Hacker News Reader

Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered how long it would take for HN to succumb to an eternal September where the "rest of the world" finally joins. Whatever HN is doing to keep discussions as high-quality as they are is pretty incredible. Yes, HN has changed over the years, but the fundamental aspect of conversation quality hasn't changed significantly.

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The text only format is enough to keep 90% of people away.

Also the karma limits. I have almost 150 comment karma and still can't downvote. I'm not sure when downvoting/report, etc. come into play, but I'm fine even if it's much higher -- it seems to be working well.

>After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment.

>If a user has 31 Karma, they can flag submissions.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

That already happened c. 2013 when signal declined as early adopters and the cool kids from YC batches were swamped and dissuaded by randos. Nowadays, there are so many on HN who aren't part of the startup, academia, or STEM scene that there isn't nearly as much signal as there was. I think the only solution for a high-signal news aggregator + comments is invite-only with a small fee.

(I constantly throw away accounts whenever they reach 1-3k karma. It doesn't mean anything and it brings out the true nature of people when they believe they have the upper hand.)

Not sure whether or not the small fee would do anything other than make it more elitist, and money is not necessarily a predictor of community member quality. The only thing a fee might do is dissuade mass spam bots, but HN doesn't seem to have a spam bot problem. Not that I have a better answer though.

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