Having observed Digg and Reddit devolve, solving this problem has nothing to do with conspiracy theories.
This is more about addressing Eternal September concerns (brilliant reference by someone yesterday). History will repeat itself until a clever, llama-free community ahem addresses these problems intelligently. I can't think of a better place for it.
I'm sorry that you think I was subscribing to some sort of conspiracy theory in listing those organizations. The point I was trying to make is that what has been termed "fluff" is now "destructive trends", and worse it was somehow suggested that by exposing others behaviors (or rather, revealing stats as illustrated in the above description) would somehow lead to a (final?) solution.
The degree to which the original "problem" is becoming viewed as cancerous is alarming because I feel that News.YC is a place for diverse thinking and sharing interesting content. Digg/Reddit have devolved because they are more homogenous than they are diverse (hence the mob-like mentality).
The very diversity that makes an online community interesting should be embraced instead of eradicated, but that's just my opinion. I know that eventually as News.YC becomes more popular this community will homogenize and follow the same fate as Digg/Reddit.
I'm not sure how long you've been lurking; there is a shared desire to perpetuate the level of discourse in a way that benefits the community. We've also got the "don't say something stupid, the natives are very smart / clever / motivated and deserve your respect" factor, the "ask yc news/ask pg and almost always get intelligent actionable feedback from experienced hackers/entrepreneurs" factor, and the "if I have an idea and demonstrate talent I might get noticed / funded, so I better not say something really stupid" factor.
Releasing data is a '?' - if it can be suggested that it may be a means to arrive at some sort of method for automatically/technically ensuring the community doesn't move toward the same kind of mob mentality, that's fantastic, let the heavyweight theory guys find something cool to do with it. If that fails, there's still moderation, and a strong desire to perpetuate the high signal to noise ratio here.
I don't feel the need to convince anybody of that which they do not know. Also, I don't feel that having data of users is more advantageous than proving my point; there are also other pieces of info I can dig up (if you're interested) that may or may not strengthen my argument. I am VERY open to the idea that I might be wrong, which indeed might be the case. However, I will always maintain that what most concerns me about the nature of this discussion is NOT the efforts put forward to solve a perceived problem but the way in which a threat is interpreted and what we are willing to give up in exchange for dealing with the perceived threat.
Btw, I really don't want to come off as being antagonistic here. I'm sticking to my view until I see a benefit to what everybody has been advocating. In the meantime, feel free to downmod me if you disagree. I have no problem paying a penalty for disagreeing, if that is the cost associated with expressing my views, regardless of how well they are accepted.
(thanks for reading this long-ass post if you got this far!!)
