Hacker News Reader

"(I understand it's better outside of NYC, but since NYC is the largest city in the US, that doesn't really matter.)"

I always think it's funny that the most cosmopolitan cities can breed the most parochial attitudes.

Eh, I sorta agree. But applying some basic math to this page[1], we find that 4% of American households that rent, are renting an NYC apartment. That's a pretty sizable chunk.

[1] http://www.nmhc.org/Content.cfm?ItemNumber=55508

Maybe I worded it badly -- there's no attitude, I'm just saying that if a site has something broken for its largest domestic group of customers, but it works for everyone else, it doesn't matter -- it's broken period, and not an edge case.

If the largest group is less than 3% of the total then it could very well be an edge case.

I've always thought of CL as a community/local site, meaning it is up to the community to really shape it. CL can provide guidance and tools, but it is still up to the community; for example, if your community actively uses the flagging feature to cut down on posts that make the site worse, those posts will decrease in occurrence. NYC has ~14M people, so it is just harder to create a community that agrees on what is and isn't appropriate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com