34 ms·

One should not confuse the rate of change with the question of whether or not such change is actually occurring. In other words, I think HN needs more than cas

One should not confuse the rate of change with the question of whether or not such change is actually occurring. In other words, I think HN needs more than casual self policing to buck the trend, even if it doesn't really seem too bad at the moment.

unalone 18y ago
It may seem casual, but remember that this is a benevolent dictatorship: nobody has any illusions about this being anything other than pg's project, and that's a really good thing for the future. It means that there's one unifying vision for this site, and it's one that's powerful enough to keep people here, and it's a good enough one to make it worth being in. If something goes bad, he has control over fixing it.
- run4yourlives 18y ago
  Agreed, but it's hard to reverse a trend after the fact. The key is that he react to negative forces before they occur, which involves a bit of magic.
  - unalone 18y ago
    When he holds the keys to the user accounts and the stories, he can react pretty quickly. He's shut off accounts temporarily (once to avoid an edit war over a title), and during the Obama election, a lot of stories ended up dead very quickly. That's what kept the site contained.
    - run4yourlives 18y ago
      Again though, this is not something unique to HN. Digg is notorious for banning accounts.
      - unalone 18y ago
        Not for the same reasons - Digg does it for people gaming the system. Here, that kind of thing is exceedingly rare, and HN doesn't ban most of the accounts, it just auto-kills their submissions. HN takes a unique approach to why accounts are banned. If you troll or get into flamefests, pg very often takes time to tell you you're doing poorly (that happened to me last summer). If you keep doing after that, then you get disabled - I think. It's a system that's very hands-on and it's kept this place scaling really nicely.

34 ms·

One should not confuse the rate of change with the question of whether or not such change is actually occurring. In other words, I think HN needs more than cas

by run4yourlives 18y ago

unalone 18y ago
It may seem casual, but remember that this is a benevolent dictatorship: nobody has any illusions about this being anything other than pg's project, and that's a really good thing for the future. It means that there's one unifying vision for this site, and it's one that's powerful enough to keep people here, and it's a good enough one to make it worth being in. If something goes bad, he has control over fixing it.
- run4yourlives 18y ago
  Agreed, but it's hard to reverse a trend after the fact. The key is that he react to negative forces before they occur, which involves a bit of magic.
  - unalone 18y ago
    When he holds the keys to the user accounts and the stories, he can react pretty quickly. He's shut off accounts temporarily (once to avoid an edit war over a title), and during the Obama election, a lot of stories ended up dead very quickly. That's what kept the site contained.
    - run4yourlives 18y ago
      Again though, this is not something unique to HN. Digg is notorious for banning accounts.
      - unalone 18y ago
        Not for the same reasons - Digg does it for people gaming the system. Here, that kind of thing is exceedingly rare, and HN doesn't ban most of the accounts, it just auto-kills their submissions. HN takes a unique approach to why accounts are banned. If you troll or get into flamefests, pg very often takes time to tell you you're doing poorly (that happened to me last summer). If you keep doing after that, then you get disabled - I think. It's a system that's very hands-on and it's kept this place scaling really nicely.