Consider starting (or merely sanctifying) a HN IRC channel or webchat. I think a lot of people comment and visit HN now just for something to do; they are bored and want to do some intellectual sparing.
If there was a irc.ycombinator.com with real-time chat topics, it might help separate "the wheat from the chaff," so to speak.
E.G. #japan-nuclear-chat
If not a chat, I'd say focus on something that doesn't fight the size of the community. Personally, I'd prefer if HN was shrunk to like '08 levels, but that's not going to happen. I think adding a service that allows for water cooler talk but keeps it isolated from deep technical discussions would work better than karmic tinkering at this point.
The way to save HN from its own success is to take it to the next level. You need to spin it up into a commercial enterprise. Improving the quality of HN, as it stands today, requires expenditure of human effort, either in the form of professional moderation, or some sort of AI-ish enhancement: pruning of message threads, credentialing users in more sophisticated ways, finding ways to bubble up story submissions that otherwise get lost.
No doubt some will find the commercial option distasteful, but I think the pure crowd-sourced option has run its course. Commercializing HN would allow further expansion, for instance splitting it into several areas of interest. Stackoverflow/StackExchange is a model for this. There is much value that can be added on to HN, as many Hackers have shown in the past with various projects.
I would propose that first and foremost, the best application would be to improve the quality of HN. It would be interesting to see changes over time from various angles. For example, the churn rate of users, the repetition of posts, the number of commercially-biased posts (I.e. advertisements), etc. I am relatively new to the forum, so I’m sure that veteran users would have even better suggestions.
I really miss a way to connect with other interesting people from HN. I'm afraid that a simple forum won't work, though, because of (social) scalability: there are good reasons why HN practically bans all banter, light exchanges, or turf wars that usually come to dominate popular subreddits and similar places.
As a matter of fact, I'm thinking about a possible solution focused on allowing remote hackers to at least do professional networking. It could become a real project; anybody interested, feel free to contact me (email in my profile).
With this said, I hope I'm wrong, so I'll subscribe and wish best of luck to this new forum :)
IMNSHO there are two things that would help HN be a "better" place - of course as with most folks who respond to this better will correspond to what THEY would like to see. So you should take any comment in this discussion with the requisite boulder of salt...
1) Hire a Benevolent Dictator/Community Manager. Usually the second title is just a euphemism for the first. I will go ahead and state that said person should have some history on HN, should be evaluated on a reasonably consistent basis by both pg and the community, and should have a commitment to be here more often than not. They should be able to cull some stories and promote others not only based on their personal interests, but also to the betterment of the community (even if the community doesn't always agree). I am also willing to put myself up as an applicant for said position assuming pg is willing to work with someone remotely - as much because I don't want to see the argument that no one would be willing to do it as that having run a few BBS and forums I have some reason to think I could actually do it.
2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have more control over how much of HN they view and participate in. As any community grows you get more diversity, and it becomes harder to ascertain a common "always good". Instead give folks the ability (preferably through tools) to modify how they participate in and view the community. If there's a subject that always bothers you, perhaps it's best for everyone if you can avoid having to even see it. If there's something you're particularly interested, being able to see more of it is probably worthwhile.
1) More of the good parts of HN. Ask HN, Show HN type stuff.
2) Feedback before Show HN posts.
3) "Personifying" HN i.e. right now HN is kinda opaque, I use it all the time, and I have some friends that use it, but mostly it's a black box. Would be nice to be able to have an idea of a bit more of the personality of some of the people I'm interesting with on HN
Thanks, that's a great suggestion and it does seem like there should be ways for the HN community to plug into this. It's probably also the case that we should let the new thing grow a bit before trying to extend it. But I'll talk with Sam about this the next time I see him.
Well, I think the most important thing to do is for people to upvote the stories that they see as being "Hacker News". I've got the HN frontpage feed as a "Live Bookmark" in Firefox, which links right to the story URLs (not the discussions), so sometimes I'll go a few days just reading the stories, not upvoting/discussing anything, all the while thinking, "Jeez, there hasn't been anything good on HN lately."
Now, I try to log in at least once a day or every other day and post an "HN-worthy" article if I come across one, or at least try to contribute to the discussion of an article.
My "Fix HN" suggestion: apply a different "decay" rate to the "Ask/Show/Tell HN" posts so that they stay on the front page longer. They're usually more focused on HN-oriented material, and posted by people who post on HN semi-regularly (at least). I'd also lower the flagging threshold to something like 3 or 5 so that people don't abuse this for general news articles.
I think that all the meta discussions on here about the quality of HN have become a big part of what HN is. HN is a place for hackers to discuss anything that interests them; so of course that's going to include the discussion about their own community and how to make it better.
I think you're right that we have to accept the change in communities' interests over time, but don't forget that one of these interests hackers have is to improve their own community.
I didn't feel like I knew what the answer was, so I was very curious to see what it would be.
I'd actually been considering hiring someone to run HN, though not to moderate it in quite as hands-on a way as you're suggesting. Interesting idea though.
My serious answer is: create a forum where 1000s of people can post what they like and you are bound to have some comments that are worth a giggle at.
Also the fact that coders love to codify real life problems, and bikeshed, and HN is one of the few places that is an interesting news aggregator with so so many comments makes it an easy target.
As someone who used to be in a similar role (not with HN), the best you can do (IMO) is continue to use the tools at your disposal to report spam, vote up thoughtful responses, refrain from engaging obvious trolls, and, of course, contribute interesting links and knowledge yourself.
This is actually tremendously fascinating, and has a lot of potential. It is one of the coolest things I've ever seen on HN. 10 other HN users are on it now. (Tried nytimes.com, I was the only one.)
What I'd really love to see would be a chat history, so I know what was going on "in the room" before I joined.
To make it really effective, there could be some kind of threading, forum subjects, voting, etc. It would be amazing to check out a NYT article, have this pop up, and then immediately see people giving more context, making clever comments, etc.
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