Perhaps boring was the wrong word... "stuffy", maybe? Look, I love HN as much as the next guy; it's the only link aggregation / commenting site I visit. And there is indeed a lot of good content here.
The site lacks personality and that's probably why people who are otherwise "smart enough" (or whatever metric you wish to use) to post here don't. Since there's no personality and usernames are deliberately downplayed in leu of every comment being judged strictly on its individual quality, there's no diversity. This is why I say "everyone is the same person".
Think of a close group of friends. Could you randomly interchange them without anybody noticing? Probably not, but you could easily do that on HN. All you are to me is "one of those guys who holds the opinion that HN is <fill in your arguments>". There are lots and lots of you and you're all the same to me. There are people here like me, too, and we're probably all the same to you.
I don't really "know" anyone on HN; it isn't a community in that sense. It's just a group of like-minded people who hold the standard deviation of opinions regarding a (relatively small) set of topics. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
(edit: of course this isn't the reality of the situation -- I'm sure everyone here is not the same in "real life", but due to how HN is setup and run, for all intents and purposes they are here.)
The site lacks personality and that's probably why people who are otherwise "smart enough" (or whatever metric you wish to use) to post here don't. Since there's no personality and usernames are deliberately downplayed in leu of every comment being judged strictly on its individual quality, there's no diversity. This is why I say "everyone is the same person".
Think of a close group of friends. Could you randomly interchange them without anybody noticing? Probably not, but you could easily do that on HN. All you are to me is "one of those guys who holds the opinion that HN is <fill in your arguments>". There are lots and lots of you and you're all the same to me. There are people here like me, too, and we're probably all the same to you.
I don't really "know" anyone on HN; it isn't a community in that sense. It's just a group of like-minded people who hold the standard deviation of opinions regarding a (relatively small) set of topics. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
(edit: of course this isn't the reality of the situation -- I'm sure everyone here is not the same in "real life", but due to how HN is setup and run, for all intents and purposes they are here.)