I Quit Hacker News

Many social sites start with a small community of thoughtful, intelligent people because they were created by those people. Certainly this is how reddit started, and HackerNews after it. Then as the site becomes more popular, the masses (and particularly the immature masses) join up. As the masses join up they start outnumbering the founders, and the center of gravity of the site moves towards the lowest common denominator. This makes the site even more interesting to the masses, who join in greater numbers, and so on.

Current sites are on different positions on this timeline right now. At the far end is HackerNews. Reddit is more devolved -- because it's older and because of the digg debacle. Then probably comes digg. At the far end of the sewer of the masses is 4chan. But make no mistake: all these sites are gravitating towards 4chan-ness. It is unavoidable. Our only hope is that as sites slip towards oblivion, new ones take their place at the top of the hierarchy.

I suspect the #1 reason why these sites devolve is because their handles are anonymous. This gives you leave to be a jackass where you'd never do that in reality.

I have decided to test this. On reddit or digg or whatnot I have my own name as a handle for official announcements, and of course I have various anonymous accounts, including novelty accounts. I'm sure that's the case for everyone here. But on HN I solely post under my own name, and have no anonymous accounts at all. Numerous times I'd write some snarky thing on HN only to delete it at the last minute as I realized that this was going out under my real name. As a result I think my comment quality has been radically better and more thoughtful than it has been on, say, reddit.

I still think the flow is unavoidable. But I wonder if HN could at least slow the inevitable flow towards oblivion by requiring real names.

I would definitely support a requirement that real names be used. That said, I don't think that real names will "stem the flow toward oblivion." Having to provide your real name might stop someone from posting porn (as on 4chan, Reddit, etc.) but when it comes to quality of posts as we demand on HN there is nothing immoral or particularly embarrassing about submitting an article on the TSA. Non-anonymity only stops people if what they are doing will embarrass them or get them in trouble.

I'm wondering if it's possible to get this sort of results with a non-technical site, though.

Almost everything in life can adopt 'story' as a metaphor.

(What I'm trying to say, is that HN won't be good forever, and it won't be around for ever either... it's a fact of life.)

Membership is by invite only. Whenever someone gets banned (for any reason), the person who invited them gets banned (recursively).

More users need to be given the right to flag articles. It's risky, and there has to be some learning on the part of HN. The sooner the better, or it will become harder to determine who should best have those rights.

If I understand your "(recursively)" part correctly, this could make for a really interesting mass-shedding of users the first time anyone was banned. Like watching Filezilla delete a directory structure ...

HN mostly ignored it, and Reddit users were rather hostile to the idea.

You can read the details at - http://e1ven.com/2010/09/15/lonava-com-retrospective/

In large part, I'm sure, I marketed it badly. But I'm also fairly confident that Real Names is one of those features that people wish "everyone else" would use, but aren't thrilled about using themselves.

I'm not certain how to deal with the problem of initial members / founders. Surely the founder would not set up the system so they would be banned the first time someone was banned. It seems there would need to be a set of unbannables, including the founder.

I suppose you would need to handle the detached leaves of the tree too. This brings the unbannables back into play. So if A was an unbannable and had invited B, B had invited C1 and C2 and C3, C1 had invited D and D got banned, C1 and B would also be banned, and C2 and C3 would be considered invited by A.

I think this is getting far too complicated to be practical.

But honestly, that leads to very complicated systems, lots of angry banned people, … anonymity, in moderation, is good.

Would be nice to be able to fork HN, like git, with parameters of the forkers choosing. Kind of a deme model, where you could possibly merge your fork back into HN if it had enough meta-karma.

An example of a simple fork, would be to limit posting to once per user per thread. This might concentrate the contribution of certain overactive users? Would be good to be able to run the experiment, in a fork, and abandon if it was not fruitful.

Another fork might be a PG-free zone, deus abscondicus... this might prevent the suppression of dissent? Because users would not use votes to magnetically align with the Founder.