Popular forums succumb to dogma, as seems to be a growing issue on this forum. Is dogma the inevitable end of a tech forum's creativity, or can there be a turn around?
Tech people can be very dogmatic. What's the best programming language? What's the worst programming language? Best or worst paradigm? Best algorithm for a particular purpose? Vim or Emacs? Tabs or spaces? Open source or Free Software? Add political ideology to that (even apoliticality is inherently political) and the classism and elitism of Silicon Valley (the same forum winds up containing millionaires and the proles who want their heads on a platter) and yes dogma seems inevitable unless everyone avoids ever discussing anything that anyone finds interesting.
No doubt, some of the self-moderating policies limit subjects of controversial topics. But it also filters out a lot of the routine reflexive debating that accomplishes nothing.
I'm surprised at some of the headlines that make it to the popular page. Not sure what to do about this. Maybe it can't be completely automated. Maybe there has to be some amount of manual curating of stories.
It's also important to understand that points don't mean ANYTHING on HN.
Mods have the power to weight stories so that they stay on the first page, second page, or drop off completely. Points don't matter if a mod likes or dislikes a story. Think of them as Editors and we are submitting stories they (the mods) may enjoy. The point value on the story is irrelevant.
A single person with 500 karma can "gray out" your post and suddenly you're outed as someone with a "wrong" opinion.
Users have the ability to flag posts, essentially make them invisible if they don't agree with an opinion. Get a few users to gang up on someone and you can silence people and ideas easily.
Points on HN are an illusion. People with 500+ karma and the mods are the only ones with power here.
This is all wrong, and ironic given your complaints elsewhere about misinformation on social media sites.
For example, moderators don't count for more than voters on HN. The site is moderated [1] but this is a sort of feedback mechanism to prevent the system from getting stuck in an uninteresting end-state (e.g. overwhelmed by the same few sensational stories over and over). The only thing we care about is keeping HN interesting for the community, and it's the community that decides what is interesting, not us.
The bit about users with 500+ karma is also wrong, but I doubt it makes sense to bother going further into explanations.
Yep. Point taken - pun intended. This forum has fallen into the garbage bin a long time ago. Just sort of wondering if it's a requirement of all pop tech forums to go down this way.