zlacker

>>uuilly+(OP)
I realized a long time ago that indignation about political issues was for forums what bad currency is in Gresham's law. We actively compensate for that in various ways. Sometimes when an issue seems a genuinely big deal and/or of particular interest to hackers, we compensate less. It's always a judgment call. But don't worry, if HN declines through indignation about "issues," it won't be by default. We've fended that off for years, and I'm optimistic we'll continue to.

>>pg+C6
You do it with the stories, by weighting them manually. You do not do it with the commenters. But there are factions of commenters who are introduced to the site by following stories onto it, and they stay, they promote bad sources, and they inject both politics and a particular inflammatory mode of debate into all the threads.

There are overwhelmingly more people on the site saying quality has degraded sharply --- most of them citing politics as one of the reasons --- than there are people defending it. Also, a close look at the people who do defend the current quality of the site might be instructive.

>>tptace+md
It would be good to see some data. For instance, how is the trend of average upvotes per user per month looks like? It is however clear that HN is attracting lot of marketers and activists. While I don't know all the efforts going in to fend this off, the ones I know such as banning specific URLs, dead stories etc look unorganic/bruteforce as opposed to clean algorithmic solutions. One clean solution would be to simply enable downvote button and increase the expressiveness of the community. I however has no idea why HN does not have downvote button.

>>sytelu+le
I disagree with 'tptacek on the number of actual users plaguing Hacker News like this, but I think it's fairly undeniable the phenomenon is there and it's strong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_i_see_it

You don't need data. I know, that's an unpopular phrase to say on a forum like Hacker News - but seriously, if you were alive at the keyboard on HN during the NSA debacle, you shouldn't need to ask for data. Whether there were 100 or 10 people poisoning the discussion with political strife, they were certainly the most vocal and noticeable. Their comments were easily upvoted because they were full of pathos and emphatic calls to action. As I wrote in my reply to pg here, I don't think it's enough to do what's being done now with stories - there should be a user filtering system. Restricting posts somehow could be good, but I also understand that we don't want to turn the forum into some sort of elaborate rule system.

I also believe the problem is intimately related to karma farming, and also intimately related to overpopulation. Hacker News is a fond ideal, but I don't believe it scales. Not without changes at least. I know that might be an unpopular opinion, but I think it's true.