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-1 I would rather not. Sometimes arguments or inane remarks are an annoyance, but I would not want a good post because someone hit an arbitrary limit.

by russell 18y ago

lionhearted 18y ago
I'm upvoting you and offering this scenario for thought: At some point, there's 10x as many users here as now. How important is signal:noise? I really enjoy the points I learn here, but after being present on the site for a touch less than half a year (lurking before starting an account), I've seen how the site growing is affecting the quality and it looks dangerously like something that happened slowly somewhere else I used to enjoy greatly. I think the end result is that you will miss good comments, because they're never made if the noise gets too loud. That someplace else I used to greatly enjoy: Compare "Facing Losses, German Billionaire Takes Own Life" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422284 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422284 to "German mogul kills self over financial meltdown" http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/7nrxi/german_mogul_kills_self_over_financial_meltdown/ http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/7nrxi/german_mogul... I picked that quickly as the first thread I saw on both Reddit and HN, but the comments on that Reddit thread are actually many times better than average Reddit comments, perhaps because of the serious subject matter. And - Old Reddit was close to as good as current Hacker News. Really. If you weren't there back then, it seems strange to imagine such a great place becoming what it did, but that's the reality. I don't want it to happen here, or we'll lose good comments - not to arbitrary thresholds, but to good posters leaving. Really, how many times do people write more than five excellent comments per day? There's some cases of two people having intelligent discussion, or an author replying to questions in a thread. Not sure how we'd address those cases. But I'm theorizing if there was a limit, people would adjust to stop making wisecracks, argue less, and make less "fluff" posts instead of not making inspired points.

-1 I would rather not. Sometimes arguments or inane remarks are an annoyance, but I would not want a good post because someone hit an arbitrary limit.

by russell 18y ago

-1 I would rather not. Sometimes arguments or inane remarks are an annoyance, but I would not want a good post because someone hit an arbitrary limit.

lionhearted 18y ago

I'm upvoting you and offering this scenario for thought: At some point, there's 10x as many users here as now. How important is signal:noise? I really enjoy the points I learn here, but after being present on the site for a touch less than half a year (lurking before starting an account), I've seen how the site growing is affecting the quality and it looks dangerously like something that happened slowly somewhere else I used to enjoy greatly. I think the end result is that you will miss good comments, because they're never made if the noise gets too loud. That someplace else I used to greatly enjoy: Compare "Facing Losses, German Billionaire Takes Own Life" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422284 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422284 to "German mogul kills self over financial meltdown" http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/7nrxi/german_mogul_kills_self_over_financial_meltdown/ http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/7nrxi/german_mogul... I picked that quickly as the first thread I saw on both Reddit and HN, but the comments on that Reddit thread are actually many times better than average Reddit comments, perhaps because of the serious subject matter. And - Old Reddit was close to as good as current Hacker News. Really. If you weren't there back then, it seems strange to imagine such a great place becoming what it did, but that's the reality. I don't want it to happen here, or we'll lose good comments - not to arbitrary thresholds, but to good posters leaving. Really, how many times do people write more than five excellent comments per day? There's some cases of two people having intelligent discussion, or an author replying to questions in a thread. Not sure how we'd address those cases. But I'm theorizing if there was a limit, people would adjust to stop making wisecracks, argue less, and make less "fluff" posts instead of not making inspired points.