PG: The biggest source of stress for me at YC was running HN

I can certainly see his point. The more I grow older, the more I am convinced to spend less time on internet interacting with people. Not only the anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is a magnet for toxic people, it also brings out the worst in people. Even disregarding the outright abuse or outrage, the opinions I see on the internet is very hard to meet someone in real life who has that kind of opinions.

Every Google related thread immediately becomes a thread of bashing Google's history of killing products. I don't know how many times people need to have the same conversation again and again. This has gotten to the point that I don't open any Google related threads. I am here to read thoughtful discussions, not some broken records again and again. Internet forum is hard.

HN is full of bandwagons where every thread about certain subjects is identical to the last. Some topics are impossible to discuss here (e.g. anything related to Google).

> Not only the anonymity or pseudo-anonymity is a magnet for toxic people, it also brings out the worst in people.

For one, yes, but Facebook has clear names (usually) and still it degraded quite a bit and hosts obscure trends such as flat eathers. So I don't think anonymity is really all too important. Maybe it's rather that you can now find like-minded people to strengthen your opinion, even when there are actually really few overall.

I don't think it has anything to do with anonymity. Most people are using their real names on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But quips and outrage get more attention and engagement than serious discussion (and none of these platforms are conducive to long-form discussion).

The biggest problem is that replying to a post makes it appear in more feeds. Never in the history of debate and discussion has "add more people!" led to more effective communication. Think of your own work experience - how many meetings were useful when they grew and grew every week?

HN benefits from the lack of a feed but also suffers from the inability to continue discussions over long periods of time between a few users. Something like slack's threads would be useful for a forum, as well as more permanent (old school) topic-based subforums and threads.

> "I don't know how many times people need to have the same conversation again and again."

such an oddly particular criticism. don't you have the same conversation with certain people all the time offline too? it seems completely unavoidable if you have other people in your life. that it happens online too should be thoroughly unsurprising.

it's like thrift store shopping. you wade through all the same boring stuff to get to that rare new (to you) thing that makes it all worth it. focus on the payoff, not the rummaging. and certainly no one is so learned that nothing new can be found in many, if not most, of the discussions.

Well, the thing about Google dropping products keeps coming up because ... they keep dropping products. I'm not sure every google-related thread goes that way.