> - How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?
- None that I remember, thank goodness. One man's conversations are another man's flame wars.
> - How many people do you know on HN?
- At the very least, knowing HN users' affiliations and posting tendencies is key to quickly blocking unwanted ideological noise, whether it concerns international politics or programming languages.
This is IMO the approach that makes the most sense. Let users ignore other users, rather than enforcing bans/shadowbans on the whole userbase.
While I personally would rather not block anyone, I think everyone should have the ability to police the content they see, but in most cases not what other people see.
On HN when I like a users comment I will go through their post history, and if enough of their comments are of good quality, I add their comments to my RSS reader through hnrss. Reddit does this slightly better, where you can add users to your 'friend's list' and then they give you an option to see the latest comments from all of your friends. Both ways do context of the comment poorly.
The other thing I do on Reddit is have thousands of sub-reddits filtered out through RES. Basically anything bigger than a million subscribers is useless, and often even 100k is to much.
I wonder if this is done on purpose, to nudge people into thinking of individual users not as people but as voices of a "hivemind".
Even today, usernames are de-emphasized in the UI in contrast to names of threads or subreddits. That's most prominent on the front-page ("r/all") where posts don't show the usernames at all, only the names of subreddits - producing the odd impression that the subreddits are authoring the posts and not individual users within the subreddit.
HN's UI is sort of similar on the first half: Users are de-emphasized here as well, but there are no subreddits to emphasize instead. Though I think it would be interesting if someone made an alternative frontend for HN that presented threads in the style of an old web forum, with user identities shown prominently
I think it works frightenly well sometimes. Ask yourself:
- How many engaging conversations have you had on HN in the last year?
- How many people do you know on HN?