The first year or two on HN, when the community was smaller and tighter knit, I found that when I recognized other usernames, I tended to feel an emotional attachment to them. The userbase was smaller, and thus, easier to say, "Oh, it's nostrademons. I like him. I'll reply to his comment". I felt that familiarity facilitated a sense or cordiality and camaraderie in our discussions. I think that was largely a function of group size.
I've lost that sense of camaraderie here in the past year. I find myself contributing less to the discussions, and I certainly don't submit near as much as I used to. I still lurk a lot, but I don't recognize a lot of the current users and I have no sense of personal attachement to most people here aside from the friends I've made over the last couple of years here. I imagine it's the same with a lot of other users.
If users could somehow be herded or segmented into smaller groups, that the sense of familiarity, community, and camaraderie might be able to continue in the discussions while a site scales. I don't know if it's necessarily a function of what limits, permissions or abilities that would be placed on individuals within the smaller groups, however. In meat space, an individual's actions and interactions change dramatically depending on group size. I suspect that similar forces work online, too.
The question is, how do you segment the community into smaller groups or swarms? I actually think that this can be acheived using recommendations. I have a hypothesis that I want to test. My hypothesis is that if reddit had succeeded in their recommendation engine, there would not have been a need for Hacker News. Why? Because those of us early reddit readers who were interested in hacking and founding would have remained somewhat clustered together automatically via article recommendations. We wouldn't have gotten irritated at the trolls and left. We would still be reading and commenting together on similar articles. All the while, the site could grow, and the users that were heavily intersted in politics, religion/atheism, zombies, etc... would have been ushered together via common recommendations as well. I'm looking forward to testing this hypothesis with http://newsley.com if and when I can get enough users to start doing recommendations.
> when I recognized other usernames, I tended to feel an emotional attachment to them
I think this is the source of all politeness/nastiness (both here on HN and in real life). It's hard to be gratuitously rude to someone you know personally... it's hard to even be passive aggressive.
Now that HN is bigger, it is by default more anonymous. It is less a group of friends sharing links as it is a public forum. Where insulting someone used to be equivalent to saying it to their face, it's now more akin to heckling from the stands.
I too have been coming here less and less. I came to HN for the discussion... the links were only secondary to me. Often the best discussions came out of mediocre links. But now I feel like all I see is catfights between minor programming stars, people debating whether relational databases are really dead, and the latest scandal involving rackspace/twitter/zygna/facebook. All of that stuff is destructive. It's all just churning the muck of the internet... and more importantly, doesn't make you a better person for having read it.
We used to laugh whenever the front page would fill with Erlang articles. Even when things were 'that bad' ... they weren't really that bad because the discussion was still insightful. I'm really not trying to sound like one of those 'back in the good old days' people, but I'm starting to become skeptical about the value of coming here.
I've lost that sense of camaraderie here in the past year. I find myself contributing less to the discussions, and I certainly don't submit near as much as I used to. I still lurk a lot, but I don't recognize a lot of the current users and I have no sense of personal attachement to most people here aside from the friends I've made over the last couple of years here. I imagine it's the same with a lot of other users.
If users could somehow be herded or segmented into smaller groups, that the sense of familiarity, community, and camaraderie might be able to continue in the discussions while a site scales. I don't know if it's necessarily a function of what limits, permissions or abilities that would be placed on individuals within the smaller groups, however. In meat space, an individual's actions and interactions change dramatically depending on group size. I suspect that similar forces work online, too.
The question is, how do you segment the community into smaller groups or swarms? I actually think that this can be acheived using recommendations. I have a hypothesis that I want to test. My hypothesis is that if reddit had succeeded in their recommendation engine, there would not have been a need for Hacker News. Why? Because those of us early reddit readers who were interested in hacking and founding would have remained somewhat clustered together automatically via article recommendations. We wouldn't have gotten irritated at the trolls and left. We would still be reading and commenting together on similar articles. All the while, the site could grow, and the users that were heavily intersted in politics, religion/atheism, zombies, etc... would have been ushered together via common recommendations as well. I'm looking forward to testing this hypothesis with http://newsley.com if and when I can get enough users to start doing recommendations.