HN discourages the sort of clever-yet-unsubstantial one-liner jokes that earn a lot of karma on Reddit. It reserves the space for thoughtful discussions. Getting rid of the memes simply doesn't fly in other online communities.
I'd also put money on the average age of HN commenter being higher than that of other internet communities.
I know of other rich and healthy online communities, but they are fairly niche.
I also feel the text-only format and less visible “points”/“likes” has something to do with it. It’s harder to be attention-grabbing with just text. In many ways, HN feels to me like an online email thread.
> I'd also put money on the average age of HN commenter being higher than that of other internet communities.
That might be true. However, from my experience maturity is way more important than actual age. Some maturity comes with age, but a lot of it is also individual behaviour in my opinion.
The Overton window is real, but it's fairly wide open.
I could post a pro-socialism argument and get upvoted, I could post a pro-capitalism argument and get upvoted. I could criticize GMOs, or praise them. I could probably defend Trump if I'm thoughtful about it, or decry him.
Can I say "Capitalism/Socialism/GMOs/Trump is dumb" and get upvoted? No. Can I point out problems (or benefits) of them? Yes--so long as I'm not inflammatory about it.
When a post involves gender and/or race, the Overton window is quite narrow. Those appear to be the most controversial with the comments section filled with snark and polemics.
No, not really. You can't 'disagree' with pedophile politician rings any more than you can disagree with the moon landing having taken place. The one is reality, the other is not. That's what the nonsensical stands for.
It is quite interesting what people are willing to believe when individuals in power state these things with great certainty. But personally I prefer to have my fiction and real-world views separated by a healthy dose of skepticism.
Many good reasons are already mentioned, but I also think a big one is because dang is here full time. This is job and he does it well.
Almost all other internet communities have mods that just do it on a volunteer basis. If those communities are big enough to be vibrant, that also means that a couple volunteer mods can't cut it. Luckily YC has the budget for keeping dang around. I would bet this place would be like most other poorly moderated communities without him.
There are no communities like this because of Eternal September like phenomena. If HN acquires a million readers tomorrow, it'll be unrecognizable very soon. Nicheness on its own creates valuable communities. Another contributing factor is the 'appalling' UI. I love it, everyone else on HN loves it but an outsider is immediately repelled
> Another contributing factor is the 'appalling' UI. I love it, everyone else on HN loves it but an outsider is immediately repelled
I think it's quite funny that the UI we prefer is so different from the ones we create in our daytime jobs. And it's also very different from the UIs in most "Show HN" posts.
I would be interested to know how many active users HN has, maybe it's because I'm in the bubble but I certainly feel like most people I meet who are "online" already know about it.
I have certainly noticed "ebbs" of an Eternal September vibe here too, but they quickly dispel and the types of comments that come from it get downvoted anyway, so it's not as noticeable.
Regardless, I am so grateful to have a place of meaningful discussion, and of so many different topics.
I think that nicheness strongly correlates with quality, but HN isn’t niche in the same way a forum on a specific topic is niche. Yet HN is still of decent quality. I guess what I’m trying to say is, why aren’t there more of these high-quality yet diverse communities.
Edit: Maybe being high quality and diverse is its niche!
> Another contributing factor is the 'appalling' UI
This was actually my only quibble with HN. I love the simplicity and the fact that HN doesn't suffer from the "obesity" that plagues modern websites, but I felt it could use some features.
For instance, the ability to filter it by time (it does have that filter already for days, months and so on, but not hours), or have an official app for the site could be awesome. Or a notification system. I already solved the first two of these issues by using 3rd party solutions (hckrnews.com and Materialistic) but supporting them officially would be great. I didn't find a solution for the 3rd issue, though; at least not one that I felt was useful.
But others don't feel the same way. When I googled around to see why these issues weren't addressed, the consensus seemed to be that there's no need for it for one reason or another. Oh, well. Other benefits of HN outweigh these minor issues, though. So overall, not that big of a deal for me.
The only feature I'd like is to be able to collapse threads. When there's lots of comments it can sometimes be almost impossible to work out what comment someone is replying to.
Oh, how weird. I've seen that [-] for god knows how long but it never even occurred to me that it would be a collapse button. For me it's in the "wrong" place, I'm used to expand/collapse functionality being on the left of the item to be expanded/collapsed. Thanks for that.
Professional moderation is expensive. Keeping HN as good as it is is literally dang's job, paid for by YCombinator (who benefit from it by using it to recruit and then promote startups).
This makes sense, although it clearly isn't enough to induce HN-like moderation. Surely there are professional moderators on similar platforms such as Reddit (besides just their volunteer subreddit moderators), and there are certainly professional moderators on Facebook as well given their revenue streams. Neither website has arrived at something like Hacker News, at least as I value it. Part of this might be the scale of those websites because it's presumably difficult to scale up moderation teams that require human training.
It is extremely tiring moderating a forum. PG even said it is worst than doing a Startup. And if you have done any sort of public forum moderation, you will know you could get burn out veryquickly.
From ~14 to 23, I volunteer moderated some gaming forums (~300k+ user size).
By and large, it wasn't terrible. Most people are nice and some have bad days.
What it did convince me of was the immense value of (a) down-featuring new users & (b) temp-banning.
Most of the trouble stemmed from either new users (by definition, uncultured) or a small subset of toxic users.
Because ultimately, communities are like biological systems, with far too many processes and independent entities going on to be controlled. In environments like that, toxic behavior can be cancerous by convincing others it's acceptable. And by the time you've found the source, multiple people are already acting like that too. Hate breeds hate.
Burn out is real though, mostly because it's a never ending job, and you tend to see a stream of people at their worst.
So thanks, dang et al. I appreciate you on the job, and I appreciate you more staying on the job.
I assume they meant restrictions or limits are applied to new users. New users could be prevented from creating a new topic or be limited on the amount of comments they can make.
All other communities are money driven ad bloated and later sponsored with bunch of crap products. And motivation is to promote stuff nonstop and moderation allows it. HN doesn't do any of those.
> Why aren’t there more of these communities, and if there is I’d like to know.
Come on, the Internet is vast, of course there are many communities like this one. But most people in those communities, like myself, do not advertise them. We do not want them ruined. You find them either by chance, or by invitation.
I think that the major filter is this: In order to receive the main benefit from Hacker News you will have to expend effort in reading and digesting the content, and engaging in meaningful discussion where possible. There are much better places to gain instant gratification.
