[crististm]

This is not a one year problem. And it will stay that way because, as you know, HN is a corporation. Not a public forum.

Maintaining these rules allow dang@co to maintain the position of control over what happen in HN. The corollary is that changing them will dilute their control. They found a local maximum of discourse level and they keep it that way.

The justification that the discourse on HN is maintained at a high level by not talking about the rules is at least condescending to the participants.

It doesn't matter to them if they lose you on these grounds since talking about the rules appears only on extremes which are shallow in a normal distribution. They will lose the few participants that care enough about that while maintaining those in the middle. (Of course, cutting of the extremes will grow newer ones in the empty space but I digress...).

What happens with time is that people adjust their discourse to the middle ground making it void of any new or interesting information. Thus, HN becomes an echo chamber of mainstream ideas and people will leave when they got bored enough of the same thing. We're already there and @dang is more vocal now because he knows it.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

I only partly agree with your view. It might be so, but there is a genuine reason behind not discussing the rules: they're always off-topic. For people like me who come to HN to read an interesting discussion about tech issues, anything mentioning downvoting is almost automatically useless in the sense that it doesn't bring any new information, it's not interesting, it doesn't affect me in any way.

Yes, if I were in charge of HN I would solve certain issues differently, and so would you, but it's a private forum run by someone else, so we have to obey in order to participate, whether we like it or not. The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.

[Razengan]

> The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.

Oh fucking boy, no. What even is that logic

We have a bunch of tabs open on a bunch of other social sites and forums. We don’t prefer HN to any other place, we just think something about it sucks badly enough to express our disdain of it.

[mistermann]

Overton Window 201

Moloch is always and everywhere.