A year ago even commenting that anything was wrong with any Apple product was met with derison, scorn and a flock of downvotes.

For whatever reason, the tone here has changed tremendously for the better so that this community can actually have serious, educational and productive discussions, and even present respectful competing opinions here. It was frustrating, but frankly it was boring as hell also.

I really think the turning point was the moment that pg turned off the points.

General rules I have noticed even after points stopped being show are (mostly regardless of the actual facts):

Take Apple's side(except if it's against Google) = upvotes

Take Google's side(except if it's against Apple) = upvotes

Take an anti-MS stance = upvotes

Take a non anti-MS stance: downvotes or no upvotes

I bet you can literally farm karma by following the above rules, based on seeing some posters' karma.

It's true that you are in a sense a guest of materialists in communities like these. I've found the only helpful thing is to make individual, atomic points or to write on a topic about which my conversant has no opinion. To say anything that is built on premises recognized and disputed by another is asking for a huge headache and yes, the CS training here greatly outpaces study of metaphysics.

Take heart and spend most of your time here talking about programming!

Most of my conversations here have been of a technical nature and that's fine, as I am both a geek and a pastor. I am just disappointed that off-topic conversations are welcome unless they enter the spiritual realm. Oh well, I have plenty of venues to show my spiritual side. I'll just keep it technical here, but it feels a little stifling to have to always keep it inside. Not that I want to bombard HN with matters of faith, but to never be able to mention it at all seems unrealistic.

I'll play by the rules.

I don't think I've ever seen a single religion-related comment on HN, so I'm not sure where you see a "heavy anti-faith undercurrent". Isn't it more likely that religious discussion is just off-topic here, so we don't see much of it?

As for the old days, I don't recall it being an issue, but that could be because I have a bad memory or that previous work environments were hyper-sensitive about posting to websites (or some combination of both) so I didn't get involved directly.

I've noticed the same trend. Even if no one questions or faults the point(s) being made re: evolution, a vitriolic jab at religion (particularly Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Judaism) is quite common in the comments.

This is a loss. To quote Richard D. Alexander (professor of Zoology at Univ. of Michigan and an evolutionist):

"...indeed, at this moment creation is the only alternative to evolution. Not only is this worth mentioning, but a comparison of the two alternatives can be an excellent exercise in logic and reason."

As an ex-atheist who previously believed in evolution and is now a young earth creationist, such conversations have the potential to be very interesting. Sadly, they end up with subtle (if you're lucky) or less subtle jabs about how believers are all anti-science and uneducated and just want to brainwash people, especially children. And that is generally considered to be the ultimate slam on creationists from which no recovery is expected.

I have a comp.sci degree, spent much of my teens getting excited about meta-physics and still love science, especially astronomy and am loving the Mars missions ... how's that for anti-science? :-)

As always, people holding the most extreme views color the perception of the whole community - even if most people who believe in creationism are perfectly willing to have an intelligent conversation and have no problem with their kids learning science, the vocal few that campaign ferociously against science in education make everyone on that side look bad.

Unfortunately nobody in the "sane" segment of the religious community seems to be speaking up against them or reining them in, which is why it is so frustrating.

I am sorry you had to deal with outbursts against your religion however - it can't have been too pleasant.

Back before I was a pastor (5'ish years ago) I used to blog regularly and often got into tussles with atheists, so fear not, these guys are just big ol' pussy cats compared to them.

I guess the emotion I want to express is sadness, because I expected better from thinking outside the box hackers and startup founders. No worries. I'm fine, the Lord still rules the universe and I'll be done with being bi-vocational at the end of this month. Life is good! :-)

  > As an ex-atheist who previously believed in evolution and
  > is now a young earth creationist

  > loving the Mars missions

In any case: No, not all discussions of this type are in fact potentially interesting, enlightening, or fostering a culture of whatever. Telling yourself that is feel-good nonsense. Sometimes, debating the merits of creationism simply means lowering the level of discourse. Debating the merits of current evolutionary science is, of course, both admissible and valuable; considering creationism (esp. of the wildly implausible kind) a viable alternative is simply misguided.

Don't waste time when there are actual problems to be solved.

The rest of your comment then wanders off further into the very attitude that I was commenting on, so thank you for illustrating my point. Discussing creationism does not lower the level of discourse, rather, dismissive attitudes such as yours, stifles intelligent discussion. You could have asked how I came to transition from professing evolution to embracing creationism, but instead you use words like misguided. I don't see any evidence that you'll care, but it was a thoughtful process and we could have discussed it. Looks like my personal policy of silence is the less misguided one.

Outside of my day job, I am a pastor (check my HN profile), so I also work on solving actual problems in my community and my congregation.

(I cannot say that I have noticed an increase in the number of Android posts here, but there does seem to have been a change in the tone of discussion.)

In fact, http://winsupersite.com (run by Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott) has been flagged so much that it is has been hellbanned even from being submitted at all for the crime of being a Microsoft inside news site. This would be hilarious if it weren't sad commentary on the nature of the HN community echo chamber.

It would be interesting to test the same thesis that I have which indicates there is a halo effect on anyone considered a rockstar which allows them to get more upvotes than they would w/o the rockstar status.

This is of course the way life operates. The only question is to what extent it happens. People tend to pay more attention to someone who has the trappings of success and/or has had their ticket punched.

My guess is that a long thoughtful comment by a new user or non rock star would gain almost the same upvotes as the same long thoughtful comment by a HN rockstar.

However a short comment, I'm fairly certain, (and once again this would have to be tested) would generate more upvotes from the rockstar then it would by a new user or non-rockstar. The gap would be much wider.

I once disagreed with a rockstar member (someone currently in the top 10 or so on the all time karma list) and had to delete my comment quite rapidly as I was getting buried. My comment was not personal or flaming in any way - just a disagreement.

Since hidden karma I think voting is far more fair.

I too think that HN is better in many ways than before, although I would say the noise ratio has increased. Still easily one of my favourite news and discussion forums.

Then, to avoid turning into 4chan, you can have posts be anonymous on the front end, but accountable to a user id on the back end only visible to the user themselves and the site staff.

It would be an interesting experiment.

It stops people from claiming to be someone they're not, but I see your point about knowing who you're talking to.

Perhaps a random anon on a comment here and there to test on a rolling basis.

To fix this, I would like to see threads bubble up to the top based on total karma score for the thread. Read the top half-dozen threads and you have a pretty good synopsis of both sides of the topic.

Except this, I agree with most of your comment. Most of the time I just up vote a good comment with out my eyes sliding to the poster's name (it provides me no meaningful information in most scenarios). Still, the comments I do up vote end being from the rock stars you are referring to. It's possible that they are able to put their thoughts into comments better than others. Since most of the names don't trigger a face to most people I don't see how this could be due to bias.

I do as well. I rarely pay attention to the handles on the site. There's probably less than a dozen I can remember on sight. The reason I do remember the names I recognize is because they used to consistently and always be at the top of the discussion.

Still, the comments I do up vote end being from the rock stars you are referring to.

I'm certainly not saying the folks on http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders don't deserve to be there. By and large, I think most of the folks there provide tremendous value to this community (even the ones I vigourously disagree with on a routine basis).

But I've also noticed that it seems since pg turned off the points, the names I see at the top of a discussion are more and more ones I don't recognize, and more and more ones that aren't on the leaderboard (and even if the leaderboard members aren't the topmost comment, they usually show up near the top because they provide good comments).

I like the new frothiness of HN.

Not really. People on both sides are just repeating the same discussion over and over again. Somewhat guilty of that myself, too. (disclaimer: generally not on Apple's side)

(also, maybe I'm reading it wrong but is the Steve Jobs remark not a little bit in bad taste? no matter your thoughts of him or Apple... )

Oh! To be one of the principate! What networking that would lead to ;-)