In my opinion, it creates an echo chamber where in order to be a "full member" of the community you have to already espouse views the community supports. It is a big reason why I don't participate much.
I certainly think it's possible to clear 500 karma by playing to the echo chamber, but I don't remember having had much difficulty doing getting 500 and most of my comments have either been technical or about niche policy-ish stuff like urban planning or energy. I think my personal views on particularly echo-chamber-y things are probably at least somewhat different from any normative HN values that may exist, and that hasn't really been a barrier.
I espouse a lot of views that the community does not support. I am also the first woman to make the leaderboard (under a different handle -- my retired handle has 25k karma).
I don't think it works exactly the way you think it does.
How do you know you were the first woman to do so? This is a psuedo anonymous internet forum where people aren't required to state their gender or even their real names.
I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on, as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
My other handle has 25k karma. This one has over 3k. I don't in any way whatsoever participate in an echo chamber.
> I will add that being the first woman on the leaderboard is not essential to the point that you can get a lot of karma and not be part of the echo chamber. But inevitably that is the detail that gets focused on,
If it's not essential, and you don't want people to focus on it, why did you bring it up? It was the only interesting part of your comment (to me). I don't really care if HN is an echo chamber or not.
> as if proving that I am not the first woman (or questioning my assertion, because no proof to the contrary has ever been offered when I get asked this) somehow invalidates my actual point.
I actually dont care if you were or were not the first woman or if it was someone else, I was just curious about how you knew on an anonymous forum. But go ahead, be mad about it.
Your blog post is interesting, so thanks for linking that.
Why do you think "views the community supports" is the only thing that people upvote? I upvote entire threads where people are disagreeing because the whole conversation has value. I also upvote comments that add something new to the conversation. I think you have a naïve sense of participation.
I reached that threshold mostly via submissions, I don't comment that much (but also downvote very rarely). Surely, also submissions may add to the echo chamber, especially if they hit a nerve.
One reason for me to stay here is the diversity (and civility) of the comments, I don't think it's too bad. Another favourite read of mine is Arstechnica, but the comments there don't reach the quality of the comments on HN, imho.
I don't participate much because unlike, say, reddit, HN seems much more focused on delivering people to other destinations. That might just be my perception, but I think reddit has much more sophisticated community features, where as comments have always felt like an add-on for HN
That's so different from my experience. I often read the comments on HN before the linked article. I generally find reddit comments, even in subs dedicated to topics I care about, to be garbage. In contrast, I learn a lot from reading HN's comments.
Then again, if you feel that you need to be able to downvote people in order to "participate", maybe it's good that you don't have a downvote button yet ;-)
