I've seen a number of interesting threads which inevitably end up with the first post blotted out to near-oblivion, and about half of it in various states of erasure.
Hacker News seems designed to select for intellectual novelty rather than conversation. It's unfortunate that disagreement even for petty reasons acts as a global censor. Different groups of people downvoting whatever they personally think is uninteresting, irrelevant or wrong gets in the way of the site's utility for everyone else.
You have enlightened me: there are no guidelines on downvoting. at all. that's fairly terrible, IMO. I guess I should expect downvoting to be an ungregulated wild west, and accept the spiteful downvoting that comes with it.
I understand this sounds sarcastic, but I'm being serious.
The rules are not what people seem to think they are.
I've seen enough threads where people claim the subject is not "HN material" in which it has to be pointed out to them (by dang usually) that, in fact, this is not just a forum for technology, startup culture or 'hacking' however you define it.
The community has become large and diverse enough that there's a good chance quite a few people will find a subject of interest which you don't care for. This doesn't mean that Hacker News is necessarily declining in quality, but rather it means your particular biases are no longer as normative as you once thought. Hacker News material is defined entirely as whatever gets upvoted, that's the system, it's no more or less meritocratic than that.
But people seem to find it an affront when some stories make it to the top of the heap, as if they got there by cheating.
You're right. the rules aren't what I thought they were either. I'm adjusting my views accordingly.
I rarely care about "non-hn" stories making it to the front page; discussions on HN were more important than the links themselves. I wonder if I'm in the minority there.
Hacker News seems designed to select for intellectual novelty rather than conversation. It's unfortunate that disagreement even for petty reasons acts as a global censor. Different groups of people downvoting whatever they personally think is uninteresting, irrelevant or wrong gets in the way of the site's utility for everyone else.