Such a blanket statement certainly bears more nuance. I think some segregation can be effective -- I'd like to hear thoughtful comments about people who have a stake in the matter. Not glib, off-hand retorts from the peanut gallery. Why is that harmful, to prioritize the comments of people who have an incentive to be thoughtful?
However, geographical segregation (I take this to mean separating AND isolating, which might be my mistake -- segregating does not necessarily entail mutual isolation though I took it to mean that based on what was said) does not achieve this result (assuming the only people who know about SV live in SV), but it DOES exclude people who know a lot about relevant parts of SV life/culture/business that do not live in SV.
In the general case, it is not strictly impossible (nor even improbably, I would argue) that someone OUTSIDE of your geographical area (especially if you consider that people move around) does not hold important knowledge on anything related to your geographical area (and even more-so with super generic areas like "business" and "startups" and "venture capital"). If the possibility exists that someone with such knowlege exists outside of your geographical community, the geographical community will experience (I use that word liberally, you don't know what you don't know) a loss in potential knowledge -- in short, the person who COULD have contributed knowledge cannot, since they are excluded.
So what if annoying people drown out the voices of the insightful ones, or even cause people to leave? I think this is relatively difficult, without a pretty large out-pouring of annoying. They would have to be annoying enough to drive away people abroad (all potentially gained due to inclusion) AND at least one local person. I don't think HN is at that point yet, and I think it's really hard for any medium to get THAT noisy, and be obviously too noisy to be any good.
(oh also -- I didn't downvote you, actually upvoted, I just want to debate the point, since I have thought that before)
(also -- definitely, I should have qualified "community" with "community that seeks to grow knowledge, membership, involvement, etc"
If you're seeking knowledge, truth, or science, the notion that segregation will help you get there is indeed a very flawed notion.
I'm having a difficult time seeing how those objectives aren't furthered by -- in this matter -- excluding people who gleefully cheer the collapse of a multi-billion dollar company for apparently no other reason than "I don't like them." And in this case, those people can be filtered out by limiting comments from people who would be neither positively nor negatively impacted by such an event.
2. We don't KNOW absolutely that Australia guy doesn't like Zynga because of group-think, or because of unreasonable bias -- He may very well not think Zynga had the money to do this because he is a remote accountant that they have hired and just saw the books (however unlikely that is -- but with all this SaaS going about, why not)
For what it's worth, I'm betting you dollars to doughnuts that there are people in Silicon Valley cheering on the demise of Zynga as well, so the notion you put forth that only those bay-area haoles are the ones contributing to such blasé discussion is also likely flawed, leaving me with the (admittedly incomplete) idea that what you really want is a Hacker News populated with people who agree with you, which I'd surmise as ill-advised at the least, and unhealthy at most.
Aside: not sure how you're using haole? I've only heard that applied to (unwelcome) white people by Hawaiian natives.
As for haole, that is exactly how I was using it. The direct literal translation is 'foreigner', to my understanding, and whites just happen to have caught the slur because they were foreign to Hawaii, and annexed the place by force, not without a bit of hard feelings.
Regional filter == segregation. Segregation does not help communities. Especially communities that are so similar. What if Python programmers never talked to Ruby programmers and Ruby programmers never talked to Lisp programmers? If they stayed in their own regions just because of a PERCEIVED lack of depth of knowledge of the goings-on, a lot of things wouldn't get built.
Geographic community may mean something, but in a world with data that is freely available (nevermind the fact that just because he is in Australia does NOT preclude him from knowing more about the SV scene than you do -- you may be able to name buildings on streets, but may not know the players that he does), geographic community means less and less, and it should be that way. Knowledge (of non-geographic things) is not bound by geography.
It looks like you're asking for slashdot -- maybe you should check it out if you haven't already. Up/down voting IS vague, and at best, any attempts to characterize upvotes/downvotes (as you've suggested) is largely ineffective in absolute terms. Only people who have researched a subject well have the right to put something like "well-researched", if you think everyone does that, you're going to have a hard time on the internet. People like to think they are rational, but we are highly irrational.
Not trying to flame you, but maybe you shouldn't be so quick to go to righteous indignation.