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I don't know how best to moderate or otherwise encourage better HN participation (or how to improve forums, or mailing lists, or tweet streams, or whatever they invent or rename tomorrow), but I have a thought. Can we apply a "who cares?" ethos/filter to our comments? I.e., if I am about to post a comment, before I do so I ask myself "who cares about this comment?" If the answer is Probably Nobody, then I don't post it. Simple, right? I do this all the time. I probably write and delete five comments for every comment I post here. A second question to ask the question is, is my comment adding anything to the discussion that isn't already glaringly obvious? If it's obvious, but I want to nitpick or clarify...maybe just sit on it for a while and see if the urge to comment fades? With smaller communities, we don't have to apply such harsh filters because hey, who cares, there's 10 of us. We can hash it out amongst us. But with a huge community like HN, if 9999 out of 10000 subscribers resist the urge to comment but just one does, that makes what, 50 comments? 500 nowadays? 5000? What I'm saying is, I think HN comments would be a great deal better off if everyone just sat back and said "hey, do we really need yet another armchair CEO quarterbacking on Monday (I'm not going to bother getting those idioms right) about Steve Jobs' legacy and the future of Apple, from the wizened perspective of another college student (or in my case, .NET dev)?" Even I'm following the Book of Graham and disagreeing properly and writing well-formed sentences and generally making my points clearly, am I just adding noise? Does it matter if anyone reads my comment? HN would be better if everyone just, just resisted the urge to comment and let the real experts talk. Most of us already do, but there's just too many of us now for "most of us" to be good enough. |