zlacker

>>codetr+(OP)
Congrats Dang, you have done a wonderful job so far and moderate one of the most fantastic online communities out there. I am sure most of the job feels somewhat thankless but I want to let you know I(and many many other users on this site) appreciate your hard work and dedication.

>>subsub+2k
If by “finest” you mean a Reddit mob mentality for tech, then yes I completely agree with this statement.

>>codedd+Vw
What do you think we could do differently? Serious question.

I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.

>>dang+HC
What HN is missing above all else is a section for meta posts, i.e. posts discussing HN itself, where questions like yours can be elaborated in detail.

It's ridiculous that this impromptu feedback session is happening here in a sub comment of a trivia thread that many users will just overlook. Feedback and community engagement should be an ongoing, (semi-)formalized process, not an ad hoc, once in a blue moon type of thing that will have been buried under a deluge of garbage by tomorrow morning.

>>p-e-w+kX
To be honest, meta subforums are however almost always toxic where people publicly hang their beef with other members out to dry. Not all requests of dang et al need to be public, you can email them (I have in the past).

>>noober+7Y
I've seen a tremendous amount of positive action coming from StackExchange's Meta forums over the years. Best of all, you don't have to visit them if you don't care about meta stuff.

It's really weird how two of the most important platforms of the open source world (HN and GitHub) have no feedback process in the commonly accepted sense. Every niche Python package has an issue tracker nowadays where problems are collected, discussed, and often resolved, with the synergy of the community of users. But the grand systems underlying all of this are somehow exempt from needing anything like that, and "email the moderators" is good enough? I don't buy that, sorry.

>>p-e-w+pZ
I don't know what the commonly accepted sense is but we have two active feedback channels: HN comments, and the inbox at hn@ycombinator.com. Active enough that I spend my days dealing with them.

>>dang+201
The "commonly accepted" system in this day and age would be an issue tracker where the public can collect, discuss, contribute ideas, and rank issues by voting. Issues can be sorted, searched, filtered, and, most importantly, closed when they have been addressed or rejected.

There are many variations of this feedback system, but comments randomly interspersed in unrelated discussions, never to be found again, is not one of them. And neither is a private mailbox.

>>p-e-w+z31
Thanks for explaining. We may be too old school for that. My take is that each site organizes around its initial conditions and it's not really desirable (or even possible) to radically change those.

I'm also not sure that an internet forum like HN is a good fit for the issue tracker model—but that could just be rationalization on my part.