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> "When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressiv

> "When communities grow to a certain size, people no longer expect to interact in the future, and thus are more likely to defect – to be petty, mean, aggressive..." This is one of the most off-putting things about HN in my opinion. It's better than bigger social sharing sites like Reddit in that tired jokes and posts with little thought are usually voted down to the bottom, but posts that poke holes in the original argument are often top comments. A lot of technically-minded people take great pleasure in finding and fixing bugs. The problem is that finding errors in human interaction leads to pedantry, nitpicking, and cherry-picking. This is especially true as the community grows and interactions with all but the most visible people becomes rare. People have less incentive to give others the benefit of the doubt, and more incentive to find the problems and point them out. I'm worried about our once-little community, but I don't know how to prevent the petty fault-finding from resurfacing in such a large and shifting community.

stcredzero 12y ago
Pedantry, nitpicking, and pedantry are a step up from pure fluffiness. The question is how we can go the next step. I find a lot of HN commenters try to put words into one's mouth. They even seem to feel they are being clever, and they are indeed imitating the outward forms of clever commenting. Maybe that's as far as we can expect human society to go.
- saraid216 12y ago
  Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    I used to work in a bicylce shop as a kid. In the workshop over the bench hung a sign that read "if you've got nothing to do, don't do it here". It was rude but quite effective. The next level up (for those that didn't get the hint) was that the guy running the shop would pretend to 'oil the spokes' (as if that was ever needed) causing several people to hastily depart the workshop area because they were being splashed with lube oil. He would pretend to see a lot less well and shake a lot more than he usually did during these episodes. Super nice guy by the way, long since deceased. One problem with internet websites is that it is not clearly separated into work or leisure, which leads to people in leisure mode disrupting other people's work mode. This is not an easy problem to solve and I'm sure that this is not a binary issue either, but some form of continuum.
    - saraid216 12y ago
      > This is not an easy problem to solve and I'm sure that this is not a binary issue either, but some form of continuum. It's not even a continuum; it depends heavily on cultural notions of how life is divided, or should be divided. The home/work/third place trichotomy isn't universal in the first place, and people on the internet have exhibited plenty of evidence that they consider it every combination of the three.
    - vilhelm_s 12y ago
      How does that apply here though --- surely everyone browsing HN is doing it for leisure?
      - saraid216 12y ago
        My browsing of HN is leisure about 70% of the time. At other times, I do various kinds of work (in that I am making a concerted effort to create value, rather than intending to enjoy myself) and very occasionally do "home" type things (senses of belonging, kinship, shared struggle, etc.).
        vilhelm_s 12y ago
        By creating value, do you mean that the comments you write are themselves valuable, or do you mean things like driving traffic to/recruiting for your company?
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        Surely not.
      - instakill 12y ago
        People that post Show HN links are not here for leisure. They want feedback, new users, critique etc. There are many more examples I'm sure.
  - Yunk 12y ago
    > Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure. There is a purpose besides leisure, selling to the leisure group or building technologies to improve the internet's effectiveness for selling to the leisure group? Looking at pictures of cats, pornography and buying trinkets are all clearly leisure activities.. but commenting on vaporous articles about living underwater is something I expect to get academic credit for according to the social norms established by scholastic reports.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  There is no next step. HN occassionally has some good commentary but ultimately it's hampered by the fundamental design of the place. It's not a place where extended, drawn out conversation can occur over a long period of time. A popular conversation topic results in unwieldy threads that hamper continuation of topics. And because of the way topics decay it's rare for a subject to be discussed outside of a 24hr or 48hr window, give or take. HN compares unfavorably to an older medium: usenet, where read messages wouldn't clutter up threads and where it was easy to continue discussions for indefinite periods (even months) and to return to previous topics or split off side discussions. As long as HN stays the way it is it'll always be hampered by limitations which ultimately cap the quality of discussion.
  - rando289 12y ago
    So much agree. Another big design flaw hampering good conversation: I'd like to read replies to your comment, but HN funnels me to reading only 1 reply, and then onto 1 reply for that comment, each one hijacking the conversation. And we can't collapse threads which makes it even worse.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues
    - jonahx 12y ago
      This doesn't address the larger community issue, but if you use chrome check out: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/Hacker%20News%20Collapse https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/Hacker%20News%20Co... I use the first one and it makes HN much more readable.
    - asgard1024 12y ago
      The karma system (and the ratio) also discourages conversation. You cannot expect too many upvotes in a subthread.
  - rdl 12y ago
NaNaN 12y ago
> A lot of technically-minded people ... Yes. More and more people know what internet and IT are now, and can not live without them. But they haven't learn well enough about how to interact with others and express their feelings since most of the time they are talking with text anonymously (with regard to privacy). Plain text is usually not enough for them to guess the exact meanings and feelings. So I think people should be polite first. I have surfed on the internet for more than fifteen years, but I still don't know the best way to avoid conflicts. Everyone, not only the techically-minded people, can become crazy just for a little misunderstanding. Maybe we have eaten too much fast-food.
Buttons840 12y ago
Free idea: Build a social site that, even when it has many many users, breaks people into smaller groups in such a way that it remains enjoyable to all. You could analyze user behaviors and interests to do this. I've considered doing this myself.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- ColinDabritz 12y ago
  I've see this called the 'Warrens' model. Reddit does this with Sub-reddits. Keep the niche small group feel available, while aggregating useful stuff upwards.
  - zedadex 12y ago
    Any more context? I just searched that term and it seems to have come up blank.
    - ColinDabritz 12y ago
      Unfortunately I'm unable to find the reference. It's probably a different word, but the idea is the similar, and I specifically recall it referencing Reddit and other communities with a similar "small group" branching model. Warrens came to mind because of rabbit warrens, but that's probably not quite it.
      - jcr 12y ago
        This is most likely the reference you were looking for: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
- saraid216 12y ago
  Any idea how to solve the echo chamber/filter bubble problem?
mahranch 12y ago
"It's better than bigger social sharing sites like Reddit" I think this sentence is wholly flawed. Reddit is divided into subreddits, each subreddit has their own unique community and moderators. /r/askscience for example, is one of the best science help communities on the entire internet. Their level of discourse far surpasses hackernews by any objective metric. There are plenty of other subreddits with similar quality, /r/askhistorians comes to mind. HN is the equivalent of a single subreddit and should be compared as such.
- saym 12y ago
  I agree, what's your opinion of this forum in that light? How would you rate the moderators of content here? To move a level up the ladder, What do you (or any other commenter who feels like responding) look to get out of this community?
  - restless 12y ago
    Finding good links, hearing news and occasional commenting if i think I can add something valuable to a thread.
- argonaut 12y ago
  That isn't a good comparison because of the limiting nature (specific format) of those subreddits. For example, the Ask HN and Show HN threads tend to be much higher quality than HN in general.
- zimbatm 12y ago
  Your post is a good example of what the parent was talking about. Everyone has their opinion. Instead of contributing new ideas and venues of explorations your post is "debugging" the parent post on a specific thing while missing the meat of the conversation. It doesn't matter if his analogy is flawed because the main point was about HN being predominantly critical.
gdewilde 12y ago
It has to be the same people contributing content as the ones doing the fault finding. If those 2 jobs are done by different people the distribution of checks becomes a mess.
twelve40 12y ago
One idea: introduce some cost for entry. Some popular sites have switched to invite-only write privileges, including comments (yes, there is precedent with trendy tech sites). Similar but less elitist: you have to do something to post or comment, like show your profile on other sites. Not perfect, but from my experience a lot of potential troublemakers chill out when faced even with simple hurdles.
- NaNaN 12y ago
  Both not good. I've another idea: turn some HN submits into article-friendly places, and only thoughtful articles are welcome from the replies. We can have a small homepage on HN to attach our small articles about interesting news. Maybe the submitter can choose which mode to use. It is like Reddit but still has difference.
Angostura 12y ago
Actually, I have to say,I find that quite useful. If I know that the comments are likely to contain the most the most robust critique available, the quality of that critique gives me a shortcut to assessing the article's strength.
archagon 12y ago
I think the problem is the threaded/upvote system. When higher voted comments get boosted to the top, then — how should I put this? — there are certain categories of comments that will inevitably appear simply based on past karma. Take Reddit, for example. If somebody mentions something "random", SOMEBODY will post that "penguin of doom" story. Even if the first 20 people decide to refrain, it's gonna happen eventually on account of the upvotes that people know will be given. I don't participate in that stuff, but whenever I see a gap like that, it's very tempting just to "get it over with" and reap some upvotes. Similarly, even if 20 people on HN decide to not post a negative hole-poking-in-argument comment, that vacuum will have to eventually be filled by someone. It's like some sort of perverse, community-driven Markov chain. In my experience, there's less of this on MetaFilter, where it's simply a flat discussion.

stcredzero 12y ago

Pedantry, nitpicking, and pedantry are a step up from pure fluffiness. The question is how we can go the next step. I find a lot of HN commenters try to put words into one's mouth. They even seem to feel they are being clever, and they are indeed imitating the outward forms of clever commenting. Maybe that's as far as we can expect human society to go.

saraid216 12y ago
Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I used to work in a bicylce shop as a kid. In the workshop over the bench hung a sign that read "if you've got nothing to do, don't do it here". It was rude but quite effective. The next level up (for those that didn't get the hint) was that the guy running the shop would pretend to 'oil the spokes' (as if that was ever needed) causing several people to hastily depart the workshop area because they were being splashed with lube oil. He would pretend to see a lot less well and shake a lot more than he usually did during these episodes. Super nice guy by the way, long since deceased. One problem with internet websites is that it is not clearly separated into work or leisure, which leads to people in leisure mode disrupting other people's work mode. This is not an easy problem to solve and I'm sure that this is not a binary issue either, but some form of continuum.
  - saraid216 12y ago
    > This is not an easy problem to solve and I'm sure that this is not a binary issue either, but some form of continuum. It's not even a continuum; it depends heavily on cultural notions of how life is divided, or should be divided. The home/work/third place trichotomy isn't universal in the first place, and people on the internet have exhibited plenty of evidence that they consider it every combination of the three.
  - vilhelm_s 12y ago
    How does that apply here though --- surely everyone browsing HN is doing it for leisure?
    - saraid216 12y ago
      My browsing of HN is leisure about 70% of the time. At other times, I do various kinds of work (in that I am making a concerted effort to create value, rather than intending to enjoy myself) and very occasionally do "home" type things (senses of belonging, kinship, shared struggle, etc.).
      - vilhelm_s 12y ago
        By creating value, do you mean that the comments you write are themselves valuable, or do you mean things like driving traffic to/recruiting for your company?
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      Surely not.
    - instakill 12y ago
      People that post Show HN links are not here for leisure. They want feedback, new users, critique etc. There are many more examples I'm sure.
- Yunk 12y ago
  > Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure. There is a purpose besides leisure, selling to the leisure group or building technologies to improve the internet's effectiveness for selling to the leisure group? Looking at pictures of cats, pornography and buying trinkets are all clearly leisure activities.. but commenting on vaporous articles about living underwater is something I expect to get academic credit for according to the social norms established by scholastic reports.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
There is no next step. HN occassionally has some good commentary but ultimately it's hampered by the fundamental design of the place. It's not a place where extended, drawn out conversation can occur over a long period of time. A popular conversation topic results in unwieldy threads that hamper continuation of topics. And because of the way topics decay it's rare for a subject to be discussed outside of a 24hr or 48hr window, give or take. HN compares unfavorably to an older medium: usenet, where read messages wouldn't clutter up threads and where it was easy to continue discussions for indefinite periods (even months) and to return to previous topics or split off side discussions. As long as HN stays the way it is it'll always be hampered by limitations which ultimately cap the quality of discussion.
- rando289 12y ago
  So much agree. Another big design flaw hampering good conversation: I'd like to read replies to your comment, but HN funnels me to reading only 1 reply, and then onto 1 reply for that comment, each one hijacking the conversation. And we can't collapse threads which makes it even worse.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues
  - jonahx 12y ago
    This doesn't address the larger community issue, but if you use chrome check out: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/Hacker%20News%20Collapse https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/Hacker%20News%20Co... I use the first one and it makes HN much more readable.
  - asgard1024 12y ago
    The karma system (and the ratio) also discourages conversation. You cannot expect too many upvotes in a subthread.
- rdl 12y ago

NaNaN 12y ago

> A lot of technically-minded people ... Yes. More and more people know what internet and IT are now, and can not live without them. But they haven't learn well enough about how to interact with others and express their feelings since most of the time they are talking with text anonymously (with regard to privacy). Plain text is usually not enough for them to guess the exact meanings and feelings. So I think people should be polite first. I have surfed on the internet for more than fifteen years, but I still don't know the best way to avoid conflicts. Everyone, not only the techically-minded people, can become crazy just for a little misunderstanding. Maybe we have eaten too much fast-food.

Buttons840 12y ago

Free idea: Build a social site that, even when it has many many users, breaks people into smaller groups in such a way that it remains enjoyable to all. You could analyze user behaviors and interests to do this. I've considered doing this myself.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ColinDabritz 12y ago
I've see this called the 'Warrens' model. Reddit does this with Sub-reddits. Keep the niche small group feel available, while aggregating useful stuff upwards.
- zedadex 12y ago
  Any more context? I just searched that term and it seems to have come up blank.
  - ColinDabritz 12y ago
    Unfortunately I'm unable to find the reference. It's probably a different word, but the idea is the similar, and I specifically recall it referencing Reddit and other communities with a similar "small group" branching model. Warrens came to mind because of rabbit warrens, but that's probably not quite it.
    - jcr 12y ago
      This is most likely the reference you were looking for: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/ http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...
saraid216 12y ago
Any idea how to solve the echo chamber/filter bubble problem?

mahranch 12y ago

"It's better than bigger social sharing sites like Reddit" I think this sentence is wholly flawed. Reddit is divided into subreddits, each subreddit has their own unique community and moderators. /r/askscience for example, is one of the best science help communities on the entire internet. Their level of discourse far surpasses hackernews by any objective metric. There are plenty of other subreddits with similar quality, /r/askhistorians comes to mind. HN is the equivalent of a single subreddit and should be compared as such.

saym 12y ago
I agree, what's your opinion of this forum in that light? How would you rate the moderators of content here? To move a level up the ladder, What do you (or any other commenter who feels like responding) look to get out of this community?
- restless 12y ago
  Finding good links, hearing news and occasional commenting if i think I can add something valuable to a thread.
argonaut 12y ago
That isn't a good comparison because of the limiting nature (specific format) of those subreddits. For example, the Ask HN and Show HN threads tend to be much higher quality than HN in general.
zimbatm 12y ago
Your post is a good example of what the parent was talking about. Everyone has their opinion. Instead of contributing new ideas and venues of explorations your post is "debugging" the parent post on a specific thing while missing the meat of the conversation. It doesn't matter if his analogy is flawed because the main point was about HN being predominantly critical.

gdewilde 12y ago

It has to be the same people contributing content as the ones doing the fault finding. If those 2 jobs are done by different people the distribution of checks becomes a mess.

twelve40 12y ago

One idea: introduce some cost for entry. Some popular sites have switched to invite-only write privileges, including comments (yes, there is precedent with trendy tech sites). Similar but less elitist: you have to do something to post or comment, like show your profile on other sites. Not perfect, but from my experience a lot of potential troublemakers chill out when faced even with simple hurdles.

NaNaN 12y ago
Both not good. I've another idea: turn some HN submits into article-friendly places, and only thoughtful articles are welcome from the replies. We can have a small homepage on HN to attach our small articles about interesting news. Maybe the submitter can choose which mode to use. It is like Reddit but still has difference.

Angostura 12y ago

Actually, I have to say,I find that quite useful. If I know that the comments are likely to contain the most the most robust critique available, the quality of that critique gives me a shortcut to assessing the article's strength.

archagon 12y ago

I think the problem is the threaded/upvote system. When higher voted comments get boosted to the top, then — how should I put this? — there are certain categories of comments that will inevitably appear simply based on past karma. Take Reddit, for example. If somebody mentions something "random", SOMEBODY will post that "penguin of doom" story. Even if the first 20 people decide to refrain, it's gonna happen eventually on account of the upvotes that people know will be given. I don't participate in that stuff, but whenever I see a gap like that, it's very tempting just to "get it over with" and reap some upvotes. Similarly, even if 20 people on HN decide to not post a negative hole-poking-in-argument comment, that vacuum will have to eventually be filled by someone. It's like some sort of perverse, community-driven Markov chain. In my experience, there's less of this on MetaFilter, where it's simply a flat discussion.