I don’t have much use for TechCrunch– it’s symptomatic of the many things that are wrong with this weird advanced-marketing industry, hijacked by fired/disgraced finance guys who’ve reinvented themselves as “startup founders”, that we still call “tech”– but I read this article, posted today, about Hacker News. Here’s the piece that struck me:
One of Graham’s biggest pain points is the “schoolyard quarrels” he finds on the site on a daily basis, and wishes “users would stop misbehaving.” He cites the example of users organizing voting rings to purposefully vote up stories, which caused Graham to develop additional software to detect this. He adds that more users are trolling under newly created accounts, and are deliberately starting flame wars on the site.
“I wish I could get people to stop posting comments that are stupid or mean,” he says. “It takes only one or two negative comments and a discussion turns into a flame war.”
Graham adds that he gets a lot of vitriol from users personally with accusations of bias or censoring. He clarifies that he, and the other human editor, rarely take links down unless they are dupes. Even with tabloid or gossip stories that surface, Graham will not take them down. Users with high karma points tend to flag these stories, he adds, and they can then be taken down.
“Hacker News makes me sad a lot,” says Graham. “I wish the community would behave the way they did when it was a little village.”
I think I am, mostly, a good contributor to Hacker News, but there’s been a decline in the quality of my posts lately. Maybe I’m part of that problem. Perhaps it would be good for me to take a hiatus.
I have an anger problem. It’s made worse by the fact that most of the things that anger me genuinely deserve to be hated. That makes me right in opposing them. The software industry is in a fucked-up state and we (the technologists who should be running it, instead of the smooth-talking assholes who don’t love– or even understand the first thing about– technology, problem-solving, or code) ought to stop letting ourselves be a conquered people. All that is true. I am fighting a good fight. But do I need to fight it all the time? I’m not sure, and certainly I should not inject so much anger with such frequency into one of the best discussion forums currently on the Internet.
I’m taking a break. One month, and then I’ll decide what to do from there.
