| HN Mirror

Yes I'm talking about HN.

First of all, there are famously no real sub-sections of HN, it's just this one "home page" with 30 "stories" that are voted on by 5 million people (unique monthly viewers), and a couple other ways to sort or view the same stories based on some algorithm. So it's nearly impossible to have discussions here unless it falls into a very broad category. Therefore the discussions are broad, the opinions are broad, the reactions are broad. You have a lot of people talking past each other, arguing over nothing, reinforcing false beliefs, etc.

Second, like Reddit and its other "story-specific discussion" brethren, there is no ongoing conversation, like older forums, so all discourse has to be topical, temporary, and based around a specific piece of media and set of positions. People get trapped in debates over false premises, presented bad information, and can't reference other discussions or pick up where one left off. There is no memory or continuous conversation, so every new story is nearly random in what will be discussed, what opinions will become dominant, what group rides in to take over the thread.

Third, the site is filled with algorithms to filter, optimize, weight, and otherwise alter what content shows up on the front page. It is a highly curated, highly artificial environment, serving the purposes of YC to gather users with which to funnel potential founders into its startup machine. This is a business and we are the product, and we are being honed and shaped according to a very particular set of interests, priorities, goals. A sort of 'ideal world' according to a very small number of people.

Fourth, there's as many moderators for all of HN as there is for the average Subreddit, yet 10x as many users here. It would be trivial to simply acquire more volunteer moderators. But I believe they want to keep tight control on moderation in order to ensure they shape narratives, behaviors and culture in a specific way.

Fifth, the technology of the user interface hasn't advanced past what was available in the 90's. Besides the lack of topics/categories, tags, customization of the feed, and no way to provide feedback other than up/down vote. This is intentional in order to force the culture YC wants. But it makes it difficult to have more nuanced discussions. For example, the "up/down" vote button could easily expand to more specific reactions, ala Slashdot's moderation modifiers (Troll, Flamebait, Offtopic, Redundant, Overrated, Underrated, Funny, Informative, Interesting, Insightful, Normal). Going further, votes could have emotional modifiers (Angry, Scared, Confused, Excited) and intellectual modifiers (Incorrect, Misleading, Stupid, Correct, Factual, Agreed). The addition of this intellectual and emotional context would allow users to provide more feedback to the comments they're voting on, which helps guide users in their discourse as well as shape the culture towards more intelligent discourse. But without these signals, there is no way to divine what an upvote or downvote means, so it becomes an incredibly poor signal. The only way to know if a story is a shit-show or not is to compare total upvotes to total comments, as a majority of comments indicates a lot of emotional, uneducated people trying to force their opinion on everyone else.

This could be improved if those people could provide more context to their feedback, or the discussion continued past the initial story in a more nuanced way. But there is no way to solve this as every single story is another battle that everyone feels like they have to fight over again, because ground is never won, nuance never captured, education impossible. This forum is designed to force people to come back to reassert whatever they already believe, or argue to perpetuate it, which keeps engagement high.