If you haven't had moments when you thought "Never again" about HN, then you haven't been here long enough. If you haven't taken any extended breaks (weeks/mont

If you haven't had moments when you thought "Never again" about HN, then you haven't been here long enough. If you haven't taken any extended breaks (weeks/months) from interacting on HN or even visiting HN, then you haven't been here long enough. Maybe edw519 is taking a well deserved break? Then again, maybe he has left for good? Of course, maybe he got tired of the endless argument that is the current state of HN? But also, there may be some other reason? HN has changed. In fact, HN has been constantly changing since its inception as "Startup News" six years ago. You might consider the changes to be "good," or you might consider the changes to be "bad," but either way, the rate change is fairly consistent. pg (and RTM, and TLB, and JL, and ...) has found technical countermeasures for many of the common ailments of discussion systems. Sadly, a lot of the advancements are not public, but if you pay attention and have a lot of free time to invest in studying, you might see some of them at work here on HN. The trouble is, no matter how bright these people are, they can't mitigate all of worst parts of human nature, and particularly, they haven't managed to compensate for the human propensity to disagree [1]. Though it sure seems as if most of the newer HN members haven't read Paul's "disagree" essay (linked below), Paul was still prescient enough to realize HN could (d)evolve into an "argument site," rather than a "contribution site," and the result of the rise as an argument based site would be driving away the contributors. Whether we've quietly lost another great contributor with edw519 is yet to be seen, but if he is gone, he'll be missed by me and most likely many others. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html