| I wish you all the best. I've contemplated quitting HN quite a few times as well, I might do it myself, but the community with all its flaws I still enjoy at times. There are a few people who think they're better than most, but that's not just a HN problem, it's a problem everywhere, people on HN are just better at articulating their point and getting upvotes. This part I couldn't agree more with: Fluff posts from John Gruber, who rarely says anything at all of value (and I say this as someone who spends most of my time working on iOS projects) are extraordinarily popular because it fits within the community’s ideology John Gruber could literally publish a blog post with no content and just a title and it would hit the front-page of Hacker News and people would be commenting about how they get his metaphor and try connecting it to a new Apple gadget or sales report... Very overrated. You missed one other point: the constant homepage submissions about Google Go. I've used it a couple of times myself and I think it's a great language, but the amount of posts about it you see on this site hitting the homepage are ridiculous. How much praise can you sing for something without repeating yourself? The same thing seems to be happening with Google's AngularJS. I recently saw a submission for a Sublime Text editor clone someone wrote and open sourced. The author had disabled the ability to post an issue on the Github repo and people took the author to school and back in the comments section about it. The author clearly stated if you want to contribute, send me a pull request because I don't have time to fix issues. This guy open sourced some amazing code (written in Go of all languages) and instead of saying thank you, a few decided to laud the author with negativity. Hacker News has flaws, I think over time they will work themselves out and the community will tame itself down (I hope), for the moment I'll hold on and enjoy the ride. I love nothing more than to take top commenters oozing negativity to town. Being able to tag and filter submissions would be amazing, I would immediately remove all Go and AngularJS posts if I could. Maybe someone should create a Chrome extension that does it? Take it one step further and add in some basic sentiment analysis to hide any negative comments on submissions. |
So a Chrome extension to filter again (eg tag comment as "technical", "ideology" and see what others do) could be v interesting.
Unfortunately the most thoughtful, most civil comment threads, seem to disappear the fastest off the home page - and attract the fewest participants. This could be a community issue or a chicken and egg situation...