Ask HN: Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a case study for a class
Hi Sankalp.<p>I&#x27;ve been on HN since before 2008. I&#x27;ve seen it change a lot. Before then, I was a regular on Slashdot, on IRC, on various phpBB boards, and, before that, dial-up BBSs. I&#x27;ve got a fairly healthy offline life too and have been a part of climbing communities, business communities, and outdoor communities, and have had organizational roles in some of those. So my opinions aren&#x27;t worth more than anyone else&#x27;s, but I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time developing them nonetheless.<p>Whether a community, online or not, is &quot;healthy&quot;, or not, is largely a matter of perspective. You&#x27;ll see a lot of people say some community isn&#x27;t healthy, and then a lot of people say the same community is healthy for the same reasons that other people find it unhealthy. The only metric that makes sense to me is whether the community helps me to be a happier or better person. A community might have a lot of faults, but if the overall impact of the community on me is a positive one, then it&#x27;s healthy -- for me.<p>So from that standpoint, HN has been good to me. I learn a lot from it, it helps me stay sharp in my part of the industry, it challenges me to learn new things all the time. Some of the stuff I&#x27;ve learned here, I&#x27;ve gone on to teach others (as faithfully as I could) or just shown other people how to find it here on their own.<p>There are a lot of smart people here and a lot of interesting content on all kinds of subjects. Sometimes a subject matter expert shows up to point out everything that&#x27;s wrong with some content that I thought I was learning something from; from their perspective, that content made HN a little bit worse, but from my perspective, that content led to their participation and together that made HN a little bit better.<p>Sure, there are some &quot;personalities&quot; on here that some people disagree with from time to time, or maybe that a lot of people disagree with often. Well, those people are in every community and I don&#x27;t think HN would be more healthy without them. They could, maybe, benefit from a little more humility, but so could I.<p>I&#x27;m a bit mercurial and I&#x27;m passionate about some topics, especially those involving the health and welfare of the people around me. And, honestly, I&#x27;m just a bit of a jerk sometimes, a fault that I developed young and something I have to work on every day. That&#x27;s made me an &quot;unhealthy&quot; part of HN from time to time. It&#x27;s also my humanity, though, and I don&#x27;t think that the things I&#x27;ve written in a dispassionate voice have necessarily been better, or more impactful, or even received better, than the things I write passionately. But, I don&#x27;t want to become a part of the problem, so mostly I try to be quiet and let the smarter people lead the discussion.<p>One of the healthiest parts of HN is Dan Gackle (~dang). Okay, so some of this might be interpreted as boot-licking, so you&#x27;ll have to trust me when I say that nobody&#x27;s ever accused me of loving authority. I have never, in any of my communities, online or offline, seen a more even-handed, fair-minded, or restrained person in a moderator role. There have been some articles written about his work here (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;the-beleaguered-moderators-who-keep-hacker-news-focused-on-intellectual-curiosity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;the-beleaguered-moderators-who-keep-h...</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;letter-from-silicon-valley&#x2F;the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;letter-from-silicon-valley&#x2F;th...</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;858124&#x2F;why-y-combinators-hacker-news-silicon-valleys-premier-news-source-is-halting-all-political-debate-for-a-week&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;858124&#x2F;why-y-combinators-hacker-news-silicon-...</a>). I keep hanging around here in part because he and the other moderators here do such a great job overall. So, anybody ever wants to get rid of me, there ya go.<p>Their positions necessarily mean that they&#x27;re going to piss somebody off now and again. They have the unenviable task of often asking people not to talk -- well, argue -- about the subjects they most want to talk or argue about. I&#x27;m amazed at how many people though instead say something like, &quot;You&#x27;re right, I was out of line, sorry.&quot; I wish this was a skill they could teach, I&#x27;d sign up for that class without a second thought.<p>I do wish we had a little more balance here. We need more outspoken women here for instance. I appreciated ~jl&#x27;s presence here and a few others early on and was hopeful there would be more. We need to hear more from people who are experiencing the industry, or life, in a different way from the rest of us.<p>I wish also that there were more opportunities for people here to be, well, a little more &quot;human&quot;, I guess. HN&#x27;s nature leads it to sort of discourage humanity in the discussions. You have to make an effort to get to know anyone here, and mostly that happens outside of HN, in email or elsewhere. So to that extent, HN often feels less like a real community to me. I knew much more about the people in my old IRC communities.<p>The only other weakness I think HN has is the really short-lived nature of its discussions. In the past, online communities all had software that would allow discussions to continue for a little while, so if you read something interesting and wanted to say something interesting about it, but needed time to compose it or maybe do a little research before saying anything, that was fine. You could take a little bit of time to write something better, and people would still read it. On HN, once something isn&#x27;t on the front page anymore, nobody reads it. If something is on the front page for a long time, then it usually gets so many comments that there&#x27;s no point adding to them, because nobody will navigate through hundreds of other comments to find the new thing you wrote, even if it&#x27;s good. And if something&#x27;s on the front page for a short time, you have to rush to add to the discussion before it disappears forever. It&#x27;s a bit like the whole forum is always doing a bit of methamphetamine, and that&#x27;s not great.<p>I never know what to put in the last line of comments like these.