picnic and litter and trod the grass until there is nothing but a mostly bare field, where one can hardly find the remaining grass for all the people standing in the way. HN started as a self-selecting group. And I suppose it will re-incarnate somewhere, in some fashion, through a similar course of events. As they say about X, the first rule of X is that you don't talk about X. (But someone, hey, email me when you know what X is.) I don't mean to sound arrogant, nor do I think I'm a particularly valuable member of the HN community, myself. But the signal to noise level has started to drop below the threshold that keeps me interested. And I notice a lot of the older, and in my experience more insightful user ID's, appear only infrequently now if at all. (And then, it can be more work than I can muster the will for, to find them -- or the more interesting newer user ID's -- amidst all the rest.) Community versus publicity. Maybe there is a fundamental choice, there. Or the need for at least two tiers -- two buses of connection and traffic.

Mz 15y ago
I really enjoy figuring out the social dynamic stuff (which often comes across as "gossipy" and gets me in lots of hot water) and I'm an excessively emotive person and just want to give the world a hug and buy the world a coke. I've worked really hard at learning to tone that crap down. I have also learned (the hard way) that getting two people like me together in a public forum is just a train wreck waiting with baited breathe to happen. I go out of my way to minimize the whole "love explosion" insanity that can blow up in your face when you get two idiots like me together in public. In other words, I agree with your concern about emotionalism and will add my own observation that even when it's "positive" stuff, excessive public emotionalism tends to turn problematic. The human brain can follow the complex social interactions of roughly 150 people in a community setting. On the internet, where roughly 20% of members tend to be "active" members, this means that forums above about 700 members start having issues with the sense of community dying and so on. I suspect that the solution for this is to do what many older IRL cultures have done and introduce more social formality -- in other words, consciously and formally introduce practices which explicitly show respect for people in situations where you don't know them all that well and never will. HN is basically the population size of a small city. Given that the degree of interaction with others is higher in a forum than it would be for a similar population size grouping IRL, I think it is the social equivalent of a city much larger than the numbers here seem to suggest to the minds of most people. By that I mean I think of it as being more like New York city rather than a city of 80K or 100k size. I sometimes end postings with "peace" as my closure. I have a friend who says that sounds passive-aggressive and wants me to stop that. It's something I began doing on smaller lists to reduce ugliness since I tend to be really controversial. In that setting, it did have at least some success in terms of getting people to be less reactive and hostile over disagreeing with my often unconventional views. I do think it's not having quite the same degree of success here. If I can come up with something better, I will happily move on. For now, it's the best I've got. I don't have any ready-made answers for these issues. American English dominates the internet and lacks some of the formal 'respectful' language options found in other languages like Japanese. I don't speak Japanese, but my understanding is that it has a rich variety of ways to say "you" or "me" which express subtleties of formality and the character of the social relationship for which English has no equivalent. I suspect that these types of problems in online forums are compounded by the fact that the internet is dominated by English and it's mostly American English to boot. So the linguistic means to show cultural formality simply aren't there.

Mz 15y ago

I really enjoy figuring out the social dynamic stuff (which often comes across as "gossipy" and gets me in lots of hot water) and I'm an excessively emotive person and just want to give the world a hug and buy the world a coke. I've worked really hard at learning to tone that crap down. I have also learned (the hard way) that getting two people like me together in a public forum is just a train wreck waiting with baited breathe to happen. I go out of my way to minimize the whole "love explosion" insanity that can blow up in your face when you get two idiots like me together in public. In other words, I agree with your concern about emotionalism and will add my own observation that even when it's "positive" stuff, excessive public emotionalism tends to turn problematic. The human brain can follow the complex social interactions of roughly 150 people in a community setting. On the internet, where roughly 20% of members tend to be "active" members, this means that forums above about 700 members start having issues with the sense of community dying and so on. I suspect that the solution for this is to do what many older IRL cultures have done and introduce more social formality -- in other words, consciously and formally introduce practices which explicitly show respect for people in situations where you don't know them all that well and never will. HN is basically the population size of a small city. Given that the degree of interaction with others is higher in a forum than it would be for a similar population size grouping IRL, I think it is the social equivalent of a city much larger than the numbers here seem to suggest to the minds of most people. By that I mean I think of it as being more like New York city rather than a city of 80K or 100k size. I sometimes end postings with "peace" as my closure. I have a friend who says that sounds passive-aggressive and wants me to stop that. It's something I began doing on smaller lists to reduce ugliness since I tend to be really controversial. In that setting, it did have at least some success in terms of getting people to be less reactive and hostile over disagreeing with my often unconventional views. I do think it's not having quite the same degree of success here. If I can come up with something better, I will happily move on. For now, it's the best I've got. I don't have any ready-made answers for these issues. American English dominates the internet and lacks some of the formal 'respectful' language options found in other languages like Japanese. I don't speak Japanese, but my understanding is that it has a rich variety of ways to say "you" or "me" which express subtleties of formality and the character of the social relationship for which English has no equivalent. I suspect that these types of problems in online forums are compounded by the fact that the internet is dominated by English and it's mostly American English to boot. So the linguistic means to show cultural formality simply aren't there.