| unlike most people I think that HN is pretty great. Sure the site has some problems with being overly basic and not having anything that helps foster/grow good discussion[1] but overall it's good. The problem HN has is just like every other social site: people. People change; everyone is different. HN is shaped by the people here and as they evolve so does the site. What HN needs is: 1. Proper guidelines about what is and what isn't appropriate here. Types of content, subject matters and how to approach commenting. Systems to support how much HN is growing, (eg: subreddit style system for show hn, ask hn, jobs, new content types as they arise, like recently the blog posts responding to another HN blog post) 2. Active and transparent moderation. Submissions that don't meet the guidelines should be removed, as should comments, but it should be done transparently so that the community can see what is and what isn't acceptable. If a comment doesn't provide value to a thread it should be removed and if someone is consistently posting poor quality comments or comments that don't fit with the guidelines they should be removed. HN is becoming diluted, but with a proper structure that is well enforced the site will be able to handle it. It's hard to force a social site to remain the same forever, but it's possible and in the case of HN I think it would be the right choice. The most important thing to remember: you can't solve people problems with programming. [1] To address this problem I would have a reddit style notifications system and the ability to subscribe to favourite users. |