Is HN a ‘healthy online community’? I’m doing a case study for a class

Yes and no.

I think it's better in terms of overall "health" (content, toxicity, moderation, privacy, spam) than other, more popular forums (e.g. Reddit), but that could just be directly because of its small size and relatively niche appeal.

My biggest problem is that it stopped being a community for tech entrepreneurs a long time ago. Everyone is now bearish on everything by default. Every idea is pointless. Every new product is useless. Every company is evil. There's no point building or launching anything. It's just people complaining about everything rather than improving things and building the future.

I think HN is one of the better communities I've participated in.

A few reasons I can see:

1) It's text- and hyperlink-based. Multimedia forums become meme recycling centers.

2) It centers discussions around submitted links. This avoids endless, pointless discussions about the forum participants themselves.

3) The submitted links focus on technology and business issues, which attract more serious participants. There is no random board.

4) Moderation is professional rather than community based. Voting has an effect but can be overridden.

My method of determining if a community is "healthy" (online or otherwise) is to evaluate it after I've (temporarily) left (e.g. for the day). Do I feel angry, upset, sad? Do I feel wiser? If somebody says something I disagree with, but afterwards I find that it has brought up lots of interesting insights in my own mind, then regardless of whether I agreed with them or not, I consider it healthy.

Conversely, even if I agree a lot with what is said, if afterwards I'm angry, sad, etc. then it wasn't healthy. When younger, I used to think that more anger at what was wrong in the world, would help to fix it. Experience has taught me that actions taken out of anger, even if well-intentioned, are almost always unskillful. I want more insight, more understanding, and HN aids me in getting that far more often than, say, Facebook, which I now use only on Sundays, and not every Sunday, as a way of making sure I don't let its toxic stew of opinions infect my emotions.

I cannot honestly remember how I discovered HN, but I return because, even when I disagree with most of what is said on a topic, it is typically the case that I find my own thinking to be more nuanced or more interesting afterwards.

It's healthier than many other online communities, but that's not a terribly high bar to clear.

The moderation is reasonably effective against the most extremely toxic content, but IMHO has a tendency to privilege toxic opinions stated in measured tones against the pushback they create.

As for member downvotes, I can often predict which comments of mine will attract downvotes: humor will tend to get downvoted as irrelevant, while the relevancy of replies complaining about said humor is rarely questioned.

Certain subjects are downvote magnets: Criticism of Elon Musk, scepticism about nuclear power, support for intellectual property rights (especially in the case of music), support for ethnic and gender inclusiveness. It's possible, though, that these are just hot button issues, and the opposite opinions also attract downvotes.

The technology backing HN is still massively inferior in every respect to what Usenet was 30 years ago. I tend to read each thread only once, and then only follow up discussions of my own comments. Following a thread over several days is a near hopeless endeavor. Why doesn't anybody combine the light touch moderation of HN, combined with the tools that a decent newsreader like nn or GNUS could provide?

One interesting datapoint that I think distinguishes HN from even well-curated subreddits: the culture actively discourages humor-only comments. Making a thoughtful post that happens to contain a pun or a comic exaggeration is fine; but cluttering up comments with one-line jokes, off-topic cheap shots, etc, that contain no real information, tends to be aggressively downvoted.

HN is a unique outlier for being highly informative and somewhat rational while being designed around an inherently toxic and emotionally charged format (the popularity/upvote system).

I believe this is entirely due to the strict rules in place here and the great moderation.

However, there's obviously a couple filter bubbles at play. For example, if I write a post claiming that [insert tech company] is doing [insert thing] to abuse privacy, it will reach the front page and be accepted as fact regardless of whether I made it up. This applies for numerous themes/topics, ie. VC is evil, Marketing is evil, etc. HN tends to be cynical about everything.

Don't get me wrong, I've probably learned more from this community than any other place on the internet. It is my preferred portal through which to explore the internet. But I also wish we could improve on the undercurrent of frustrated cynicism here.

I'm anticipating a lot of downvotes, but I couldn't think of a less healthy online platform except for maybe Reddit or Facebook.

Really, the best way to use HN is to keep a list of the interesting blogs that get posted here. I check in every now and then and add the blogs to my RSS list and away I go.

Year after year, HN gets worse and worse. It's constant complaining and whining, the discussions are INCREDIBLY trivial and just vapor-y. Show HN, for example. In Show HN, someone is presenting the community something they designed, created, implemented, polished, there's weeks or months or years of effort involved. Most of the time, the comments of these posts are "Oh, well the text-margin is 1px off" or some stupid detail that nobody using the product actually cares about, and then the rest are complaining about those comments, like what I'm guilty of doing right now.

I don't really know what could be done to fix it. Finally, let me add this: If you want the most pleasant HN experience, click the LINK, and stay far away from the comments.

It's all relative... Having participated in many online communities starting from back in dial-up BBSes and message networks, it's as healthy as any I've experienced.

I don't remember how I got into HN... I stay because I happen to appreciate the comments, often I get more from the comment system than the actual articles. There are a lot of people with diverse technical knowledge and insight.

It's far from perfect, but it's still healthier in that you get a relatively diverse set of topics and opinions on those topics in a mostly rational discussion. There are some subjects that will see an unbalanced level of moderation based more on opinion than hard fact, that said it's still better than most.

I think the only area that tends to really flow emotional is when the topic of politics comes up. People are very tribal in terms of what they believe and support and will up/down-vote instinctively, regardless of merit. It tends to cut in every direction. I would love to see counts of up and down votes on a given post, as I'm sure there are many that while they are -2 to +2 have seen many votes in both directions...

All in all, I think the moderators are relatively fair in their disposition of the rules such that they are, and in general fosters discussion in good faith. I've seen many opposing views discussed at length, and don't recall anything that went over the line (calls for violence or personal assault), with minimal ad hominem.

Is HN a healthy online community?

Yes

The moderation scheme makes it harder to troll, so you actually have to come up with some clever insights in order to troll effectively. Though, when people need to back up their comments, the quality improves. Articles/links that are voted up are often interesting or insightful.

On the other hand, participants are still somewhat married to preconcieved ideas, so moderations and comments are sometimes shallow and predictable. It's still hard to come through, though better grounds for free-thinking than many other forums. Humour is often lost here.

I believe that not being able to see the "upvotes" on each comment is a good thing, and really cools down a lot of the intense vibes. People place way to much emphasis on this number, and I'm glad we don't have them here. Also good: submissions cannot be downvoted. Flagging appears to be a kind of pseudo-downvoting in that it causes submissions to fall in rank, but does not effect the upvote score. Compare with other sites like reddit or the stackoverflows, it really sucks submitting stuff there and then having it be downvoted to oblivion. Once you attach a number to something, it heavily biases your opinion of that thing, be it number of followers, or dollars, or upvotes, or whatever. There's probably some psychology experiment I should be citing here...

Here's my thoughts on what a healthy community is: People are basically dysfunctional, though to varying degrees, and so any congregation of people in the flesh or online will also be dysfunctional, to varying degrees.

So there is no way to assign the label "healthy" to an online community, only a way to compare it as more or less healthy.

For any social media site, there are two things to separate out: The aggregation aspect (information distribution) and the community conversation. A site that disseminates low quality articles, slanted articles, or a limited varied of articles is not as healthy in terms of the aggregation aspect as one that is rich in variety and quality. For my own opinion, HN has made me aware of a lot of great resources, so I think it is very "healthy" in this regard. Typically the political posts are significantly less quality.

In terms of community engagement, one thing I personally pay attention to is how often my buttons are being pushed. Sometimes that's due to a flaw in my own biases and opinions where I can't take any alternative views. However, usually conflict of opinion that is highly emotional, imprecise in statement, and poorly thought out are the types of comments that work me up.

Generally, on HN, I don't get worked up on anything except for the political posts. Flame wars about writing documentation in markdown or not are actually kind of entertaining to me. Those kinds of posts don't push my buttons, and I suspect most other people's, to the same degree.

This is a topic of great interest to me. Somewhere around the late eighties or early nineties I began a somewhat morbid hobby of watching online communities die.

I will try to keep my personal conclusions out of it and allow you to form your own, but will at least hint at my methodology. First, you say "healthy" and I say "not dead." Having seen a lot of communities declare themselves healthy and vibrant, doing all the right things, and so forth, only for them to wither and die, statements of health are meaningless.

Look for multiple measures. You know it is dead when they pull the plug, but what about the withering before that? What does that look like? Identifying that is going to be key to determine what health looks like, because it looks like "not dying."

User turnover. Moderator turnover. Account creation. Account retention. Rate of comments per user. Is the "old guard" still present? (This sound subjective but can be worked on)

Less objective are incidents of "purity spirals." These are a great way for a community to die. Find incidents and examine them. Look for commonalities that can be abstracted into numerics.

I lurked around HN for a long time before making my first comment. It's the first community that made me realize the potential and extent of massive misinformation on the Internet. It also raised my awareness about my own biases and common fallacies. But I personally have never had a sense of "community" from these parts. I value the information and discussions because it's rare on the Internet to come across a group of people that are so focused on keeping each other in check when it comes to facts. It's full of contrarians. It's like an automatic mental mechanism for many here. Articles and comments are challenged sometimes seemingly as a simple intellectual exercise. It does force you, the spectator to realize that the coin truly has two sides (sometimes more). The bs filter on HN is also relatively high, when compared to other places on the Internet. As you can expect, that leaves little room for the warm and fuzzy tolerance that one has to display in a friendly community where people's beliefs are respected. The "well, actually" is strong in HN.

I'd say HN is fairly healthy. As others have pointed out, it's relative, but HN is definitely healthier than, say, Slashdot, or many Reddit subs. That said, there are subs on Reddit that I consider healthy, but that's a separate issue.

What makes a forum "healthy" to me? I'd say a few things stand out to me (this list is not comprehensive, mind you).

1. The question "do I learn something from interacting here?" In the case of HN the answer is very often "yes". Now, by "learning" I don't mean "mastering" anything. I just mean "I learned about some person, topic, resource, book, article, field, etc., in a way that deserves further exploration and may be of benefit to me." That happens quite often here, both from the submitted links and the ensuing discussion.

2. Do I take away anything actionable? Again, quite often yes. The action may be "bought this book based on a recommendation", or "downloaded this new framework to start experimenting with it", or whatever, but I definitely find actionable, valuable information here.

3. Is there an absence of most racist / misogynistic / jingoistic / xenophobic / bigoted rhetoric, conspiracy theories, complete snake oil, etc? Mostly I find the answer to be "yes". You will see accusations of misogyny here from time to time in certain threads, and you may see little flare ups of nationalistic sentiment or whatever ever now and then, but on balance I find HN to be pretty good in that regard.

HN is not a healthy community for me to participate in, but it's got high variance output to a greater degree than anything except my Twitter follow group and my Slack private groups - i.e. it's the highest quality uncurated source I have.

The reason I say that it is not healthy is that it is full of misinformation and sensationalism. I get upset at reading things I know are lies or errors perpetuated through confident ignorance and end up attempting to even it out by sensationalizing the other side (and perhaps in my anger doing some of the things that annoy me). I've noticed this weird behaviour in my parents arguing with their friends about politics and for the most part I'd removed myself from that but HN brings it forth.

What is valuable about HN is that you get some real experts talking about stuff they know well and startup entrepreneurs engage here in a way that's often closer than just posting on ProductHunt, and I like talking to other people like that.

Actually, thank you for asking this question, I think it's pretty obvious at this point that I should just stop using this website. But I needed the question to be asked. Should just use that time building and spend it on my private groups.

Despite its flaws, I honestly can't think of a community that comes close to HN in terms of size/healthiness. I mainly attribute its success to:

1) Strong moderation.

2) Being apolitical: ideological/political/religious debates are generally off-topic.

3) Meta comments being discouraged: insinuations of shilling, soliciting down votes, complaining that a submission is off-topic, etc.

Miles better than anything else I've seen. Most of the times my comments are downvoted I can see in hindsight "ok fair that wasn't a great comment".

Other communities that's not always clear

You must not forget that is the news aggregator for ycombinator. Thus it's rather biased at times.

That said, I disagree with other commenters who describe HN as people discussing about things they know nothing about. Some people may lean out of the window too far, what I find interesting though is the amount of expertise assembled here. No matter how exotic a topic is, somebody will show up who has first hand experience and actually is an expert.

I've been visiting HN (many years) and mostly enjoy it. The difficult thing for me is how hard it is to post anything and have it stay in the headlines long enough to have anyone give you feedback.

Very easy to add comments though. So guess what? You end up with a lot of 'noise' in the comments and very little 'signal' elsewhere.

I don't have a proper 'solution' and maybe HN is just perfect the way it is, flaws and all.

I'll just say I'm usually as interested or more interested to read the comments on a link as in the link itself.

I now find it annoying when looking at other links that I don't have the usual skeptical/thoughtful HN take on it.

I feel like this site can be a little negative sometimes. or worse crickets.

One thing I like is a lot of people back up their statements with links or examples. or other reasoning.

Absolutely not. HN is far too insular and full of self-assured personalities who think themselves experts on topics far outside their expertise to be considered healthy. It is also filled to the brim with groupthink, reality denial, and often a complete lack of both empathy and perspective. A significant chunk of this is likely due to the demographic skew of commenters here combined with the negative aspects of being technically-minded enough to want to participate in HN in the first place. That being said, it's still superior to most online communities due to its focus specifically on technical topics (you get a lot of focused content and actual experts chiming in) and the moderation (both from the HN org and self-policing to prevent inane meme comments typical of communities like reddit).

Here's what a healthy online community has: respect for other members, maturity, empathy, self-awareness, strong moderation, and a diverse enough set of views from participants to make conversations well-rounded and thought provoking.

How and why I arrived here: the subreddits I frequented degraded in quality to the point where I wanted a less-mainstream tech news aggregator, and several redditors recommended HN. I actually had no interest in commenting here until I got far enough along in my career to have actual insight to share on relevant topics. I suspect I'm quite a bit older than most HN participants these days.

Why I stay: a larger portion of content here aligns with my interests and career than elsewhere online and the overall experience has not yet degraded to reddit levels of picking through trash to find gems.

I don't think there is a single definition for the health of a community. The leaders of the community define what their goals are, and based on that health can be assessed. For HN that is things like high quality, technically oriented links & discussions, as well as minimization of things like noise, spam, clickbait, trolling or flaming.

I think on those metrics HN does pretty well. Obviously not perfect, things fall through the cracks all the time, but way better than other communities that strive for the same thing.

I don't remember how I originally got into HN, but what drives me to stay is alignment in goals. I _want_ the things HN is optimizing for.

I think it's still pretty good, and I still learn a lot from the submitted articles and their discussions, more than any other social network/discussion site I can currently think of. For a site that constantly has discussions on topics that typically trigger egos, while also giving a lot of leeway to anonymous account posting, it's about as civil as I can imagine any Internet site being these days.

Your question presupposes HN is a community. To the extent that community is “a group of people with shared interests,” I don’t know how you would define that as healthy or not - health refers to fitness for function, and there’s no inherent function in “common interests.” The bar there is essentially, “does the community impede bullshitting and sharing links of interest?” No, it doesn’t, cool, it must be healthy.

But I think most anthropologists define community as traditionally involving shared resources and problems. Traditionally this entailed a geographic proximity, but it didn’t have to (e.g., the HIV activist community in the 80s and 90s). Given that geography isn’t actually a requirement, you might ask a fair question: what proportion of online “communities” are communities at all, and does that relate to their “health”, however you define it. In that instance, you might refer to health as the ability to marshal resources to effectively manage those problems. By that definition, HN isn’t a community at all - it marshals no resources, tackles no problems, and has no common set of either. Health is orthogonal.

Hacker News has incredibly good long term retention of active users (commenters/submitters). I just published a blog post on the subject (https://probdist.com/2020/03/28/the-graying-of-hacker-news-u...).

Lots of users on HN are actively contributing for years after sign up. This to me is a good sign of health. The counter point is of course, the rapid drop off in engagement after the initial month. Where a large number of users each month never return to the site.

The average comment on Hacker News last month was written by a user with 5 years of tenure on the site. Depending on your perspective you could argue this is a good or a bad thing (new users aren't contributing as much as old users, or old users are continuing to contribute!).

A healthy online community is one that I can learn from, where I can find insightful discussions. That's what attracts me the most to HN. I've learned a ton since discovering it, some things had a direct positive impact on my life.

This doesn't come without a cost : HN is highly addictive, like every other social media website.

This is not necessarily the criteria I use to determine 'health' in offline communities. There is a "human" side that is more important offline.

What I miss the most about HN : the ability to have discussions around political and controversial topics. I can't understand why a community like HN isn't able to have thoughtful, well reasoned discussions around political and controcersial issues. When those don't get flagged or hidden by moderators, I enjoy them a lot.

I feel like people are just listing generically good ideas for social atmosphere, but to me an entire collection of those things does not amount to health -- things like warmth, empathy, forgiveness, etc.

One of the things I notice about Hacker News is that it wants things. It wants all sorts of things. There's clash but there's also recognizable consensus on want. What I also see is that HN won't get what they want, and I don't believe they're any closer to effectively organizing to get what they want, whether it's unions or racially fair hiring or a different scheme in how money works.

HN is not effective, and that is why I view them as unhealthy. HN wants things and it shall not have them. You can put warmth and love in that package, but it's still impotent.

What are some examples of communities that are significantly "healthier" than HN?

I'm particularly curious about communities that are "similar" to HN. Use whatever definitions of "healthier" and "similar" you think are appropriate.

Look I don't think it's the medium really. HN is quite similar to Reddit. Reddit I wouldn't consider to be that healthy as it's really driven by strong politics and it's sometimes impossible to express an opinion reasonably without getting into trouble. The big difference: the people. I think HN is a healthy community because it consists to a degree of like minded people. Smart people with an interest in programming and technology business/startups. Whereas Reddit is everybody from teenagers to farmers. That's not to say I dislike Reddit. I was on that site many years.

I'm a big fan of the discussion and insightful comments provided by the community. Things tend to be quite negative though. I wonder if that's just how tech people are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> communities with controversy aren't necessarily 'unhealthy'

I recommend you explore the concept of "agonism" – which claims that (certain forms of) conflict and disagreement are essential components of a healthy democratic system. Many parallels could be drawn to online communities (specifically) and the curation of productive, social spaces (in general.)

In this era of conflict avoidance and information siloing... promoting the right sorts of disagreement might actually do a great social good!

Good luck with your assignment.

Even before we get to the "healthy" part, I'd argue HN is a true community, which is hard to say of other social networks today..

1. The commenters here have some common interests beyond the lowest common denominator of politics/pop culture/humor(memes). In larger networks this part often breaks down.

2. It genuinely has shared values - particularly curiosity, skepticism and debate. Plenty of negative ones too - cynicism, anger, grandiosity but hey :)

3. It is NOT a ad-click-maximizing dopamine slot-machine like FB. When networks go down that path, i think they stop being communities altogether and become something more like TV.

4. It is more resistant to group think than e.g Reddit subs like /r/investing because it has a broader scope I think.. networks with a overly narrow focuses inevitably become echo-chambers the network converges on a consensus view. HN is somehow not completely defined by "i'm interested in X, so lets go to /r/X", its broader than that, but narrow enough to not

Maybe i'm behind the times, but HN is one of the very few places I'd even call an online community, forget healthy. "Healthy" at the scale of a global community can only be a sterile echo chamber. HN is as unhealthy and flawed as its members, which is something to be proud of. I've never seen a real community of people I'd describe purely as healthy.

There’s a lot of comments on this thread, and I apologize if I’m saying anything that’s been said multiple times already.

I would say that HN is the healthiest comment driven site I’ve been part of in the 27 years I’ve been on the internet. It’s big, and still doesn’t succumb to the trolls who tend to be the biggest problem on anonymous comment threads. There are a few rules here that are pretty well policed, bit I think the single most important one is to read and respond to comments in the most positive light possible. It keeps threads civil, and tends to starve the trolls.

It also helps that we have very good moderators.

I will say that it feels it feels like the heart of what made HN isn’t as apparent anymore. Many of the strong core that was here isn’t as prevalent anymore, but despite this, and it’s seeming growth it still hasn’t succumbed to the poor behavior of a minority of users that tend to disrupt and subvert communities like this after a surprisingly short amount of time.

I keep coming back because the comments tend to have good gems, and a good take on the main article, without having to deal with most of the vitriol of most comment sections.

Hi Sankalp.

I've been on HN since before 2008. I'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'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't worth more than anyone else's, but I've spent a lot of time developing them nonetheless.

Whether a community, online or not, is "healthy", or not, is largely a matter of perspective. You'll see a lot of people say some community isn'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's healthy -- for me.

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've learned here, I've gone on to teach others (as faithfully as I could) or just shown other people how to find it here on their own.

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'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.

Sure, there are some "personalities" 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't think HN would be more healthy without them. They could, maybe, benefit from a little more humility, but so could I.

I'm a bit mercurial and I'm passionate about some topics, especially those involving the health and welfare of the people around me. And, honestly, I'm just a bit of a jerk sometimes, a fault that I developed young and something I have to work on every day. That's made me an "unhealthy" part of HN from time to time. It's also my humanity, though, and I don't think that the things I'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't want to become a part of the problem, so mostly I try to be quiet and let the smarter people lead the discussion.

One of the healthiest parts of HN is Dan Gackle (~dang). Okay, so some of this might be interpreted as boot-licking, so you'll have to trust me when I say that nobody'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 (https://thenewstack.io/the-beleaguered-moderators-who-keep-h..., https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th..., https://qz.com/858124/why-y-combinators-hacker-news-silicon-...). 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.

Their positions necessarily mean that they'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'm amazed at how many people though instead say something like, "You're right, I was out of line, sorry." I wish this was a skill they could teach, I'd sign up for that class without a second thought.

I do wish we had a little more balance here. We need more outspoken women here for instance. I appreciated ~jl'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.

I wish also that there were more opportunities for people here to be, well, a little more "human", I guess. HN'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.

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'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'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's good. And if something's on the front page for a short time, you have to rush to add to the discussion before it disappears forever. It's a bit like the whole forum is always doing a bit of methamphetamine, and that's not great.

I never know what to put in the last line of comments like these.

All judges of health are subjective obviously, and while HN has flaws I would judge it to be, yes.

The main thing I would point to justify that it is healthy is that the vast majority of the comments are informed, well written and productive. They add to the information in the linked article, and provide insight from multiple points of view.

There’s a very long and deep dive into the topic of healthy communities here https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html which I enjoyed.

To borrow from that analysis I would say that HN do exhibit some tribal thinking tendencies but over all dissenting perspectives are tolerated enough to allow new knowledge about a wide variety of topics to bubble up.

As someone noted the seemingly large amount of subject experts present for those topics might contribute more to this than the actual culture though.

And often enough some self proclaimed expert, or an entire clique of them, spin off into some thread sharing their take. But I’d say there just enough skepticism presented to prevent things to devolve into pure cargo culting.

It can get very insular and dogmatic at times. Some common views -

1. "I don't know who would have smart speakers at home. " Most people don't care.

2. GOOGLE is Lord Voldemort.

3. FB is Sauron.

4. Startup life > Big company

5. "Who would live in the bay area. I am happy at my ranch doing remote work."

Hacker News is good because it's a middle ground. It's not toxic like metafilter where users know each other well enough to form factions. It's not as big as reddit so that you lose any sense of community.

Yes, I'd say for what it's trying to achieve it's pretty healthy and the responses here seem to confirm that. The limit of text only and the voting mechanism prevent the worst instincts and I think the moderation is okay.

I'd heard about it shortly after it started and have been following ever since although not as much as I used to.

I like it as a place to get exposed to "modern" software topics but I feel like I get more value out of it after learning the overall bias of the commenters.

I feel (no proof whatsoever) that the downvoting behavior suggests juvenile members are the heaviest voters.

Kind of. There are a lot of smart people who think that their expertise in one narrow domain transfers universally. There is a lot of bikeshedding and reinventing concepts from first principles, often badly.

I would say it is sort of the online community equivalent of a healthy big city, not a healthy small town. As such, it's not reasonable to expect the same sense of community here as you would with a smaller social group.

Last I heard, HN gets about 5 million unique visitors a month. The human brain can cope effectively with a community of around 150 members.

For a time, I was the lead mod for The TAG Project. Prior to my arrival, the founder had done some good internal research on her group of online communities (a set of email lists) and found that 20 percent of members were regular and active, another 10 percent posted once or occasionally and the rest were lurkers.

This seems to be roughly true for other communities I have participated in elsewhere.

If you do the math, that means you will have about 150 active members posting regularly when you get to about 750 members. In my experience, once you get to about 750 or 800 members, you start seeing splinter groups form and you start getting new things budding out of that.

Other small email lists began to spin off of one of those email lists once it got big enough.

So if you want a strong sense of community, you are talking about a small town atmosphere where you have about 150 active members and some number of lurkers.

I have passingly thought that the leader board of HN should maybe be 150 names long instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community -- to help foster that same pattern of "there are 150 people whom we all know and can follow all the relationships and so forth" that you get with a smaller online community. But I don't feel strongly about it and I don't see any point in making it some hill to die on, so I think I have mentioned it in comments maybe once or twice before for some reason and that's it.*

Big cities rely on formality and such to account for the fact that we don't all know each other well etc. HN does a better job than most communities of actually applying the rules fairly even-handedly and not just playing favorites for certain insiders.

There are some really corrupt communities that pretend they are nice places, but the rules are applied by the mods completely differently for "insiders" versus "outsiders" and it's very toxic. No, they probably won't help you assimilate either.

This is not true here. The mods don't have to personally like you to give you a fair shake if you will make an effort to reform your bad habits and actually play by the rules.

I think HN is a healthy space, but no longer has a strong sense of community like it did when I first joined. But I was always an outsider looking in who never really got to benefit from that strong sense of community (in fact, it arguably did me a lot of harm).

I stuck around because it had those big city formality things already going on and was kind of the least worst option for my needs and purposes. It had virtues that helped me make it work for me in spite of humans being human and certain problems (like sexism) being rampant and inescapable across the globe.

* Edit: I run my mouth a lot. It's probably more than twice in the last decade, but I certainly don't harp on it.

I posted something slightly wrong by accident and was voted down like crazy. In a human conversation it would have been easily corrected. But on the whole, I really like the HN community.

I feel sometimes you get upvoted or downvoted more depending on politics more on the inner comment quality.

For pure tech and startup comments, I would say it's very healthy.

Here you find a lot of people trying hard and learning or already building something in accordance with proven and successful guidelines, which is much better than many similar internet aggregations out there. After that, sure, there is some latent negativity on here, it sometimes resembles a cult and it is not the Red Cross charity for sure. All in all, healthy maybe, a daily nudge for sure.

From my perspective it’s pretty healthy. It’s just very insular and inward focussed. Checkout n-gate which does a great job of pointing out the inherent contradictions here. My only other criticism is that moderation tries too hard to make this place “of great minds discussing ideas” outside of material conditions. Lots of nasty stuff gets a pass for being academically delivered.

I do find it funny that a lot of posters find this place left leaning. I guess I could see it as such if you take left wing as Democratic neoliberalism but from a lefty European perspective it’s the same uninspired, technocratic guff we get from our mainstream right wing parties.

> What criteria do you use to determine 'health' in online communities?

Level of activity, quality of discourse (that's hard to measure, but like art vs. the pronz, "I know it when I see it"), ease of use, and the ability to get and give useful feedback on relevant topics.

> How do these differ from those criteria you use to determine ‘health’ in offline communities you are in?

Mostly the same. "If you're the smartest person in the room... find a new room" is true in real life as online. Things like culture, language, and hygiene are more of a consideration in person; I don't care what you smell like when you're posting on reddit.

> How does HN exemplify or not exemplify 'healthy' behaviors? What behaviors of your own would you acknowledge may or may not contribute to the overall ‘health’ of HN?

Active, knowledgeable, and able to refute obviously bad points (though it still has its circlejerks at times) -- I would characterize this as healthy. HN also has a specific focus -- highly technical -- and is free of ads and other unwelcome overt marketing (though I'm 100% sure there is covert marketing happening). It is an organ of YCombinator, so some degree of start-up shilling is expected and tolerated (even welcome, sometimes), but again it is expected and thus easy to avoid or ignore.

HN also is able to get rid of or generally marginalize the few, obviously toxic posters. They show up, no doubt, but are fairly hard to find compared to some of the clearly bad-faith subreddits like fatpeoplehate or the like.

>How did you get into HN? Who introduced you? What makes you stay?

Regular reddit and slashdot user, lots of overlap with those sites. I stay mostly because it is a fairly healthy tech forum; see the reasons above. HN also represents (generally) an older (as in, not 19-year-old wanna be hacker, but like 29-45 year old who has been around) professional crowd, with a very heavy focus on tech. That said, HN also has enough people who aren't in IT to keep it interesting. The level of education and overall work experience is considerably higher than a lot of other forums, as is the "grown-up-in-the-room", peer-to-peer feel of the place. By comparison, some subreddits like r/relationships or r/legaladvice is full of people talking entirely out of their ass, or with no sense of reality or self-awareness (or just straight up trolling).

This site suffers from extreme group-think. Comments are essentially predictable, as anyone who disagrees with the public opinion will either refrain from posting or not get upvotes anyway. This is what you get from sorting content by vote count. I think that, ironically, the problem is technical and not so much social.

Just replying to give you a data point, not to argue with anyone. Is there a way I can subscribe to get the results of your study?

1. Criteria for health in online communities: users are sincere and extend goodwill towards each other when they discuss topics. Many users (more than a tiny minority) contribute original ideas, personal stories and evidence of things they make. There is some effort required to contribute but members are incentivized to try by the anticipated responses and reactions of other members. Moderation is predictable and is emotionally intelligent. A critical mass of users are mature enough that norms don’t quickly change, and there is no mechanism a small minority can use to be over-represented when administration considers the wishes of the community (i.e. the Metafilter problem.) The community does not believe that its comments are the main attraction to the site. This isn’t a complete list.

2. How the criteria differs from offline community health: online communities are mostly discussion whereas offline communities work together, share meals, and so on, so it’s vital for the discussion to be high quality online in order for the community to be healthy. Offline communities have greeting and parting rituals that shape them.

3. How HN exemplifies healthy or unhealthy behaviors: HN mostly exemplifies healthy behaviors. There is a minority of users who are too immature and inexperienced to make valuable contributions, and a smaller minority who are antisocial. This percentage doesn’t seem to be increasing quickly, though. A substantial number of HN users believe comments are the main draw to the site, which is an unhealthy mindset to the degree those users are willing to let the quality of the links and text posts degrade.

4. Behaviors of my own that contribute: I try to extend goodwill towards users and encourage discussion of particulars, rather than fighting over general statements. On the other hand, I have a tendency to participate in inconsequential/creativity-free conversations that need to stay below a threshold to continue to attract users who have more to offer. I also downvote a lot of comments that attack other users or write unhinged, insubstantial polemics.

5. How I got into HN: I came here from a Paul Graham essay in 2008-2009 (different username.) He had a link to HN on his personal site. At the time, I was developing heavily in Rails and learned a lot from the Ruby-oriented and JS framework articles.

6. Who introduced me: See above. I didn’t know another HN reader personally for years, or at least didn’t know whether I knew one.

7. What makes me stay: the links and Show HN are interesting. Ultimately, good content drives good discussion.

It's healthy in some ways and unhealthy in others. Overall, I guess I'd have to say that it's healthy since the quality of the content and discussion far exceeds Reddit, Twitter, etc.

But it's not without serious flaws. As others may have mentioned, there's a lot of groupthink here that's shrouded under very academic/intellectual pretense. Because everyone wants to look like they're on the cutting edge, the community creates this illusion that "only real developers use ". I'm almost certain that a lot of content gets no attention or isn't discussed because it's not considered cool.

However, this is nothing new. I haven't really seen this community degrade in that sense.

What has degraded is the community's attitude towards voting/downvoting. In my opinion, as I have expressed many times, the comment voting system is broken. Obviously, there needs to be some kind of community moderation, so I'm not necessarily saying that the system should be abolished(not yet), but it's not functioning that well in its current state. Users have to be extremely careful about what they post because, if misinterpreted in the slightest way, your opinion, even if civilized and valid, will be demoted. If your comment is even the slightest shade of grey, few will take it seriously, and it will be pushed down on the heap. All it takes is a few people to not like what you have to say and press the down arrow in the belief that their dislike should mean something.

Over the past maybe 4 years, I've noticed more people taking advantage of downvoting rather harmless comments without creating a discussion about why they feel that way. This is harmful because, due to the mechanics of downvoting, people are de-legitimizing others when they should really only reserve the down arrow button for "This comment is blatantly rule-breaking/offensive/wrong, and others shouldn't see it". The latter really should be a rarity.

I don't know if it's just the politics of our time that have encouraged everyone to hold strong opinions on everything, but the increase in downvoting behavior makes me believe that downvoting should be removed and replaced with flagging. Maybe HN runs on bare bones, but if something isn't breaking the rules, then it shouldn't be suppressed, but if something breaks the rules, moderation should know about it rather than letting randos on the internet determine what's legitimate and what isn't.

TL;DR The community is healthy in that it has above-average caliber in discussion, but there's a higher level of intellectual suppression and back-patting than I've seen elsewhere.

> How did you get into HN? Who introduced you?

We have pretty much the same story in this regard.

> What makes you stay?

An important part of what makes me stay is the straightforward design of the website :) and it's lightweight, so it loads even on slow networks which tend to be fairly common where I live.

Hello Sankalp, I am starting an online community for financial services professionals. They have decimated by this crisis. If you have any draft of your paper, I would love to read and maybe we could learn from others' mistakes. Thks. jb at kivfinance dot com

I think there are two axes to consider.

Is it possible to have reasoned debate? Yes.

Is the community a bubble? Are some topics and ideas which are immediately shut down? Yes.

It's possible that you have to have some of the second in order to get some of the first.

It's heavily moderated, so we can't really tell, but probably not, because most of us lives in the tech bubble with good salaries, good opportunities, whine about small stupid things and such (including myself).

I'm not sure whether this makes things more or less healthy, but because HN really downplays the posters of links and comments, I don't really have any sense of personalities on the site like I do elsewhere.

I am just gonna say that I think Metafilter is a much healthier place than HN.

Some measures of toxicity briefly mentioned here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22691540

With respect to it's goals, it is a healthy community. But in general, it suffers from several echo-chamber ailments that are difficult to overcome for any community.

Anna Wiener makes commentary in her book Uncanny Valley that's pretty on the nose, and I know I wouldn't be able to do it justice. Worth a read.

Pretty healthy, as a comparison, is a lot better than Stackoverflow as it feels I can’t say anything without getting voted down unless I please their gods

imo, “mostly”. its my impression that this community is very defensive at times, especially when it comes to issues of inequality along gender lines

I've always found discussions to have a variety of perspectives which is cool. I just wonder if the community is mostly men.

I would say it's well above average, mostly intelligent respectful discourse with the occasional religious person or jerk.

not sure if your looking for multiple communities, but you might also check out indiehackers.com

Most people self censor here. Alternative points of view are not debated, they are flagged. Ask yourself how good of a job it did to help people get the picture about Corona, while other places (like my twitter) proved much more valuable. Health level 50%. It s a legacy community largely saved by having a more aged demographic than reddit.

It's better than most but it's still a bubble that doesn't match the real-world.

a healthy amount of groupthink

Hello Sankalp, good questions, here's my responses:

What criteria do you use to determine 'health' in online communities?

Depends on the context, for example, commercial/business health may vary from the actual health of the members interactions that make up a given community. Personally, I would assess the health of HN community based on raw engagement numbers as well as a qualitative assessment of the interaction value, like:

Are the topics relevant to human growth & evolution of the mind? Diverse? Intelligent? Controversial at times? Is the content I am exposed to and consuming making me a better _________ ? Do community participants interact in a way that fosters understanding and knowledge transfer/gain? Are members willing to admit what they don't know, when they are wrong, and respectfully disagree in the mean time? Are there a lot of blatant trolls/negative or useless quips/spam?

What is your working definition of "success" and "health" is what I would wonder given that you and your institution are apparently investing resources here?

How do these differ from those criteria you use to determine ‘health’ in offline communities you are in?

For me, they don't differ much - same criteria, expectations and standards sought elsewhere online.

How does HN exemplify or not exemplify 'healthy' behaviors?

Not sure how moderated the forum behind the scenes, but I rarely am subjected to irrelevant, toxic, rude commentary, so props to whomever/however they pull that off because it keeps many people actively returning and engaging in best practices aka healthy behavior.

Also, love how dead simple and basic the interface is, don't ever change HN!

One thing I do wish would be clearer communicated / understood is how the algorithm works as in 'why am I seeing what i am seeing?' I might be missing this already shared, but it would make for a healthier community by being as transparent as possible about this because it builds trust in the platform.

What behaviors of your own would you acknowledge may or may not contribute to the overall ‘health’ of HN?

I'm just here to listen learn from smart people, (in fact I was a lurker for almost 10 years before more recently creating an account to facilitate my goal of writing more). My hope would be that individually my impact or value this community is a net positive :)

How did you get into HN? Who introduced you? What makes you stay?

I don't remember, I think everyone in the entrepreneur/hacker community just knows about it.

I will conclude by saying one aspect of this community that is unique and you may want to look into as you conduct your "health" and "success" research is: the role 'identity politics' has on the quality of conversations among members in a given community. I am unaware of another robust online community that places such a high emphasis on the caliber of content/conversations and low emphasis of who it's coming from as far as I can tell?

Since nobody's mentioned it yet, you would be very wise to pay attention to the demographic(s) of this community vs other communities. They explain a whole lot of the behavior and opinions that are popular here vs elsewhere.

That's an interesting question. I think HN has its good and its bad sides.

What I like about HN is the (usually) high quality of discussion. You're likely not gonna get hit with insults or low blows or trolling on this site. I think this is in part due to the great moderation (I always wonder how they're able to pull that off so well with so little staff) but it's also manifested in the culture here. Commenting on HN just feels different than on Twitter, for example.

I've also noticed that I act differently on HN compared to other circles that I'm in. Like, VERY different. On HN, people (me including) share way less details about themselves and their emotions (from what I've seen - I'm not a credible source for data), to the point where it sometimes feels like you're talking to a bunch of robots. Compare that to Twitter: I'm mostly just on Twitter to follow people I relate to for their portrayal of character online (be it real or staged). I'm also more open to show my own emotions on Twitter (though that has its limits as well). However, I wouldn't engage in a serious discussion on Twitter or use it as a source of information.

Generally I don't think HN really has a concept of "community". It's just a place where a lot of information is flung around and people (mostly serious and professional) come to talk about it but you don't really form "bonds" or "networks" on HN. I mean, sometimes you don't even read the name of the person you're replying to. That's why I like to think of it as "the least social network".

I don't take it too seriously either. Like okay, maybe HN has moved the needle in the real world sometimes but I think most of the discussion here doesn't have a real impact other than that we're entertained for the moment. (Though it would be interesting to see an analysis of what HN has or might have done in the real world.) Therefore I also sometimes see it as a bit of a "roleplay" where you act in a fancy way just for fun. Like, I'm not trying to mock anyone, I say exactly what I would say IRL, just in a more formal and correct manner and I think it's nice to do that occasionally but I don't know why. I'd like to know what others on this site think about that.

All in all, I don't know. There's a lot more to the question if a site is "healthy" I think and in the end it greatly depends on the receiver. HN also has a couple of mannerisms that could make it a bad experience for some, like strongly favoring some concepts and technologies while being extremely pessimistic on the rest. I'm glad there is something like HN but I think it could be a bit more open (to new ideas, different views, etc.) and, for the lack of a better word, human.

Addendum: While writing this I had the idea that Hacker News is filled with an equal amount of humans and (actual) robots and the humans are trained to be more robotic while the robots are trained to be more human, to prepare the singularity. That could make for an interesting novel.

It's a hard question to answer. It's healthy in that it encourages discussion due to skeptics of all kinds. However, it can get very pedantic at times, where some people nitpick not over the post itself but some non-pertinent detail about the post, such as the title, website loading speed, trackers, and so on; the content metadata, as it were, rather than the content itself. This is quite annoying to read through. If I were to make a new forum, I'd want something like the following stipulations for posters:

- Steel-man all arguments: consider the best possible interpretation of the argument, and if you need to, consider playing the devil's advocate not only for the post you are replying to, but also your own post. I've written a lot of philosophy papers and they strongly advocate this point, that you must consider each and every single counter objection. I know that HN rules include consideration of the best possible interpretation, but it may not be enforced strictly enough.

- Do not comment if you cannot do the above. This includes short one sentence comments that should be permitted if they truly and exemplarily contribute to the conversation, such as a necessary piece of information. Too often I see pithy quotes or humor, which, while interesting, are not very suitable to argumentation in the formal sense.

- Focus on the main content, not metadata. As above, many posters comment on something that is not part of the content but its metadata. This goes hand in hand with the "best possible interpretation" clause. If you so feel the need to nitpick over the title, do so only after addressing the content at hand.

How does one achieve this? People run on incentives, so the design of the forum must incentivize people to act in this way. On one end you have Twitter, which incentivizes short, flame-baiting "hot takes" over long-form discussion. This is inherently and entirely due to the _design_ of the site alone, where the 140 (now 280) character limit creates these incentives. On the other hand, you have academic paper communities, which incentivize understanding long-form content lest a reader misunderstands a paper, creates an opposing paper, publishes it, and is socially ridiculed for not having noticed the misunderstanding sooner. In other words, the design of the forum incentivizes the reader to digest content fully. The hypothetical forum would stand somewhere in the middle.

Now, to achieve this in practice, versus theory, there are certain designs you can have to do so:

- Strict moderation. This is similar to the moderation levels of /r/AskScience or /r/AskHistorians on Reddit where low-effort comments and even branches are removed. This is the easiest to implement technologically but also the hardest sociologically, due to needing manpower and choosing acceptable moderators.

- No downvoting, and no showing numbers of votes. HN does this well to some extent, but you still see branches downvoted for differing opinions. Perhaps one can only downvote or report posts with a rational reason, basically held to the same standards as if they were to reply to it.

- Randomizing content to a certain degree. HN and Reddit have algorithms to do this so that the top-most content is not always shown.

- Sorting and filtering any and all posts based on content and votes. This is more of a convenience feature but I wish more sites could let you sort and filter by certain tags or number of votes, and by date, like reddit and HN with the Algolia search.

That's what I've thought of for now, I know it doesn't exactly answer your question but these were a few things that annoy me about most fora.

What criteria do you use to determine 'health' in online communities?

This is a question that I think is too broad to be worthwhile, because signs of health in one community aren't necessarily signs of health for another.

As an example of two communities that are effectively polar opposites (at least in theory, anyway; in reality they're pretty close): HN & /r/NFL.

'Health' in /r/NFL's case is closer to emulating a gathering on someone's couch to watch American football. Checking a random example off the front page, the comment section has a Nazi pun at the top, and countless single- or double-word replies to that. It seems pretty healthy.

'Health' in HN's case can be taken a few different ways.

If we look at the original announcement for it (or, at least, the announcement that it was being renamed and refocused)[1], it's supposed to be a clone of 2006's reddit; intellectually-gratifying stories on the front page; high-quality, civil comments; primarily self-moderating (if nothing else to the point of not needing babysitting). We can then conclude that it's failed at most of this, and as a result, not healthy. That seems to be the conclusion Graham hit. [2]

However, that's not very satisfactory, is it? Plenty of things end up worse than originally intended to be. Let's reframe a little bit.

Are some of the stories on the front page intellectually-gratifying? As an uncontroversial example, 'afandian's blog post (which at the time of writing this is at #22) is certainly intellectually-gratifying. On the other hand, there are more than a few that are uncontroversially not so.

Are most of the comments civil and high-quality? I leave answering this as an exercise to the reader.

With that framing, it's kind of healthy.

Let's hit it from a different angle: is it better than the average public-facing Internet community aiming to do the same things presently? For the most part, I would say so, especially at the scale it's at.

Conclusion: Healthy enough.

How do these differ from those criteria you use to determine ‘health’ in offline communities you are in?

I disagree with the premise of this question as-worded.

How does HN exemplify or not exemplify 'healthy' behaviors?

I think HN embodies the healthiest example of large-scale heavily- and strictly-moderated conversation on the Internet. On the other side of that, I think the community reacts poorly to it as a result: it's done well enough to where it doesn't feel like it's as moderated as it is, so when people notice that it isn't they're surprised and alarmed.

What behaviors of your own would you acknowledge may or may not contribute to the overall ‘health’ of HN?

My submissions are pretty great overall. My comments aren't as good as I'd like them to be, and I occasionally find myself commenting on things I don't care about, so I've been reconsidering commenting at all lately.

What makes you stay?

kuro5hin is dead, and I've been reading this site for ages. Since the best is dead, most communities have little if any redeeming qualities, a good mail client doesn't exist (great discussion still happens on some mailing lists), and HN is by and large still decent, it's the closest alternative that isn't a microblogging community.

I also recommend that you examine the corpses of dead online hangouts for this. Many places were fantastic for years but died due to events that weren't necessarily tied to the core functions or community of the hangout (kuro5hin being an example of this alongside many newsgroups).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

When I have to explain HN to normal people I say, "Culturally it's a wasteland, but the technical information you can glean there is top notch."

What I mean by "cultural wasteland" is that you have a lot of social retards and moral cretins on here who, for whatever reasons, will gladly lumber threads with crazy sociopathic BS. You have to wade through and weed out a lot of arrogant unsympathetic bastards (like me.)

On the other hand, awesome people show up all the time like, "Oh yeah, I did that, AMA." I once interacted with Alan Kay on here! Carl Hewitt is on here regularly (trying to get people to finally pay attention to Actor model.) Walter Bright (D lang) is here. Charlie Stross replied to a comment I made in re: O'Neill colonies the other day. I could go on and on. (And those are just (relatively) famous people. There are all kinds of brilliant not-quite-so-famous people on here too. I'm just name dropping to make m'point.)

So that's nice.

- - - -

Another thing about HN is that it's not a community. It's more like a bar at a train station. Most people are just passing through and the regulars it does have should probably do something better with their lives.

Like me. I'm pretty much a recluse these days, and this HN account "carapace" is damn near the only outlet I have to communicate with the outside world. I'm on here pretty much every day (for better or worse) wasting time I could be spending on important projects (like my Joy interpreter. Heh.)

Imgur is more of a community than HN: those folks send each other pizzas! I'm seriously, there's a whole pizza club that just sends pizzas to imgurians who are broke and hungry. HN doesn't do that.

- - - -

To the extent that HN is a health community it's all about dang and sctb. Those two do an incredible job and I have nothing but respect for them. Ask them about HN's community health.

- - - -

Last but not least, IMO the way to judge the health of an online community (or any community) is to ask, "Has it made me a better person?"

FWIW, I think that participation on HN has, over the last few years, made me a little bit of a better person. I'm less knee-jerk sardonic, more willing to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. And I've learned to value good faith conversation over witty barbs and sarcasm. (Although I do still consider a good rant to be a kind of art, like slam poetry.)

It's on the healthier side, but it has some strange allergies. I used the term "boomer" once and the reply thread spiraled out of control and included someone suggesting that I was a Russian agent just for using that word. I think we can only really talk in comparitive terms rather than arrive at "yes, it's healthy".

Anecdote: I saw a thread on Facebook a while back in reaction to news stories about fights that were breaking out on a cruise ship off of Australia. One of the commenters was posting horribly racists comments on the Facebook page of the very father of one of those involved. This particular doofus left so much personal information at default privacy settings that in about 5 minutes I knew his kids names. As an experiment, in 5 more minutes I knew what extracurricular activities they were involved in, when, and where. All based on what he left public. No black-hat doxxing shenanigans. Not exactly the kind of stuff I'd leave hanging out in the open if I'm going to make sweeping generalizations that an entire ethnicity of people are violent criminals. I closed it all. Walked away. Said nothing.

So yeah, IMHO HN is a lot healthier than Facebook :)

"community" is a stretch considering the amount of astroturfing that goes on here.

>The goal of the assignment is to figure out whether an online community exemplifies or doesn’t exemplify ‘healthy’ behaviors, from the points of view of their own members

The culture of HN is also such that it tends to attract a certain type of person, typically from the upper end of the normal curve. Look at the highly technical nature of the majority of articles being posted.

What I'm saying is that community health is not just a reflection of the rules imposed upon the community. The individuals need to meet certain minimum requirements in various social and cognitive dimensions to have a truly "healthy" community.

personally I think it's quite toxic, if you say unpopular opinion you will be downvoted into oblivion - echo chamber of mostly right wing libertarian childless IT guys

some people look down at Reddit, but personally I find it much more diverse and open to more kinds of opinions than HN

Look on twitter what people think about HN. The general opinion I hear about "the orange site" is that it's a toxic trash fire (this is also my opinion, which I will not be defending here).

I don't think HN community is particularly healthy. People here have severely biased views on certain issues - Especially social issues related to money and politics.

A few hours ago, a video which explained how the government (the Fed) injects money into the economy was quietly removed from the front page even though it was getting a lot of upvotes and made some interesting points.

HN is becoming increasingly political and divisive. The losers of our modern economy have already started leaving the site and those remaining are being actively downvoted by remaining elitist community members for not sharing the same techno-utopian ideals.

Also, to prove my point, this comment will almost certainly get down-voted. It will get down-voted in spite of me saying so because most people won't even bother reading past the first line of my comment. The community is extremely defensive of itself and its techno-utopian ideals.

No. I avoid any topic even vaguely related to gender because people are terrible about it. I would be surprised if this comment doesn't get downvoted, just for implying that misogyny exists.

Anything remotely critical of China is censored supposedly because it's to prevent a "flame war".

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...