Fortunately, the mob of angry teenagers seems to find the group of slightly older people having a quiet conversation in the library rather dull.

There is something tangential that I have always found interesting.

Whenever this kind of discussion (about this-better-site users vs. that-worse-site users, subjective judgments galore, obviously) happens, there are always posts about the "strategically correct" behavior to ensure the desired outcome. The prototypical case would be: "Don't feed the trolls."

But, in posting this publicly, on a social site where, in many cases, the troll is targeting said social site, you are feeding the troll. In fact, the troll's goal might simply be to elicit as many "don't feed the troll" posts as possible.

Stated otherwise, reiterating the rule to ignore somebody is effectively un-ignoring them. But at the same time, you want to reinforce these rules into the community, and educate people to follow them. So you have a problem: in order for the rule to be efficient, it needs to be tacit; but it also needs to be widely known, and the efficient way to achieve this is by reiterating it publicly.

Now, there is clearly a puzzle here. Has anyone else thought about this, and came to an elegant attack? I think the most obvious case is to use private messages, although I have no knowledge how well those work (this is a general case and is independent of whether HN has PMs or not).

Unruly teenagers? Come on. I can't be the only one who gets tired of the petty, smarmy anti-Reddit talk. It's just another site; we're not cults. And we're also not the old farts telling the "unruly teenagers" to get off our damn lawns, are we?

Agreed. All reddit's doing is calling us sterile, and circlejerking around a few of the people defending Hacker News. There's nothing meaningful in this conversation.

recursivity :)

I was just being honest. There is an element of sterility to the culture here, IMHO. I still like Hacker News, but it's not as enjoyable to discuss things here. Hard to quantify, exactly, but it does feel a bit stilted and artificial, dry and academic, like everyone is trying extra hard to perform and please their peers.

(This is probably exacerbated by the fact that pg has gone on record stating that your Hacker News karma score is factored into any Y Combinator submissions you make. Nothing wrong with this, but it turns this site into a sort of proxy startup / investor pitch for some folks.)

On the whole, I'm more of an advocate of saying what you feel, while being reasonably civil. That said, I do not support 4chan style anarchy, or what the broad Reddit/Digg has turned into. I still think prog.reddit is pretty decent though.

Perhaps boring was the wrong word... "stuffy", maybe? Look, I love HN as much as the next guy; it's the only link aggregation / commenting site I visit. And there is indeed a lot of good content here.

The site lacks personality and that's probably why people who are otherwise "smart enough" (or whatever metric you wish to use) to post here don't. Since there's no personality and usernames are deliberately downplayed in leu of every comment being judged strictly on its individual quality, there's no diversity. This is why I say "everyone is the same person".

Think of a close group of friends. Could you randomly interchange them without anybody noticing? Probably not, but you could easily do that on HN. All you are to me is "one of those guys who holds the opinion that HN is <fill in your arguments>". There are lots and lots of you and you're all the same to me. There are people here like me, too, and we're probably all the same to you.

I don't really "know" anyone on HN; it isn't a community in that sense. It's just a group of like-minded people who hold the standard deviation of opinions regarding a (relatively small) set of topics. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

(edit: of course this isn't the reality of the situation -- I'm sure everyone here is not the same in "real life", but due to how HN is setup and run, for all intents and purposes they are here.)

I agree folks should not waste space with comments that are purely for amusement. However, I have noticed that if a comment is on-topic and still adds humor, it can be taken very poorly. I agree: "we're far from the same person". Humor is often the best way to open minds in a diverse group. Alcohol works as well for breaking the ice, but its hard to induce that online ;).

To me, the idea that fun and "serious discussion"/work are mututally exclusive is the biggest disappointment of the HN culture. And it's just not true!

For me, if it's not fun, it's not worth doing:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/how-hard-could-it-be-th... -- For his part, Jeff says he didn't want our new venture to feel "like work" -- that if Stack Overflow wasn't fun to do, he didn't want to be doing it. If I had tried to make him play by my rules, I don't think the project would have come together, at least not as well as it has. --

Good work is fun, almost by definition. And that should come across in your comments about the work, too.

I fail to see at which point I recommended HN be comprised of "quip after quip". Or you've assumed that there is some sort of all-or-nothing requirement between quips and intelligible comments.