[sankalpb]

thanks for the response, as well as for the alternative 'bar at a train station' example as a way to think about HN, rather than as a 'community' - I'm curious about the last point you make, about how an online community is 'healthy' in so far as can make any of its members a 'better person' - do you think this goes both ways, so to speak? 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'?

[carapace]

Cheers!

> 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.