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Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

> Hacker News is about the only civil place I'm capable of contributing to a discussion to at this point.

Funnily enough, right around the time I made an acct here (4+ years ago, after ~1 year of lurking), I saw an internal post by a well-known Googler talking about the recent drastic decline of HN comment quality and looking for a replacement. I still get value out of HN comments (clearly), but it's definitely changed substantially in the last few years, and not really for the better. I've resigned myself to every high-quality Internet community without heavy, opinionated moderation being a slow treadmill towards popularity and then mediocrity, or worse. Though this is of course something of a "you're not in traffic, you are traffic" problem.

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You and I are around the same group, but I've long since abandoned participating in these conversations. Honestly I am in these comments because I had hoped this was the conversation being had. The HN community drove me away long ago.

Maybe for the next community you need to figure out where it is in order to be self selected for membership.

I've had several people try to discern the meaning of your comment, but none of us could figure it out. You have words here that together sound like a sentence, but don't make any actual sense.

The implication is that if one were truly too good for HN, then one would already know about "the next HN": that exclusive comment site at which sober mature discussion among intelligent sophisticated people takes place much as it used to long ago on HN. Which is funny not least because the level of discussion here even today seems vastly superior to what one finds elsewhere online. Part of that quality, may be a willingness to welcome those for whom English is a second language.

I have never felt 'too good' for HN at all. That's one of the reasons I loved it in the past- I can pick almost any link and look at almost any comment section to find information that's over my head and the content and conversations were challenging and force me to learn- and I loved that. At a certain point I felt that it turned in to a bunch of mean girls, and I left. I sincerely wanted OP to clarify his comment, because it seemed to be saying something poignant I just couldn't understand it. I see how my phrasing seems insensitive.

Fair enough. I apologize for misunderstanding.

How's this:

Maybe for the next community, instead of making it public - potential users will instead have to find the site by solving a bunch of hidden puzzles. Think secret club.

Jokes aside: a major part of why HN works is that the community here self selects for several traits which ensure healthier communication.

As a forum becomes more mainstream, many things happen to attenuate the signal to noise ratio. (Pg had an excellent essay on the mid brow argument effect, which for many other forums is a problem they wish they had)

Eventually part of the crowd who came first realize it's not as useful anymore and decide to go somewhere else. The question is where.

We've seen eternal September come to almost every place and there's only a few traits which can help protect against it.

From my experience with many forums/modding, demographics are 80% of the issue, the remainder is topic of discussion, goal orientedness in discussion and moderator quality.

So the best solution is to create the forum and never advertise it. Let potential users figure out how to find it and how to get in.

Ah, that's a great clarification. I wasn't trying to be argumentative in my response, I was sincerely trying to determine what you meant. I'm glad you did, because your comment is great. Thanks!

hey thanks. I was half worried it was a terrible comment.

There is always going to be the elitist attitude of newcomers ruining things for the "OG" people. However there is certainly no way HN compares to the rest of the drivel out there. Always going to be a fine line between popularity, and trash.

> However there is certainly no way HN compares to the rest of the drivel out there

Shrug, that just depends on where people choose to set their standards; there are much worse fora and much better ones. As I said, I still clearly find HN comments at least worth reading, but the distinction isn't as binary as you seem to think it is.

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