I joined later than you, and when I did it was incredible. It stayed so until the middle of October, as the election picked up steam. I actually think that it's

I joined later than you, and when I did it was incredible. It stayed so until the middle of October, as the election picked up steam. I actually think that it's begun to recover in terms of the stories that hit the front; the comments are getting worse, and the hivemind is acting up (I disagree with you, but I voted you up because you made a comment that invited discussion), and I think that's the big problem on HN right now. I think that as far as the system goes, HN works better than both Digg and Reddit. Digg was killed by its emphasis on the "Digg" button, by its claim to be a bookmarking site early on, and by its poor comment system. (That, and the formula for displaying all posts that reached a certain level of popularity and only those posts.) Reddit's system was far more flexible, but its community got far too one-sided, to a pretty awful degree. Hacker News discourages that stuff in part by forcing karma gaps before you have access to features. I think that if anything, the karma requirements should be increased again. Require higher karma for downvoting comments and upvoting submissions, require some karma for submitting stories. That way, the people who have the most control over the system are the longer-time users, who have contributed more and who have much less of an impulsive reaction towards things. That's the most important thing to keep in mind: impulse kills civilized community. I think HN can be saved, but only time can tell. I think that it will have to be tweaked to balance things out.