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.

I ran (and wrote the software for) a forum for a number of years circa 2003-2012, FWIW. Did some things well and did some things poorly.

    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.

It's not too complex to run a mostly-positive community. It's not easy, mind you. It's just not complex. Sort of like running a marathon - it's not complicated, it's just really really hard. =)

As far as shaping a positive community, you attract good people and reward good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior.

This is at odds with things you might reasonably do to "challenge the big players" (if by "big players" we mean Facebook, etc) in my experience, though. It's hard to scale up because it's labor-intensive.

Camaraderie is relatively easy in small groups but tough in large groups. Not sure what HN's size is but I suspect it's right around the tipping point.

Reddit shows one possible solution to scaling up: you scale horizontally. Each subreddit is a semiautonomous "shallow silo." It's partially successful at this: you have a lot of shockingly supportive and positive subreddits and some absolute dumpster fires.

FB sort of does this well, with their groups feature.

Ultimately a challenge faced by those two is their revenue model. It you don't charge users directly, you are either going to be privately funded (HN) or ad-supported. Relying upon ads is the kiss of death as far as sane discourse goes. It means you crave engagement and eyeballs and pageviews above all else. It is how you survive.