For me, I'm not here or on any other message board to "get shit done"... if I am getting shit done then I'm not surfing the Internet, by definition. I come to sites like this to learn stuff, find cool links, run across things I had never heard of or thought of before, and hopefully have interesting conversations. I really detest the constant pressure of having to self-censor and edit what I say with a view to making sure it's "useful"... whatever the definition of useful is.

It's funny that after a long hiatus I do a drive by here and this thread is on the front page.

Also the point thing sucks, frankly. Whether you want to or not, you start keeping track of your points, wondering what you could do to get more, feeling jealous of others who have way more than you, etc. Human nature I suppose. It also sucks to call it some bullshit euphemistic name like "karma", which obscures what it really is, which is a social ranking system.

I would say that 4chan and YouTube comments are at one extreme, and Hacker News sits squarely at the opposite extreme. Neither appeal.

It's too clubby, it's taken the general disgust that people feel toward the banality of messageboards that deteriorate into meme-ification or juvenile flamewars... and turned that into a kind of snobby elitism that is just as off-putting.

Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous. Only an antisocial or asocial nerd would come up with such a rule and think it was a great idea, and I say that as an antisocial nerd myself.

The system of ranking people by points, insisting that every single post be some giant revelation of wisdom that advances the fortunes of the tech industry and mankind immeasurably, etc. has only exacerbated people's tendency to self-aggrandize, kiss ass, over-analyze minutiae, and constantly try to one-up each other... all cloaked in a brightly colored cheerful passive-aggressive candy coating, of course.

I still cruise the site from time to time because it does have great links (one of the few things left going for it) but there is no way in hell I would consider myself part of the community or welcome. I certainly wouldn't and don't come here any more to ask questions or try to learn anything by exposing any gaps in my knowledge to general ridicule and sneering.

My two cents.

Don't say "thank you" for a useful post because it takes up too much time and space? How utterly ridiculous.

As far as I can see, if you have a point or articulation in your "thank you" comment, it's not really frowned upon. But if all you can contribute to the conversation are those two words, isn't that what upvoting is for? I really like that HN threads are much easier/faster to navigate (compared to reddit for example) merely because of the lower number of comments, which stems from the pressure to provide more substance behind them.

I spend over an hour a day on this site, yet have so few comments or submissions; because it costs so much time and effort to put anything in front of a pedantic, productivity/efficiency obsessed audience ready to shred anything to bits and pieces that is less than a throughly fact-checked, carefully constructed argument. I think that's what makes HN worth reading.

For example, I'm about to post about a project I've been working on for a while. I'm sure it'll feel good to hear if people have good things to say about it but the most valuable feedback I'll receive will be from the people who overanalyze things and are highly critical.

The first year or so was a private club. I knew many of the posters, and would have great arguments, some won, some lost but it didn't really matter because everyone shared a passion for knowledge, and would rather be proven wrong than not learn something new. The discussion was great.

The second year I started losing track of the usernames and thus it became less of a club of peers, and more of a regular forum, albeit a very high quality one.

The third year the site had attracted so many users that the original patos of intelligent discussion based on merit started to fade. Based on mere numbers this had to be so; for any given subject there are only a limited number of people that adhere to the standards to which we had becomme accustomed, and new users mistook nitpicking for good discussion.

The fourth year I've more or less stopped posting and discussing here, primarily because it's become a game of winning, and not a game of learning. Nitpicking is a great way of winning, but terrible if you want to have an interesting discussion. Negativity is highly correlated with nitpicking in this respect :-)

I remember the first year here i had a long discussion with MattMaroon about a linked story where a consultant had saved a company 100 million dollars by changing a few bits and pieces around in the check-out process. He was concinced the company was Amazon, I was convinced it wasn't. The discussion dragged on, and we each tried to throw statistics, numbers and good guesses on the table, until at the end Matt found a link directly confirming that it was indeed amazon. He was right, and we were both happy because now we knew. I don't see many of those discussions anymore. Unfortunately.

The comp.* hierarchy and probably most of the rest of Usenet in 1992 had the ethic that you should not waste a whole message on just a thank-you (thank-yous sent by email were fine, and in 1992, almost every Usenet From field contained a valid email address) or on any other purely social nicety unless perhaps the social nicety's purpose was to conclude or cap off a long series of back-and-forth messages.

Usenet was probably where a good 40 to 50% of thoughtful public discussion happened on the 1992 internet (the other places where much public discussion happened being mailing lists and IRC).

My suggestion: a column down the left with a topic marker: startup advice, network technology, programming tips, hacker culture, VC firm news, economics, politics, military tech.... whatever the topics are that people are actually posting and upvoting.

Classifying a topic could be done by a voting algorithm, weighted by karma... the poster thinks the topic is economics, then it gets marked as economics. If enough commenters feel that it falls under politics instead, then their clicks on that topic classification (submitted as part of the comment form) will reclassify it as such. Those users who want to see only certain topics can filter as desired.

The spirit of respectful and collegial debate that pervades the site is a huge draw and could just as easily be applied to the "off-topic" as the "on-topic"... and there is a synergy in having both available. It keeps things fresh and interesting and there is intellectual stimulation available here that you can't get anywhere else, regardless of topic.

I guess I am saying that the pool can be bigger and still be clean, and it can have a shallow and a deep end, fast and slow lanes, and serve a wide range of swimmers... but still be known for its overall high quality.

On the other hand, I think it would be useful to have strict limits on how far the culture stretches. We should try to preserve the geeky, business-y, thoughtful culture, rather than going the route of reddit where everyone's allowed to do what they want.

This site is already radically different from other online communities, why not go full-bore and just make it based purely on a the-cream-rises-to-the-top model?

I would imagine the flag feature is enough to get rid of the spam or junk topics. If someone really likes a topic or wants to see it stay on the front page, they can burn up karma with upvote boosts (to a limit).

It seems the focus here is already on the community finding and upvoting topics of intellectual value and fostering stimulating discussion. Why not just bring that to a laser-like focus and drop all efforts at "punishing" or otherwise disciplining members of the community.

There's a big difference in motivation between thinking "what can I add to the discussion that will be appreciated and upvoted" versus "gee I sure hope I don't get penalized for saying this"... and that thought loop feeds back into the culture of the site. Right now I would (subjectively) say that 85-90% of the effort people put into the site is positive, while maybe 10-15% of it is negative (downvoting, indulging in a bit of flaming, etc.). If the architecture of the site was further refined to reduce channels for negative action, it would seem that positive effort component could get upped to 90-95% and make this place even more of a standout than it already is. HN could be one big proof-of-concept that a large, diverse, open community on the web can still be a highly evolved and civil community.

Dissenting opinion (from someone who generally believes in positive reinforcement as the best policy): I tend to be a very controversial figure, wherever I go. I have dropped out of a lot of communities in part due to the degree to which I get attacked. Some of my comments here get upvoted, downvoted, upvoted, downvoted. It can be entertaining to watch it. It usually doesn't result in some pissing contest. I am content with having people who don't like me/my opinions vent their spleen by viciously giving an entire downvote to my comment and then moving on. I'm very cool with that. It beats the hell out of anything else I've known so far.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3116043 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3125017

I have a serious medical condition that is supposed to be killing me, and I do still have bad days at times, but I'm getting well when doctor's (and everyone else) says that can't be done (getting well is why I have slimmed down so much). To me, that is an ordinary fact and I talk about it casually at times online, the way I would to the two sons who live with me and know all the details. For other people, that's a headfuck and most folks divide up between being highly impressed or spitting in my face and accusing me of both making up crap and being a danger to others to talk about it (which makes me want to go "Okay, which is it? You can't have it both ways.").

In short, I guess I'm the anti-group-think wherever I go. AKA lightening rod for controversy.

Generally, you can give a +1 by upvoting. If you have something to add to the discussion, you can add a thank you in that comment, but in isolation a "thank you" really adds no value.

At the same time, I would like to contribute and also feel compelled to express my opinion at times, but don't really feel free to do so unless it is an area where I feel pretty confident that I either know what I am talking about or have something to say that wasn't already said. I've noticed that just saying "wow that's cool" is frowned upon. I've also seen several threads where comments are downvoted to invisibility and I can't figure out why. Sometimes later they are upvoted again, sometimes not. But I feel like I am learning what is and is not acceptable... and as I increase my knowledge on topics that I came here to learn about, I hope to have more insights to offer back to the community (right now I can't say that I do).

I guess my points here are:

A) It's already a great site with quality much higher than a lot of other message boards. B) It's hard enough to figure out what is ok and not ok to comment on. C) To keep the community vibrant, presumably there should be some tolerance for and encouragement of growth in posters' ability to contribute.

This talk of "punishing" is discouraging. I suppose if there are already enough people here to understand what the community is supposed to be about, and if that group is self-sustaining, then there is no need to worry about attracting new users and exclusionary tactics are not a problem.

Quality is what you (or we) make of it. I've read thought-provoking comments on topics that are probably a bit off the reservation... and seen interesting segues inside threads that take me places I wouldn't expect.

Another approach might be to seed the front page with articles that are good examples of what the community is striving to focus on. Maybe put a green sprout next to it or something. Add one more voting mechanism for people at whatever karma threshold: a vote for "exemplary" status. I suspect that not every regular upvote would translate into an "exemplary" upvote... the front page would reflect the interests of the community, and if it was bare of exemplary articles, I have no doubt users would soon vote some quality articles onto it. My own preference in dealing with people is to give them an easily accessible mechanism to exceed your expectations instead of finding ways to punish them for not.

The chill effect very seriously concerns me. Assumptions of guilt do enormous harm to trust and undermine genuine civility. People need to feel it's reasonably safe to open their mouths and they need to feel they don't have to walk on eggshells or be perfect, that there is some room for being human, making mistakes, and so on. Robust discussion cannot thrive without some tolerance for friction. Finding ways to lubricate the process is good. This proposed approach is not lubrication.

Which is fine as far as it goes, but basically when you boil that down it's "don't screw up, or else."

That isn't what attracted me here. What attracted me here was reading interesting links and thought-provoking discussion, and thinking "man, I need to up my game so I can participate meaningfully".

If the goal is to have a members-only kind of retreat from the mundane, then I suppose the notion of creating an underclass of posters who don't even know they are being ignored makes sense. But in that case, why not take it a step further and just require applications and screen out members in the first place?

If the goal is to grow the site and generate more traffic, then I would submit that encouraging people to emulate quality contributors is a better approach... why not flip this algorithm on its head. Instead of hell-banning those who score poorly, add in a karma boost for those who score optimally... and an indicator on articles that meet the site criteria for quality.

People don't like to do as they're told, but they sure like to do what got somebody else a gold star.

I participate to up my game. This approach tends to kill that possibility (or at least contribute to slowly killing it).

If the goal is to grow the site and generate more traffic,

As I understand it, the actual business goal of the site is to help YC screen applicants: Your user-name is a required part of your application to YC and (if no one else) PG will go check your comments. Since start-up founders tend to be young and therefore probably a bit socially wet behind the ears, it seems to me that being too controlling about the site in that regard is potentially a bad business decision.

Be that as it may, the differences between IBM and HP are stark in this instance. I-B-M: it stands for International Business Machines. Services to industry are their roots, and those roots run deep. Whether in the form of census punchcards in the 1890s, or ballistics calculations for the military, or the creation of the SABRE booking system, or the creation of relational databases... the list goes on and on and on, but the point is that IBM has never strayed from its roots. It is a business services company.

Upon hitting a rough patch in the early nineties, IBM took radical steps to revive its profits; one of these steps was the introduction and promotion of the business-oriented Thinkpad brand, which was a huge success and helped bring the firm back to health. But that did not make IBM into a PC company any more than the success of the XBox makes Microsoft a gaming company.

After nurturing the brand and working gradually over time with a Chinese supplier to offshore production, the last step (at that point almost a formality) was taken and the brand "Thinkpad" was transitioned to Lenovo ownership. IBM continues to be a company providing services to government and industry, as it has since its founding.

HP, on the other hand, is a company whose roots are in technical instrumentation and excellence in test equipment. Over time, this resulted in innovations such as the HP 9100A, the familiar tried-and-true HP calculator line, its superb printers, and so on... all outgrowths of HP's core roots in engineering and instrumentation.

The spinoff of Agilent was like HP cutting off its right arm. To add insult to injury, the company was forced to digest the Compaq acquisition at the same time. Still, the core mission of creating excellent electronic machines survived and HP is in a dominant position when it comes to providing reliable hardware in the form of computers, servers, printers from laserjets to industrial presses, networking, etc.

With that as a basis, the move into consulting services and enterprise software makes sense, but a move as unforgivably idiotic as removing the PC business would cut the very legs out from under the business, regardless of what some P/E number on a spreadsheet says. Why would an enterprise come to HP for consulting when it cannot provide a package of desktops, servers, and software? That is HP's mission as it is configured now, with Agilent gone its separate way. It makes sense to push aggressively into new territory, but not to destroy the foundation of the business at the same time.

Apotheker brought no innovative thinking to HP; he merely sought to remake the company in his image and transform it into the SAP that not even SAP would let him create. Whether or not that vision, taken in the abstract, is one worth pursuing is debatable to begin with-- but hacking HP into bits to force it to fit that vision is madness, and the plummeting stock price that you seem to measure value by reflected the market's view of this insanity.

Why is there any need to "bleed heavily"? The PC division is the foundation of the entire edifice. It may not be sexy and it may not fit your metrics-based notion of company value, but it holds up the business and it is number 1 in the world and profitable. That is a strength to leverage, not a "drag".

HP is finally in a position to do exactly what Meg Whitman said it needs to do today: focus on excellence. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d6a4b220-00d8-11e1-930b-00144feabd...