Your idea that HN is more like an economically healthy city than a socially healthy town sounds like another take on that idea. I think it conflicts with this suggestion:
> I have passingly thought that the leader board of HN should maybe be 150 names long instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community -- to help foster that same pattern of "there are 150 people whom we all know and can follow all the relationships and so forth" that you get with a smaller online community.
The problem is that the leaderboard is a list of community heroes, not a list of community members. You may know who tptacek is, but he doesn't know who you are. (In general.) By my criterion, that means he is a part of the community, and you're not.
I don't actually think there is a core community any longer. I don't think everyone on the leader board exchanges emails or something.
I've spent time on the leader board under a previous handle. I appear to be the only woman to have done that. It absolutely wasn't some magic "in" where I suddenly joined some club and all that. I've been around enough to know they aren't all friends or something.
Members of the leader board come and go. Edit: By which I mean making the leader board isn't some kind of permanent status. I'm not the only person who used to be on the leader board and still participates.
A social group of this size fundamentally works differently from a small town. That doesn't mean that only hardcore insiders benefit from a sense of community.
Probably, the reason people talk a lot about famous celebrities and popular movies and TV shows on the internet is because those are touchstones we have in common to help socially orient ourselves, smooth communication, etc.
Fostering a sense of community can help establish community norms, help newcomers orient and figure out how to fit in, etc. No, participating here isn't going to be the same as living in a tiny town of 150 people your entire life. It doesn't need to be to benefit members and for things to generally run better when we apply some means to help establish cultural norms, etc.
There are many people that have readily used HN as a means to establish or grow an online income. That was a goal of mine well before I ever heard of HN, but it's been a huge uphill battle to get taken seriously here and get treated like someone knowledgeable who needs and deserves an income.
I was homeless for nearly six years of the more than ten that I have been here and was getting dismissively told "get a real job" repeatedly in response to my efforts to try to develop an online income from the street. Men didn't really want to talk to me except to inquire if I might be willing to have coffee with them sometime, aka they were looking for a hookup while literally not caring that I was so poor I often went hungry.
There is a long history in my life of people thanking me for what I know and what I contribute to various online communities I have participated in and gushing at me and wanting to reach out to me for some feel good emotional connection. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. The world interprets me as very caring, has big feels about how caring I am towards them and then insists this isn't worth money, doesn't merit an income and is valuable to them apparently precisely because it is authentic and comes from the heart and isn't done for money.
It's amazingly sick stuff where they expect to benefit for free, they are very touched that I care about them and their response is not only that they don't care about me and my welfare, they are actively and openly hostile to my need to establish an income. Almost no one goes "What she brings to the table adds value, she deserves an income for adding value, so I should do one or more of the following in response to sincerely appreciating what she adds here: support her Patreon, leave a tip, hire her to do some writing, recommend her work to other people, promote her writing, etc so she can stop being dirt poor."
This is not unique to HN, but it's especially galling because it's perfectly normal behavior on HN to be participating here for purposes of developing an online earned income. It's also especially galling because I appear to be the highest ranked woman here. Between my old handle and this one, I have more than 50k karma which would put me respectably high on the leader board if it were all under one handle and I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board.
There are self-made millionaires on the leader board whose income comes at least in part from being active participants on HN. For men, HN is an opportunity to promote their work and network.
For me, it's been an opportunity to be sexually harassed by people content to watch me starve. Any time I talk about being the highest ranked woman here, I get attacked and dismissed as being obsessed with meaningless internet points. Meanwhile, it used to be pretty common for men on HN to tell each other "You have a lot of karma on HN. That's evidence you are uncommonly competent." and similar.
That seems to be less common these days, perhaps because I've pointed out at times that there is a double standard. Rather than admit that maybe it means I'm smart and deserving of respect, it seems they've stopped saying that to each other.
That's the really ugly version of more than a decade of participation. It's not all downside and hopefully answering your question will not lead to the usual pile on of ugly, dismissive personal attacks for commenting on it.
If I got nothing out of participating here, I wouldn't be here. But I certainly don't get what the guys get and I certainly haven't gotten the career enhancement I was looking for, which is clearly and obviously available if you are male.
(No, I don't want to hear for the umpteenth time that I'm just doing it wrong and sexism is not the problem. If I'm doing it wrong, why am I the highest ranked woman here? Where are all the women doing it right if it's just me and not sexist bullshit?)
Networking has mostly been a fail. Historically, men either didn't want to email me at all or they only emailed me to hit on me, while not giving a rat's ass about my dire and intractable financial problems.
After more than a decade, people are finally willing to email me for reasons other than to say "So, sugar, when can we have coffee?" but that puts me a decade behind on career development and I remain dirt poor at this point.
Escaping poverty is easily as hard as trying to escape Earth's gravity well. I wish you the best of luck in attaining a healthier financial situation. If I could afford to, I would donate to your patreon directly.
My ability to speak frankly is one part me and my history, one part the rest of HN. Over the years, I've been thrown off of several forums. Most of the world is quick to shut down criticism and look for a scapegoat, usually the person giving the criticism.
I'm well aware I can be hard to take. I'm still here in part because it isn't at all lost on me that most social groups would have long ago run me off rather than continue to listen to my unflinching appraisal of all that's wrong with the world and how that expresses itself in the microcosm we share in this virtual space.
I've seen forward progress. And the thing is that most revolutions are bloody and violent and there's a lot of collateral damage. And there's also that principle that "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
A desire for revenge and a desire for actual solutions is often at odds.
I think whatever changes have gone down because of HN's willingness to put up with my uncomfortable presence probably quietly cuts more deeply to the heart of certain problems than a lot of other efforts in the world.
Last I heard, HN gets about 5 million unique visitors a month. The human brain can cope effectively with a community of around 150 members.
For a time, I was the lead mod for The TAG Project. Prior to my arrival, the founder had done some good internal research on her group of online communities (a set of email lists) and found that 20 percent of members were regular and active, another 10 percent posted once or occasionally and the rest were lurkers.
This seems to be roughly true for other communities I have participated in elsewhere.
If you do the math, that means you will have about 150 active members posting regularly when you get to about 750 members. In my experience, once you get to about 750 or 800 members, you start seeing splinter groups form and you start getting new things budding out of that.
Other small email lists began to spin off of one of those email lists once it got big enough.
So if you want a strong sense of community, you are talking about a small town atmosphere where you have about 150 active members and some number of lurkers.
I have passingly thought that the leader board of HN should maybe be 150 names long instead of 100 to help foster some sense of community -- to help foster that same pattern of "there are 150 people whom we all know and can follow all the relationships and so forth" that you get with a smaller online community. But I don't feel strongly about it and I don't see any point in making it some hill to die on, so I think I have mentioned it in comments maybe once or twice before for some reason and that's it.*
Big cities rely on formality and such to account for the fact that we don't all know each other well etc. HN does a better job than most communities of actually applying the rules fairly even-handedly and not just playing favorites for certain insiders.
There are some really corrupt communities that pretend they are nice places, but the rules are applied by the mods completely differently for "insiders" versus "outsiders" and it's very toxic. No, they probably won't help you assimilate either.
This is not true here. The mods don't have to personally like you to give you a fair shake if you will make an effort to reform your bad habits and actually play by the rules.
I think HN is a healthy space, but no longer has a strong sense of community like it did when I first joined. But I was always an outsider looking in who never really got to benefit from that strong sense of community (in fact, it arguably did me a lot of harm).
I stuck around because it had those big city formality things already going on and was kind of the least worst option for my needs and purposes. It had virtues that helped me make it work for me in spite of humans being human and certain problems (like sexism) being rampant and inescapable across the globe.
* Edit: I run my mouth a lot. It's probably more than twice in the last decade, but I certainly don't harp on it.