[spiffworks]

The system he is suggesting is exactly what /. had, and that didn't work out too well. I have a theory that the decline of any great community begins with a conflict. In the case of /. when the SCO matter started, the issue was so black and white that there was no need of discussing it - and the community itself was so homogeneous in their opinion on this matter that there was no real discussion going on. In the case of HN, I think we're seeing a variation of the same thing - it's Apple vs everybody else, and the issue is so polarising that the discussions are almost never real discussions, they're just a bunch of people trying to prove they're right. And that is where the rot starts.

I am as guilty of this as anybody else - since I find myself rarely able to comment on any technical discussion on HN, most of my posts have been on these topics, where one does not need any more than an ideological standpoint from which to talk. Perhaps the recent precipitous decline in the quality of the comments is directly linked to the kind of stories that we've been discussing, and the kind of people who tend to comment on them.