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

I think there's a larger point in what he said. Basically all current social media ends up optimizing for creating outrage, spawning mobs, less thoughtful discussion and more vitriolic arguments, etc. It's becoming a real concern to me that this is going to drive us into some kind of civil war or something if we don't find some way to check it.

The outrage seems to be like a drug. Nothing generates engagement quite like it, even if it's toxic in the long-term. So all social media platforms that embrace it grow bigger until they become near-monopolies, and all that don't so far have had a hard time growing userbases, making money, and generally fade into irrelevance.

It would be a real service to society IMO if we could find a way to somehow generate enough engagement and energy to challenge the big players without the outrage culture.

A few years ago I helped build a large social media site that had discussion threads at its core, and we quickly discovered how much time and effort it took. We quickly realized that so much of the grief was coming from the, ah, older generation — people over the age of 50 just loved to escalate things.

For many of these people it seemed like they hadn't ever used the Internet for communicating before, and for us employees it always felt like supervising children. Sometimes they would dig up the phone number of the CEO or some poor developer, and call them with some angry complaint. Their anger died down somewhat when they got a human to talk to. I suspect a lot of the heated discussions stemmed from people's inability to see the other party as a real human; people behave online with a completely different level of respect than in real life.

One of the most amusing experiences I had was hearing about how the "like" button next to comments had become a form of bullying. People would (rightfully, it would appear) complain that other people "liked" their comments ironically, and asked us to remove the likes. People in their 60s being bullied by other 60-year-olds through "likes". Both hilarious and sad.