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

The key to getting good discussions is to not have a profit motive coupled to eyeballs.

HN doesn't show ads, doesn't care about growth.

Large newspapers had strict firewalls between advertising, journalism and opinion -- but smaller papers had to fold to pressure from advertisers.

Subscription services need eyeballs badly -- but they need paying eyeballs, which means that they need to offer more than just outrage -- but if they don't show at least some of their content for free, they can't grow.

That is plainly insufficient. There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics. Privacy, anything google, amazon, or Uber, gender and racial politics, Facebook, etc. There's more going on here than the profit motive.

The problem isn't that these companies want to make a profit. The problem is they make it easy for people to get what they want, and users seek out outrage and polarization. I think that combined with the globalizing tendency of ubiquitous, high bandwidth, low latency, broadcast-capable connections is a real problem. But since I believe it's a human nature thing, I'm much less sure of how to solve it, especially while respecting the free speech value.

> There's serious outrage, polarization, and lack of nuance on this site about a variety of topics.

That doesn't feel like a huge issue here. I see tough topics brought up often and them being passionately discussed, but it generally goes quite civilily. I would not say there is lack of nuance at all - I learn a lot from reading people's counterpoints.

I mean, it's not perfect, but compared to other online discussion areas, it doesn't feel like a total waste of time to get into a nuanced discussion here.

I'm not saying it's relatively terrible here compared to the rest of the internet. I'm more thinking about the stridence of typical discussions, say, pre-1980. Simply, there was not a context where the typical person could go to have or witness aggressive partisan argumentation, be it about a company, a political system, whatever. Certainly, very, very few people could cause their statements to be broadcast to more than a handful of folks. Whereas your humble correspondent has probably gotten hundreds of impressions on these modest thoughts he has posted here. Another thing that wasn't present was the space for those views to feed back on themselves and become more intense, more passionate, and more aggressive.

That doesn't mean everything about the world was better back then. But this one thing was different.

I think it remains to be seen how much all this really matters. We probably won't know until they're writing the history books about this time.