I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.
Newer, widely purposed tech that hasn't taken hold yet is the one I see most often. Where people have invested non-trivial time. Eg the rust crew which I choose as an example because I quite like rust so I'm not bashing the tech here.
There are bogus "here's a cool library/app/thing" articles which get to the front page where I scratch my head and then discover "oh, it's boring as hell but in rust." I see people expressing legitimate points of view (which I frequently disagree with) about cases where C might be a better choice or where a rust re-write doesn't buy the user much that are immediately massively downvoted. It's mob mentality, is it organised or self-organising? Doesn't matter either way. Makes rustaceans look pretty stupid though. And yes you can do this for non-rust stuff and it happens. And it's easy to see why. You invest a ton of time into a tech you really want it to succeed to maximise the payoff for doing so.
What do you do to counter it? Anything at all?
HN is gamified on karma - an idea taken from slashdot with a mildly different implementation but a really good idea that has been under-applied accross the web. In this game popular in the zeitgeist massively trumps interesting, well written, thought provoking and well supported. Sure by the time you've got 50 points you probably should stop caring and you've got karma to burn to be thoughtfully unpopular, but if you take the time you probably want that seen and it's the stuff you want to see - which is kind of the point.
The other question I have is why has there been next to nothing here (that I've noticed - maybe I missed it?) About the twitter files revelations and their importance or lack thereof? Intervention? If so please would you share the thinking behind it?
The point being, to suggest what you could do differently requires a clue on what you actually do now, which I'm not at all sure I have.
Re the Twitter stuff: there have been quite a few major threads. They also attract a ton of user flags. I'm personally open to the topic but the chalice is so poisoned that I'm not sure HN can discuss it in an interesting way, and interestingness is what we're going for here.
I ask this with the greatest amount of respect: Is it possible that you're taking that "mission statement" a little too seriously here?
I'm a casual HN user and I open the front page 3-4 times per day. Roughly 50% of the topics tend to be well-written but ultimately standard blog posts from random technologists on fairly standard technology topics.
Some of it is indeed interesting, and what's interesting of course depends on the reader, but I think it's safe to say that most people won't open the front page and be utterly blown away by how incredibly interesting every single post is.
Considering this, silencing a lively discussion because it might not meet certain, ultimately subjective, criteria of "interestingness" seems excessive. To be clear, I don't want to see the front page dominated by a single topic every day, but it pains me when discussions containing (among other things) thoughtful comments are effectively hidden from view in a matter of minutes because an algorithm or a moderator thinks we'd be better off reading about how someone has connected their dog's heart rate monitor to their car's entertainment system using a Raspberry Pi.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it is interesting. There are all too many ways in which it is not. I just mean that that's what what want it to be, and try to help it be. Even though we fall short.
Connecting a heart rate monitor to a car does sound kind of interesting to me though! but not with a dog - that sounds too close to abusive. But I could imagine someone making a biofeedback system where their heart drives their car or something. That would ba a great HN post.
And, ironically, even interestingness can get repetitive. When I see a post titled "How I made Netflix' video decoding on Android 25% faster", I know that I'm going to find a war story where some silly hardware bug was preventing proper cache management or something. It's interesting in a way, and if I read the full post I'm going to learn plenty of new things – but at the end of the day, I've seen (and done) it all before. Not this particular bug of course, but this type of story.
What I'm really looking for is ideas and thoughts that are completely new to me. Not just in their particulars, but in their general direction. That's very difficult to find. And "dissenting", "controversial", and "offensive" opinions are an absolutely crucial part of finding it, in my experience. A "sort by controversial" feature like Reddit has would be a godsend for HN.