One of the most powerful things that HN enjoys is a vital, continuous and active meta-discussion about the quality of HN.
I'm going to take a different approach to this. If you look at the comments in the thread in question, there's really only one person who's behavior is lamentable, and it's clear by his continuous statements in the topic that he isn't even aware of it...Dunning–Kruger is spot on. I was even so pissed I took the bait and fed the troll when I probably should have thought better of it.
However, looking back at the thread a day later, I see that the community policing worked. That vast majority of the really despicable comments were downvoted into negative territory. The poster's statements were tossed out into the trash they were.
The truth is, we shouldn't extrapolate the behavior of one attention starved malcontent to the entire community. I'm personally impressed with the community. To me at least, the community worked hard to keep the discussion appropriate and positive, elbowing out the bad sort of folks who shouldn't be participating in a forum like this.
Yeah sure, there were a few other questionable top level posts, but nothing entirely inappropriate, most of the ugliness centered around one person (I'm including myself regrettably as a participant in responding to this troll). So it's no the community that necessarily behaved badly, in fact the community behaved quite well.
edit Something I thought I'd add after reading through a few more comments discussing how the quality of discussion here appears to be going down. I have to disagree. I'd say that the comments and discussions here are extremely strong, better than they were about a year ago (or whenever pg turned off comment voting). At that time, HN seemed to be suffering from an outrageous echo chamber where a select group of superstars were automatically the top comment in every thread they participated in, the cult of Apple was going through all kinds of absurd egocentric narcissism, a Haskell and a Daring Fireball post was guaranteed to be on the front page, and any comments pointing this out were mercilessly downvoted and their users flagged - and comments supporting the echo chamber group think were guaranteed karma earners.
Since the simple switch to turn off comment points, this trend seems to have dissipated. Superstars no longer squat at the top of the mountain, Haskell no longer dominates the front page, we still love Apple, but only as a product company that makes cool stuff, not as a cult, and dissenting opinions and reasonable debate seems to have returned. The front page is dominated by tech tips and business ideas most days, even in the shadow of SOPA. In short HN has returned with a vengeance.
I'm going to take a different approach to this. If you look at the comments in the thread in question, there's really only one person who's behavior is lamentable, and it's clear by his continuous statements in the topic that he isn't even aware of it...Dunning–Kruger is spot on. I was even so pissed I took the bait and fed the troll when I probably should have thought better of it.
However, looking back at the thread a day later, I see that the community policing worked. That vast majority of the really despicable comments were downvoted into negative territory. The poster's statements were tossed out into the trash they were.
The truth is, we shouldn't extrapolate the behavior of one attention starved malcontent to the entire community. I'm personally impressed with the community. To me at least, the community worked hard to keep the discussion appropriate and positive, elbowing out the bad sort of folks who shouldn't be participating in a forum like this.
Yeah sure, there were a few other questionable top level posts, but nothing entirely inappropriate, most of the ugliness centered around one person (I'm including myself regrettably as a participant in responding to this troll). So it's no the community that necessarily behaved badly, in fact the community behaved quite well.
edit Something I thought I'd add after reading through a few more comments discussing how the quality of discussion here appears to be going down. I have to disagree. I'd say that the comments and discussions here are extremely strong, better than they were about a year ago (or whenever pg turned off comment voting). At that time, HN seemed to be suffering from an outrageous echo chamber where a select group of superstars were automatically the top comment in every thread they participated in, the cult of Apple was going through all kinds of absurd egocentric narcissism, a Haskell and a Daring Fireball post was guaranteed to be on the front page, and any comments pointing this out were mercilessly downvoted and their users flagged - and comments supporting the echo chamber group think were guaranteed karma earners.
Since the simple switch to turn off comment points, this trend seems to have dissipated. Superstars no longer squat at the top of the mountain, Haskell no longer dominates the front page, we still love Apple, but only as a product company that makes cool stuff, not as a cult, and dissenting opinions and reasonable debate seems to have returned. The front page is dominated by tech tips and business ideas most days, even in the shadow of SOPA. In short HN has returned with a vengeance.