I want to say what I want to say; I've always been that way, and I think people should not self censor. I'm "disgusted" by it and that's the word I want to use. I don't want to sugar coat it. But these feelings occur before even getting to controversy. They exist beyond myself here even in hacker topics.
I get tired of trying to have a deep conversation about subjects I have expertise on here about only to be armchair responded to by an amateur who has a casual understanding of the topic.
I think HN should do away with public karma and the karma system all together. It reminds me of Reddit, and it causes the same sort of behaviors to exist. I think there's great value in allowing valuable posts to percolate up, but I also think there are adults here who can read.
The real world doesn't work like a numerical karma system and it makes no sense anyway. Why should some shmuck who got karma for talking about how great templating is in Rust be able to silence someone who has something opinionated to say about RPC protocols or the difficulties of bootstrapping a company? How stupid is that? What an idiotic concept.
I think the issues that exist with HN today are common to all online communities, though. There's no "fixing" it, it just is what it is. Once they get large enough, this sort of thing just happens. I don't think there is a fix.
People rave about dang's moderation, but I'm not a fan--it's about on par with any moderation I've seen in the last 20 years. He frequently stamps out opinions that don't need to be reprimanded. This place is an echo chamber. But he does a job that isn't enviable, so good for him and the people that enjoy his work. It's still important.
I'm sure there are really cool communities out there today where interesting smart people are building things and talking about things that are interesting, but it's not here.
I saw it on a gaming forum years ago in which the members of that forum created fun, silly, and useful things ranging from 2048 to Babel, and those people went on to work for large orgs like Cloudflare and GitHub.
I'm sure there's a forum out there right now with some kids working on stuff that will put a little dent in our world tomorrow or some day soon, but I just don't see it here. My guess is it's in a place you don't expect, but where young developers hang out, and so probably another gaming or Internet interest forum--maybe Roblox's forum.
This place is ironically even hostile to people creating things they want to show off, and as you would expect, it's usually comments from people who create nothing at all.
If you don't believe me - here's a quick experiment.
1. Find an article in the new section that is getting really popular
2. Observe as it either gets taken down from the front page or never makes it there even though it beats other submissions in popularity.
3. Ask dang how it's possible that this submission never made it to the front page. He'll say it was a moderation mistake [0].