Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a case study for a class
At this point, the class is working on case studies of successful and healthy online communities, where we are seeking insights from online communities we are part of, inspired by, or find interesting. The goal of the assignment is to figure out whether an online community exemplifies or doesn’t exemplify ‘healthy’ behaviors, from the points of view of their own members, on their own terms. I’m here to understand HN from your perspectives and I’m interested in hearing from all of you.
What criteria do you use to determine 'health' in online communities? How do these differ from those criteria you use to determine ‘health’ in offline communities you are in? How does HN exemplify or not exemplify 'healthy' behaviors? What behaviors of your own would you acknowledge may or may not contribute to the overall ‘health’ of HN?
How did you get into HN? Who introduced you? What makes you stay?
I began using HN as a source for news, projects, ideas, etc. a couple years ago when a mentor referred me here, but I hadn’t made an account until this week for this Ask HN. I check HN once or twice daily and I actually stay for the discussion as much as the links shared by HN members.
In case this is helpful for our discussion, something that our class recently discussed is that communities with controversy aren't necessarily 'unhealthy' — as in, the ability of some communities to work through a controversy and maintain coherence, and to exist as multiple voices coming out of a controversy can be an indicator of being 'healthy'.
I aim to share my findings as well. I hope these questions are interesting to you and that we can hear a variety of perspectives in the comments!
377 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadOne thing I like is a lot of people back up their statements with links or examples. or other reasoning.
Here's what a healthy online community has: respect for other members, maturity, empathy, self-awareness, strong moderation, and a diverse enough set of views from participants to make conversations well-rounded and thought provoking.
How and why I arrived here: the subreddits I frequented degraded in quality to the point where I wanted a less-mainstream tech news aggregator, and several redditors recommended HN. I actually had no interest in commenting here until I got far enough along in my career to have actual insight to share on relevant topics. I suspect I'm quite a bit older than most HN participants these days.
Why I stay: a larger portion of content here aligns with my interests and career than elsewhere online and the overall experience has not yet degraded to reddit levels of picking through trash to find gems.
I've only been using HN for ~3 years now (lurking, mostly) but I've noticed that a lot more people use their real names and identities. I would think that helps towards not spouting bullshit without resources. (but controversial threads, e.g. highly political ones, tend to throw that out the window). Lobste.rs has the concept of "hats" that are given to specific people, and they can wear them to answer something in a specific capacity. [0] I wish HN had something like that. HN is moderated enough that I think a system like that could work.
Other things about HN:
1) There are no thumbnails or image links, just links to articles or similar. Reddit suffers from images being allowed, because images take a few seconds to process and upvote, versus a longer article. Reddit is very good for sharing memes and cat pictures, but not so good for lengthy articles. Tild.es [1] is how reddit would be if it were text only (and orders of magnitude smaller). Picture and joke/meme replies also completely derail threads.
2) HN is highly focused and consistently moderated (in my opinion). At times more controversial discussion happens with political news, but it generally is focused on business / research / technology news, etc. Reddit is a mishmash of subreddits and each one is moderated differently (usually very minimally).
With HN's culture I usually feel no need to comment on something unless I have experience with that or it's something I'm interested in.
[0]: https://lobste.rs/hats
[1]: https://tildes.net/
How do you know this? What data verifies that this is what a healthy online community looks like? Why is strong moderation part of a healthy online community, where strong moderation in a real life would be a signal of unhealthiness (it's censorship)? If an online community is mature, empathetic, and self-aware - why would it require strong moderation?
Think of the evening news on TV. You have half an hour to fill, you are going to have to pick the most relevant things. Some things will make the cut, some won't.
Once you get to 24 hours news then it is another thing, because they are repeating the same 15 minutes over and over again. The model to describe that is not censorship, it is spam, electronic warfare, jamming -- an entirely disingenuous communication that superficially looks like "speech" but has nothing to do with "free speech" and such. In fact, it inhibits real communication the same way weed killer kills plants.
Seriously, next time someone goes after you, try it. Laugh and move on. It's really, really fun to watch what people do in response, because their anger at not landing the desired effect often manifests in physical twitches. Don't give people what they want until it benefits you.
Isn't that what the GP said?
First off I think you make a point. However, the reason I think strong moderation is still required, even if those previous qualifiers are met, is that online communities are generally built off of focus on some shared interest. Real flesh and blood people, even if they are mature and empathetic etc, will invariably have a variety of passions some of which may conflict with the focus of the community.
If a passion that conflicts with the focus surfaces in a discussion it may _ignite_ that passion among a subset of the members of the community. This causes conversation to derail, the community loses focus, and the members abandon the forum. Strong moderation keeps the community focused, and for that reason the community thrives and is "healthy".
Membership criterion is central to maintaining the competency level of the members. And competency on the topic (along with intellectual honesty) is the single most, perhaps only, important component to a useful discussion: It would be insanely destructive for the New England Journal of Medicine to publish every single thing it ever received with equal weight in massive weekly tomes.
Moderation acts as competency monitoring to a degree.
The problem with literal membership is that it precludes autodidacts, people new to the field and people who can't be bothered with a complicated process for joining. Thus unrestricted membership with moderation. And indeed on reddit, the highest quality subreddit, /r/science, is the one most aggressively moderated
For fact based, purpose driven venues, if you believe you were censored because of your opinion, you should not have posted an opinion in the first place. That's certainly how it works in the workplace which is how some people need to use the web.
There can be unlimited venues where partially informed people post their opinions, maybe we can call them "healthy" or not. But some people want to work on problems that actually do require knowledge and should not have to have their discussions constantly vandalized. A "functional" venue one might say.
Although IMHO their extreme stance on moderation is not always a good thing. For example, they have an unwritten (at least, the last time I checked) policy of nuking entire threads where there are some poor comments, even if this also results in deleting many useful comments later in the same thread.
The first time I contributed substantially to a discussion in /r/science, on a subject where I did have something resembling an expert opinion to offer, my entire contribution (which took several hours to write across a handful of comments, with carefully backed sources etc.) was summarily deleted without warning. I queried this with the mods, and they explained the policy about nuking entire threads. Given the nature of some of the early comments around that thread, I couldn't disagree with the assessment that they were not a constructive contribution. However, I also immediately filed the whole sub in the same dustbin as SO and have made no further attempts to contribute, for much the same reasons.
Which communities do you know, if any, which are better than HN, in your view, by these two parameters?
Child A: I like Batman!
Child B: Prove that Batman is better than all the other super heroes!
I think technical concerns are underrated in the general population. The other day I was watching some lectures by a quant finance prof who started out telling people that "you can still be smart even if you don't like repetitive math" -- there is so much mollycoddling of people whose main ability is the "social skill" of coming up with the same wrong answers that most other people come up with.
I like HN because it is a place where technology and business are taken equally seriously. I think of the programming subreddit which is overrun by communists who think that if money has any effect on your motivation as a programmer you're like a pedophile or something.
Also HN is mostly free of the unproductive "culture wars" discussions that have led to the heat death of so many fora.
Theres a level of irony in trying to claim some sort of level of superior intelligence and then following it up with a paragraph of nonsense demonstrating you know little about the community you've attacked and the ideology you've attempted to label it with.
This is objectively and demonstrably false. The wars just manifest differently and happen to lead to an outcome that you prefer.
There's a reason this site has "avoid controversial topics unless you have something new to add" or however it's phrased in the guidelines. Let me be completely and plainly clear: there is an HN culture. You will be banned, often quietly, if you wander off that reservation.
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Edit: Dan, I'm rate limited, so you get the edit here because I can't be bothered to account hop again.
Grandiose? You ban people for not adhering to a culture. How is that even a remotely controversial statement? What else would you ban them for?
There is a set of guidelines and approaches you want in place for HN behavior. When people fail to meet those, you give them a couple chances and then remove them from the community. Examples: "We've asked you to be nicer," or "we've asked you not to bring up gender politics," or whatever nice explanation you give.
There's a word for that kind of thing; that word is culture.
I wasn't even criticizing moderation, because I'm not sure what I could add there because it's your employment to manage this stupidity, but you sure showed up fast assuming I was. Is it really like that now? Nobody can speak objectively about how this site works and point out an incontrovertible fact without you taking it personally and trying to rally a bunch of usernames you've never met to believe you?
While I have you, I appreciated that you declined to share your age in that fawning profile you and Scott got. That was tacit admission of your own site's culture, and you know it.
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Edit 2: I'm really enjoying watching your comment evolve via edits into reading back exactly what I'm saying from a position of authority and then challenging me to find authority.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Edit: it's easy to make authoritative-sounding claims, but to be taken seriously, you should supply links so readers can make up their own minds. In the majority of cases, we ban accounts for breaking the site guidelines after multiple requests to stop (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). (I'm talking about established accounts. We handle brand new accounts that break the site guidelines differently.)
It's frustrating, but it is a good thing.
The core way billionaires control our discourse is through spamming the agenda with junk. If we are always talking about why billionaires shouldn't be taxed (abortion, white privilege, lame woke people, ...) we aren't talking about everything else.
Rate limiting answers that. It's OK to talk about those subjects, it just shouldn't be more than 5% of the discussion or so. If things are too heated, people should get slowed down.
I've noticed that I'm more likely to get rate limited after I flag something. That makes me feel like flags are a limited resource so I use them wisely.
We're happy to take the rate limit off (and often do so) when people give us reason to believe that they'll use the site as intended in the future. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com is the best way to do that.
I am wary of entering this sort of meta-discussion and usually I would not, but given the slightly unusual topic today, I feel obliged to defend dang here. I have been a participant in HN and various other online forums for a long time. The moderation here, or at least its visible effects, has consistently been handled better than almost any other forum I can think of. That is due in no small part to the calm and incremental approach dang typically takes when someone in a discussion is making unconstructive comments or lowering the tone.
One of the original questions in this discussion was about what makes a healthy forum. I don't really know what "healthy" means in this context, but I have found that dedicated moderators with a soft touch are something I associate with a lot of the most useful and enjoyable forums I'm familiar with, social media or otherwise. If generally constructive commenters occasionally drift towards incivility, as many of us sometimes do if we have strong feelings on a subject being discussed, I would prefer to see a gentle push to keep the standards of discussion up, rather than see the admins wielding the ban hammer at the slightest opportunity. That said, I also appreciate the admins of a forum wielding that ban hammer if someone is persistently making comments that are unpleasant and contribute little value to the discussion. Obviously I don't know what if anything happens invisibly here, but the visible part of HN has consistently tracked closer to those two ideals than most of the other online forums I know over many years.
Aren't those two clauses basically antithetical? The experts are the ones who don't group think. You can't be full of both.
The indictments here regarding perceived expertise outside of one's lane are not necessarily indictments of Hacker News. Hacker News reflects its constituency, a large number of whom unconsciously feel that software engineering expertise is a gateway to understanding other disciplines better than those actually practicing them. Just throw some code at it, right? Misplaced competency in far-ranging topics thanks to software engineering and VC exit is only validated by, say, essays written by two very famous people here that get a clap circle every time they're posted.
I've studied this effect in my own life (I am far from immune) and I think it's because software engineering, and architecture especially, gives one a systems approach to thinking. It feels natural to apply your systems thinking to all of the problems in the world that look like they need a system. The problem is that the world is a plethora of imperfect variables, and what seems to be a "simple" system to fix the world in the eyes of a Ruby developer lacks the nuance to understand all of the reasons things are the way they are. Ironically, those same engineers often perceive the danger of a wholesale rewrite of code which discards the same exact hard-won nuance in their own system.
My life got immeasurably better once I was banned from this community and exited SV. I can assure you that the summaries on N-Gate and such, no matter how much shooting of that messenger is expended by people who believe themselves to be right, reflect how this site, and SV at large, are perceived outside of the community. Yeah, all that venture capital and world-changing hubris and "software will eat the world and give us flying cars" thinking, and here we are with half the world rotting on Facebook and the other half showing up on ClearviewAI.
> Hacker News is a great reflection of SV at large
More than 90% of HN's community is outside of SV, and the bulk of the community here is actually rather disposed against it (or their image of it).
Your view it's very interesting. When I took a psychology course one of the first things that hit me was the fact that what in psychology is considered "normal" personality is full of internal struggle, sometimes violent - depending on the particular circumstances of the individual. Whereas the absence of such struggle is associated with some personality disorders. When you look at it from that angle, the HN community, in spite of its flaws, is very healthy. And I really appreciate it, in spite of occasionally getting 10 downvotes a day.
The actual discussion is medicore for the most part and heavily policed.
Or, put another way, computer programmers ;-). Sure there are plenty of other people who armchair quarterback, but there's just enough truth to this that I wonder if programmers are a little more prone to it. Like we think everything can be solved with an algorithm, and since we're pretty good with algorithms, we can solve any problem in the world.
I agree with these criteria (except "thought provoking"). Mostly I expect to be able to learn something from some of the comments, and I don't want to lose my time with political debates, flame wars and trolls. I think HN works pretty well for that (better than any other forum I know), which is why I stay.
I agree it's somewhat insular and US-centric (as expected from an English language forum). It reduces the set of views and some opinions may be hard to express. But overall, I feel it's reasonably balanced, and it's possible to have "non standard HN views" if they fit the guidelines (they may not receive a lot of upvote, but they shouldn't have negative vote count). Besides a lot of the articles are technical so it's usually possible to avoid ideological discussions.
These are all the reasons I love HN.
I don’t know of anywhere else that approaches it from those perspectives.
I’d sincerely love recommendations for more like it, tech-related or otherwise.
I asked for information hoping to expand on a position so far from reality that it's almost nonsensical. Asking that question more nicely is orthogonal to empathy.
I've noticed this more recently on HN as well.
There are a few areas where I'll actually know what's going on under the hood in the specific niche area of industry or wherever, but then I'll come on HN and see the top comment completely off base, with maybe one or two refutations of that comment way down at the bottom. There's no actual verification by experts for each topic (not sure how there could be though).
I also notice this happens more the farther away from HN's core focus area the subject matter is on. Internet security? Tons of great advice. Boeing? It gets a little iffier, with a lot of armchair small prop pilots, who give you a completely different outlook than going and talking to a pilot who actually flies large jets for decades (but then wait a bit longer and pilots who fly large jets for decades show up on HN, which is cool - and no offense to the small prop pilots, I actually enjoy reading a lot of that discussion). US Patent law? You see some very outright false info on HN, I guess because while there are some very good patent lawyers here, there aren't very many. Also HN being a global platform inevitably leads to discussions on law getting completely mixed up.
But then of course Gell-Mann Amnesia sets in and I keep reading anyways. :)
The moderation here is pretty strong for keeping it civil and polite, which helps HN be a much less anxiety-inducing place.
I think probably as you say, it comes down to a lack of empathy. The startup scene is generally cut-throat and devoid of any empathy or higher principles besides money. So this is not surprising.
They probably wouldn't like to acknowledge this about themselves either - Just like colonists of past centuries, many successful people today refuse to confront the simple reality that good lives are invariably built on the suffering of others. Ironically, it is successful people's collective inability to see this which makes it self-fulfilling.
The name of the game is "coerce then moralize" and it hasn't changed much since colonial times.
1. "I don't know who would have smart speakers at home. " Most people don't care.
2. GOOGLE is Lord Voldemort.
3. FB is Sauron.
4. Startup life > Big company
5. "Who would live in the bay area. I am happy at my ranch doing remote work."
If I feel my buttons are regularly being pushed, then that is a sign of an unhealthy community. That's why I quit twitter.
Just about any thread that mentions China, India, certain "politically incorrect" tech luminaries, race or gender politics tends to devolve into passionately expressed cesspools of toxicity and vitriol. Follow dang's account for a bit, he has to talk people down from the crazy ledge all the time. He's done it to me a couple of times, because this place just gets under my skin sometimes.
It's particularly unhealthy in HN's case because this community has the pretense of holding itself to a standard of intellectual merit and civility above the internet mainstream. We can have intellectually stimulating discussions about compiler design or type theory all day long but wander outside the "technical" box and suddenly people are screaming about white genocide and cultural marxism or spouting QAnon or anti-vaxx conspiracy theories.
I am old enough to remember the anti-M$ days. And how Slashdot childishly posted the Gates-Borg image on a lot of articles about Microsoft. Slashdot was a far unhealthier community than HN.
Honest question. Worked in a big building.. sat in the kitchen area in the morning while people got coffee, this feels like how people converse.
And if that's the case, why is it so much harder to tolerate that in an online forum? It's less ephemeral than speech? We don't actually know each other?
That said, I disagree with other commenters who describe HN as people discussing about things they know nothing about. Some people may lean out of the window too far, what I find interesting though is the amount of expertise assembled here. No matter how exotic a topic is, somebody will show up who has first hand experience and actually is an expert.
And one of the nice things about HN is that usually when that happens, others do acknowledge the expert status and those contributions get moderated up to higher visibility fairly quickly. Interesting discussions often result, sometimes on quite surprising topics that might not be among the usual "core topics" for this forum yet still interest a lot of the same people.
The main thing I would point to justify that it is healthy is that the vast majority of the comments are informed, well written and productive. They add to the information in the linked article, and provide insight from multiple points of view.
Quality and quantity seem to be inversely related in social media.
Plus, all of the things Metafilter "doesn't do well" (a list which grows), the departure of the old guard (if they were not run out of town), and so forth.
I favor hacker news over metafilter specifically because this place is less of a community of familiars. On metafilter the spirit of ingroup/outgroup behavior and the bullying that comes with that is intense. I barely even contribute there but the amount of nasty, mean spirited and passive aggressive interaction there is depressing. Lots of people like the idea of metafilter until they actually try to contribute in good faith and see the result.
I think on those metrics HN does pretty well. Obviously not perfect, things fall through the cracks all the time, but way better than other communities that strive for the same thing.
I don't remember how I originally got into HN, but what drives me to stay is alignment in goals. I _want_ the things HN is optimizing for.
So there is no way to assign the label "healthy" to an online community, only a way to compare it as more or less healthy.
For any social media site, there are two things to separate out: The aggregation aspect (information distribution) and the community conversation. A site that disseminates low quality articles, slanted articles, or a limited varied of articles is not as healthy in terms of the aggregation aspect as one that is rich in variety and quality. For my own opinion, HN has made me aware of a lot of great resources, so I think it is very "healthy" in this regard. Typically the political posts are significantly less quality.
In terms of community engagement, one thing I personally pay attention to is how often my buttons are being pushed. Sometimes that's due to a flaw in my own biases and opinions where I can't take any alternative views. However, usually conflict of opinion that is highly emotional, imprecise in statement, and poorly thought out are the types of comments that work me up.
Generally, on HN, I don't get worked up on anything except for the political posts. Flame wars about writing documentation in markdown or not are actually kind of entertaining to me. Those kinds of posts don't push my buttons, and I suspect most other people's, to the same degree.
Conservative opinions will usually see a -1 to -2 down out of course... likewise the opposite for left-leaning opinions. I can only speculate as to total votes in either direction though.
Being classically liberal/libertarian, I can only speak to my own opinions on this as where I stand is often in contrast to established left/right tribes.
-- edit
I've seen this comment go up/down several times already, kind of making the point.
I'll note this idea itself is a poor approximation for what is really going on, which is that there are multiple aspects being mapped and they don't all match the traditional political spectrum line. That said, it's still a useful way to think. E.g. there are are two paths to fascism, but people usually only see the one their opponents are on, not their own.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
Well, I did say it's a poor approximation. The usefulness I alluded to is to understand that all these approximations are flawed in various ways, firstly because they are approximations, but more-so because they are all hopeless simplistic representations for what is being modeled. Biaxial is better than a single axis, but that doesn't make it better. The thing the horseshoe theory represents is something that the biaxial representation doesn't represent at all, a similarity of some aspects of though in the common extremes we see in reality.
There's often a difference between diagrams that allow everything to be represented clearly and diagrams that help steer you into associations that are useful. Both have their place.
Conversely, even if I agree a lot with what is said, if afterwards I'm angry, sad, etc. then it wasn't healthy. When younger, I used to think that more anger at what was wrong in the world, would help to fix it. Experience has taught me that actions taken out of anger, even if well-intentioned, are almost always unskillful. I want more insight, more understanding, and HN aids me in getting that far more often than, say, Facebook, which I now use only on Sundays, and not every Sunday, as a way of making sure I don't let its toxic stew of opinions infect my emotions.
I cannot honestly remember how I discovered HN, but I return because, even when I disagree with most of what is said on a topic, it is typically the case that I find my own thinking to be more nuanced or more interesting afterwards.
Far from it.
The way it has been explained to me the core emotions are: Anger, Fear, Joy and Sorrow
You also have feelings: depressed, happy, excited, anxious, etc…
The core emotions are just tools that you have in your toolbox and they show up when needed and if we were all functioning at a high level they would show up when needed and we would use them appropriately.
However, most of us are not functioning at a high level due to many factors; often this can be generational we are learning ‘bad emotional hygiene’ from our parents at a young age and these continually get passed to the next generation.
Examples of your emotions working correctly:
- Your long time pet has passed away: Sorrow
- There is a pack of Wolves outside: Fear
My understanding is that depression is caused by the suppression of Anger and Sorrow. If you are able to work through the emotions you are suppressing then depression is going to go away. This isn’t a one time thing though, you will experience Anger and Sorrow all through your life time, the trick is knowing how to actually feel these emotions so you don’t suppress them leading you back into depression.
Similarly, anxiety is usually caused by the suppression of Fear.
Disclaimer: I am not a mental health professional
Yes
The moderation scheme makes it harder to troll, so you actually have to come up with some clever insights in order to troll effectively. Though, when people need to back up their comments, the quality improves. Articles/links that are voted up are often interesting or insightful.
On the other hand, participants are still somewhat married to preconcieved ideas, so moderations and comments are sometimes shallow and predictable. It's still hard to come through, though better grounds for free-thinking than many other forums. Humour is often lost here.
I don't remember how I got into HN... I stay because I happen to appreciate the comments, often I get more from the comment system than the actual articles. There are a lot of people with diverse technical knowledge and insight.
It's far from perfect, but it's still healthier in that you get a relatively diverse set of topics and opinions on those topics in a mostly rational discussion. There are some subjects that will see an unbalanced level of moderation based more on opinion than hard fact, that said it's still better than most.
I think the only area that tends to really flow emotional is when the topic of politics comes up. People are very tribal in terms of what they believe and support and will up/down-vote instinctively, regardless of merit. It tends to cut in every direction. I would love to see counts of up and down votes on a given post, as I'm sure there are many that while they are -2 to +2 have seen many votes in both directions...
All in all, I think the moderators are relatively fair in their disposition of the rules such that they are, and in general fosters discussion in good faith. I've seen many opposing views discussed at length, and don't recall anything that went over the line (calls for violence or personal assault), with minimal ad hominem.
One of the things I notice about Hacker News is that it wants things. It wants all sorts of things. There's clash but there's also recognizable consensus on want. What I also see is that HN won't get what they want, and I don't believe they're any closer to effectively organizing to get what they want, whether it's unions or racially fair hiring or a different scheme in how money works.
HN is not effective, and that is why I view them as unhealthy. HN wants things and it shall not have them. You can put warmth and love in that package, but it's still impotent.
A few reasons I can see:
1) It's text- and hyperlink-based. Multimedia forums become meme recycling centers.
2) It centers discussions around submitted links. This avoids endless, pointless discussions about the forum participants themselves.
3) The submitted links focus on technology and business issues, which attract more serious participants. There is no random board.
4) Moderation is professional rather than community based. Voting has an effect but can be overridden.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Wow! Great article.
(Also: as of 2019, TWO, count 'em, TWO human moderators.)
Another positive trait of the community (imo) is that -- unlike, say, reddit -- it explicitly opposes, and downvotes into oblivion, silly jokes, puns, and even polite or enthusiastic agreement that fails to contribute anything of value.
Substance is king. Or, if you're less generous, the appearance of substance masking all the typical biases is king. Either way, it's a community norm I appreciate, and is what keeps me coming back here.
Last I heard, HN gets about 5 million unique visitors a month. The human brain can cope effectively with a community of around 150 members.
For a time, I was the lead mod for The TAG Project. Prior to my arrival, the founder had done some good internal research on her group of online communities (a set of email lists) and found that 20 percent of members were regular and active, another 10 percent posted once or occasionally and the rest were lurkers.
This seems to be roughly true for other communities I have participated in elsewhere.
If you do the math, that means you will have about 150 active members posting regularly when you get to about 750 members. In my experience, once you get to about 750 or 800 members, you start seeing splinter groups form and you start getting new things budding out of that.
Other small email lists began to spin off of one of those email lists once it got big enough.
So if you want a strong sense of community, you are talking about a small town atmosphere where you have about 150 active members and some number of lurkers.
I have passingly thought that the leader board of HN should maybe be 150 names long instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community -- to help foster that same pattern of "there are 150 people whom we all know and can follow all the relationships and so forth" that you get with a smaller online community. But I don't feel strongly about it and I don't see any point in making it some hill to die on, so I think I have mentioned it in comments maybe once or twice before for some reason and that's it.*
Big cities rely on formality and such to account for the fact that we don't all know each other well etc. HN does a better job than most communities of actually applying the rules fairly even-handedly and not just playing favorites for certain insiders.
There are some really corrupt communities that pretend they are nice places, but the rules are applied by the mods completely differently for "insiders" versus "outsiders" and it's very toxic. No, they probably won't help you assimilate either.
This is not true here. The mods don't have to personally like you to give you a fair shake if you will make an effort to reform your bad habits and actually play by the rules.
I think HN is a healthy space, but no longer has a strong sense of community like it did when I first joined. But I was always an outsider looking in who never really got to benefit from that strong sense of community (in fact, it arguably did me a lot of harm).
I stuck around because it had those big city formality things already going on and was kind of the least worst option for my needs and purposes. It had virtues that helped me make it work for me in spite of humans being human and certain problems (like sexism) being rampant and inescapable across the globe.
* Edit: I run my mouth a lot. It's probably more than twice in the last decade, but I certainly don't harp on it.
Your idea that HN is more like an economically healthy city than a socially healthy town sounds like another take on that idea. I think it conflicts with this suggestion:
> I have passingly thought that the leader board of HN should maybe be 150 names long instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community -- to help foster that same pattern of "there are 150 people whom we all know and can follow all the relationships and so forth" that you get with a smaller online community.
The problem is that the leaderboard is a list of community heroes, not a list of community members. You may know who tptacek is, but he doesn't know who you are. (In general.) By my criterion, that means he is a part of the community, and you're not.
I don't actually think there is a core community any longer. I don't think everyone on the leader board exchanges emails or something.
I've spent time on the leader board under a previous handle. I appear to be the only woman to have done that. It absolutely wasn't some magic "in" where I suddenly joined some club and all that. I've been around enough to know they aren't all friends or something.
Members of the leader board come and go. Edit: By which I mean making the leader board isn't some kind of permanent status. I'm not the only person who used to be on the leader board and still participates.
A social group of this size fundamentally works differently from a small town. That doesn't mean that only hardcore insiders benefit from a sense of community.
Probably, the reason people talk a lot about famous celebrities and popular movies and TV shows on the internet is because those are touchstones we have in common to help socially orient ourselves, smooth communication, etc.
Fostering a sense of community can help establish community norms, help newcomers orient and figure out how to fit in, etc. No, participating here isn't going to be the same as living in a tiny town of 150 people your entire life. It doesn't need to be to benefit members and for things to generally run better when we apply some means to help establish cultural norms, etc.
There are many people that have readily used HN as a means to establish or grow an online income. That was a goal of mine well before I ever heard of HN, but it's been a huge uphill battle to get taken seriously here and get treated like someone knowledgeable who needs and deserves an income.
I was homeless for nearly six years of the more than ten that I have been here and was getting dismissively told "get a real job" repeatedly in response to my efforts to try to develop an online income from the street. Men didn't really want to talk to me except to inquire if I might be willing to have coffee with them sometime, aka they were looking for a hookup while literally not caring that I was so poor I often went hungry.
There is a long history in my life of people thanking me for what I know and what I contribute to various online communities I have participated in and gushing at me and wanting to reach out to me for some feel good emotional connection. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. The world interprets me as very caring, has big feels about how caring I am towards them and then insists this isn't worth money, doesn't merit an income and is valuable to them apparently precisely because it is authentic and comes from the heart and isn't done for money.
It's amazingly sick stuff where they expect to benefit for free, they are very touched that I care about them and their response is not only that they don't care about me and my welfare, they are actively and openly hostile to my need to establish an income. Almost no one goes "What she brings to the table adds value, she deserves an income for adding value, so I should do one or more of the following in response to sincerely appreciating what she adds here: support her Patreon, leave a tip, hire her to do some writing, recommend her work to other people, promote her writing, etc so she can stop being dirt poor."
This is not unique to HN, but it's especially galling because it's perfectly normal behavior on HN to be participating here for purposes of developing an online earned income. It's also especially galling because I appear to be the highest ranked woman here. Between my old handle and this one, I have more than 50k karma which would put me respectably high on the leader board if it were all under one handle and I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board.
There are self-made millionaires on the leader board whose income comes at least in part from being active participants on HN. For men, HN is an opportunity to promote their work and network.
For me, it's been an opportunity to be sexually harassed by people content to watch me starve. Any time I talk about being the highest ranked woman here, I get attacked and dismissed as being obsessed with meaningless internet points. Meanwhile, it used to be pretty common for men on HN to tell each other "You have a lot of karma on HN. That's evidence you are uncommonly competent." and similar.
That seems to be less common these days, perhaps because I've pointed out at times that there is a double standard. Rather than admit that maybe it means I'm smart and deserving of respect, it seems they've stopped saying that to each other.
That's the really ugly version of more than a decade of participation. It's not all downside and hopefully answering your question will not lead to the usual pile on of ugly, dismissive personal attacks for commenting on it.
If I got nothing out of participating here, I wouldn't be here. But I certainly don't get what the guys get and I certainly haven't gotten the career enhancement I was looking for, which is clearly and obviously available if you are male.
(No, I don't want to hear for the umpteenth time that I'm just doing it wrong and...
Escaping poverty is easily as hard as trying to escape Earth's gravity well. I wish you the best of luck in attaining a healthier financial situation. If I could afford to, I would donate to your patreon directly.
My ability to speak frankly is one part me and my history, one part the rest of HN. Over the years, I've been thrown off of several forums. Most of the world is quick to shut down criticism and look for a scapegoat, usually the person giving the criticism.
I'm well aware I can be hard to take. I'm still here in part because it isn't at all lost on me that most social groups would have long ago run me off rather than continue to listen to my unflinching appraisal of all that's wrong with the world and how that expresses itself in the microcosm we share in this virtual space.
I've seen forward progress. And the thing is that most revolutions are bloody and violent and there's a lot of collateral damage. And there's also that principle that "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
A desire for revenge and a desire for actual solutions is often at odds.
I think whatever changes have gone down because of HN's willingness to put up with my uncomfortable presence probably quietly cuts more deeply to the heart of certain problems than a lot of other efforts in the world.
What I mean by "cultural wasteland" is that you have a lot of social retards and moral cretins on here who, for whatever reasons, will gladly lumber threads with crazy sociopathic BS. You have to wade through and weed out a lot of arrogant unsympathetic bastards (like me.)
On the other hand, awesome people show up all the time like, "Oh yeah, I did that, AMA." I once interacted with Alan Kay on here! Carl Hewitt is on here regularly (trying to get people to finally pay attention to Actor model.) Walter Bright (D lang) is here. Charlie Stross replied to a comment I made in re: O'Neill colonies the other day. I could go on and on. (And those are just (relatively) famous people. There are all kinds of brilliant not-quite-so-famous people on here too. I'm just name dropping to make m'point.)
So that's nice.
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Another thing about HN is that it's not a community. It's more like a bar at a train station. Most people are just passing through and the regulars it does have should probably do something better with their lives.
Like me. I'm pretty much a recluse these days, and this HN account "carapace" is damn near the only outlet I have to communicate with the outside world. I'm on here pretty much every day (for better or worse) wasting time I could be spending on important projects (like my Joy interpreter. Heh.)
Imgur is more of a community than HN: those folks send each other pizzas! I'm seriously, there's a whole pizza club that just sends pizzas to imgurians who are broke and hungry. HN doesn't do that.
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To the extent that HN is a health community it's all about dang and sctb. Those two do an incredible job and I have nothing but respect for them. Ask them about HN's community health.
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Last but not least, IMO the way to judge the health of an online community (or any community) is to ask, "Has it made me a better person?"
FWIW, I think that participation on HN has, over the last few years, made me a little bit of a better person. I'm less knee-jerk sardonic, more willing to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. And I've learned to value good faith conversation over witty barbs and sarcasm. (Although I do still consider a good rant to be a kind of art, like slam poetry.)
> do you think this goes both ways, so to speak?
Sure, the life of the forum is the lives of its members. If the server or agora is empty what sense can it make to speak of its health?
> As in, would you think that members of an online community are only as healthy for the online community in so far as they can make it 'better'?
That formulation goes just a bit too far. Just as our immune systems need, uh, stimuli to be healthy, so perhaps do online forums need a bit of, uh, "negativity" to function well, if only to provide context for shared expression of the underlying values of the forum/participants. (E.g. "HN isn't Reddit", etc.)
And I think that you can judge the health of a community (also) by examining the way it deals with problematic but-not-bad people like, say, Xah Lee or the Temple OS author. Are we merciful, do we work to understand them, or do we light torches and reach for our pitchforks?
In the specific case of HN you have a generally motivated crowd, whose passions overlap between high technology and VC/entrepreneurial business, and two very dedicated and patient moderators, so things tend to stay on the rails around here.
I've been on HN since before 2008. I've seen it change a lot. Before then, I was a regular on Slashdot, on IRC, on various phpBB boards, and, before that, dial-up BBSs. I've got a fairly healthy offline life too and have been a part of climbing communities, business communities, and outdoor communities, and have had organizational roles in some of those. So my opinions aren't worth more than anyone else's, but I've spent a lot of time developing them nonetheless.
Whether a community, online or not, is "healthy", or not, is largely a matter of perspective. You'll see a lot of people say some community isn't healthy, and then a lot of people say the same community is healthy for the same reasons that other people find it unhealthy. The only metric that makes sense to me is whether the community helps me to be a happier or better person. A community might have a lot of faults, but if the overall impact of the community on me is a positive one, then it's healthy -- for me.
So from that standpoint, HN has been good to me. I learn a lot from it, it helps me stay sharp in my part of the industry, it challenges me to learn new things all the time. Some of the stuff I've learned here, I've gone on to teach others (as faithfully as I could) or just shown other people how to find it here on their own.
There are a lot of smart people here and a lot of interesting content on all kinds of subjects. Sometimes a subject matter expert shows up to point out everything that's wrong with some content that I thought I was learning something from; from their perspective, that content made HN a little bit worse, but from my perspective, that content led to their participation and together that made HN a little bit better.
Sure, there are some "personalities" on here that some people disagree with from time to time, or maybe that a lot of people disagree with often. Well, those people are in every community and I don't think HN would be more healthy without them. They could, maybe, benefit from a little more humility, but so could I.
I'm a bit mercurial and I'm passionate about some topics, especially those involving the health and welfare of the people around me. And, honestly, I'm just a bit of a jerk sometimes, a fault that I developed young and something I have to work on every day. That's made me an "unhealthy" part of HN from time to time. It's also my humanity, though, and I don't think that the things I've written in a dispassionate voice have necessarily been better, or more impactful, or even received better, than the things I write passionately. But, I don't want to become a part of the problem, so mostly I try to be quiet and let the smarter people lead the discussion.
One of the healthiest parts of HN is Dan Gackle (~dang). Okay, so some of this might be interpreted as boot-licking, so you'll have to trust me when I say that nobody's ever accused me of loving authority. I have never, in any of my communities, online or offline, seen a more even-handed, fair-minded, or restrained person in a moderator role. There have been some articles written about his work here (https://thenewstack.io/the-beleaguered-moderators-who-keep-h..., https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th..., https://qz.com/858124/why-y-combinators-hacker-news-silicon-...). I keep hanging around here in part because he and the other m...
But it's not without serious flaws. As others may have mentioned, there's a lot of groupthink here that's shrouded under very academic/intellectual pretense. Because everyone wants to look like they're on the cutting edge, the community creates this illusion that "only real developers use <insert language/framework of the day>". I'm almost certain that a lot of content gets no attention or isn't discussed because it's not considered cool.
However, this is nothing new. I haven't really seen this community degrade in that sense.
What has degraded is the community's attitude towards voting/downvoting. In my opinion, as I have expressed many times, the comment voting system is broken. Obviously, there needs to be some kind of community moderation, so I'm not necessarily saying that the system should be abolished(not yet), but it's not functioning that well in its current state. Users have to be extremely careful about what they post because, if misinterpreted in the slightest way, your opinion, even if civilized and valid, will be demoted. If your comment is even the slightest shade of grey, few will take it seriously, and it will be pushed down on the heap. All it takes is a few people to not like what you have to say and press the down arrow in the belief that their dislike should mean something.
Over the past maybe 4 years, I've noticed more people taking advantage of downvoting rather harmless comments without creating a discussion about why they feel that way. This is harmful because, due to the mechanics of downvoting, people are de-legitimizing others when they should really only reserve the down arrow button for "This comment is blatantly rule-breaking/offensive/wrong, and others shouldn't see it". The latter really should be a rarity.
I don't know if it's just the politics of our time that have encouraged everyone to hold strong opinions on everything, but the increase in downvoting behavior makes me believe that downvoting should be removed and replaced with flagging. Maybe HN runs on bare bones, but if something isn't breaking the rules, then it shouldn't be suppressed, but if something breaks the rules, moderation should know about it rather than letting randos on the internet determine what's legitimate and what isn't.
TL;DR The community is healthy in that it has above-average caliber in discussion, but there's a higher level of intellectual suppression and back-patting than I've seen elsewhere.
You can almost guarantee that any mention of WASM will include a comment writing it off as just another retread of Java or Flash, and another predicting it will lead to the death of the web. Lisp threads will include tedious discussions about parentheses. Anything to do with web dev will probably have a tangent about how the web was ruined by javascript and advertising. Go? No generics, lame. PHP? The memes about how bad PHP is are endless, and most are still a decade or so out of date.
I will add two more 'HN tropes' in the forms of factions that are out there and tend to show up pretty often.
The Rust Evangelism Strike Force and its close cousin (of which I admit to being a card-carrying member who tries not to be too pedantic / indiscriminate with my strikes) the F# Evangelism Strike Force.
PS: I wonder if there is a recent listicle for Top 50 most common Hacker News comments / memes / tropes ? DDG says not much about it, just surfacing the nGate.com Hacker News weekly stuff.
Also - paywalls. If a site has a paywalls it's all but guaranteed that most of the thread will be consumed by complaints about it.
I found this Hacker News simulator in the archive. You could also look into /r/subredditsimulator for related stuff.
The reason I say that it is not healthy is that it is full of misinformation and sensationalism. I get upset at reading things I know are lies or errors perpetuated through confident ignorance and end up attempting to even it out by sensationalizing the other side (and perhaps in my anger doing some of the things that annoy me). I've noticed this weird behaviour in my parents arguing with their friends about politics and for the most part I'd removed myself from that but HN brings it forth.
What is valuable about HN is that you get some real experts talking about stuff they know well and startup entrepreneurs engage here in a way that's often closer than just posting on ProductHunt, and I like talking to other people like that.
Actually, thank you for asking this question, I think it's pretty obvious at this point that I should just stop using this website. But I needed the question to be asked. Should just use that time building and spend it on my private groups.