The problem is simple: cynical, jaded, unemphatic disrespectful people like cool things just like the rest of us. Hacker News is cool. It's full of enriching d

The problem is simple: cynical, jaded, unemphatic disrespectful people like cool things just like the rest of us. Hacker News is cool. It's full of enriching discussion and useful links and insight into the industry. It's a great web page to surf to and it doesn't bother you with adverts or anything like that. Unfortunately, this means it's now attracting those users we'd rather not have to deal with. I don't think there's a solution to this problem, except maybe somehow make the sight less user-friendly and less familiar to users of SlashDot etc., so that those people who don't value maturity get fed up and leave. Hacker News used to stand out as being so much more mature than other sites on the internet... that has definitely started to slip I think. Possibly the endless climate of political contentiousness is also contributing to it (SOPA, healthcare, the 1%, financial crisis etc).