> What you've just said is that because jokes are frowned upon, nobody will contribute anything useful or interesting. I don't think that follows, and the knowledge that if you post something, the reply is unlikely to be a one line attempt at humour encourages longer more thoughtful comments.

I don't think that's what I said at all, but If I was confusing I apologize. I'll try and say it succinctly, if people go out of their way to post something reasonably interesting or thoughtful, but possibly counter to a commonly held viewpoint, it tends to get downvoted around here. Those downvotes are a way of saying "you are not conforming to the group mind, shape up". A thoughtful or interesting post doesn't have to be long. Short, pithy ones are just as interesting, yet also get downvoted for not conforming to the group mind.

For example, on the validity of argument ad hominem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021182

This was immediately downvoted, yet it's a wildly interesting contradictory thought and mildly funny as well. It's concise, witty and provokes the common perception regarding such arguments. My conjecture is two fold:

1) It's clear that a population of HN members simply didn't understand it and thought it was purely a joke, and annihilated it (because what people don't understand they tend to attack). Nobody who didn't get it took the time to write a three word reply "why is that?" - instead resorting to the downvote.

2) Given that this seems to happen quite a bit around here, a person who finds themselves habitually downvoted will perceive that negative community response, not as a process of a social normative function (after all, the community guidelines desire interesting comments, if a person is supplying interesting comments, they are already "normal") but as a process of rejection by the community and will simply stop providing input to the community.

This has two effects:

1) An interesting voice will no longer be heard, the quality of the discussion will become artificially limited by a social majority.

2) Since only comments that conform to the social majority's viewpoints survive, comments will only reflect the social majority - ergo an "echo chamber" will form.

> And thus HN people collectively adjust the shape of HN to taste.

If the taste is a bunch of people trading the same ideas around over and over again, it's not very useful other than to confirm their own preselected ideas and assumptions. We get smarter when our ideas are challenged by dissenting or contradictory voices. It helps us evaluate our viewpoint and beliefs. The reason an echo chamber is bad, is that no new viewpoints ever enter to "stir the pot" and force people to reevaluate things and become smarter and grow. If HN is to become an echo chamber, then it's better to not have HN at all since everybody already knows everything. The taste of an echo chamber is stale. History tends to cherish the revolutionaries far more than those that maintain the status quo. At any rate, they add flavor to the mix.

> No, it makes for very interesting reading and occasional actual conversation rather than banter.

I agree that, in the general sense, banter is not what HN is for. But I think forums are better if people can feel a little bit free to express their opinions and personalities a bit and not be constrained to an academic discussion all the time. The tempo of this site is fast enough, and the general population seems to be experienced enough, that short comments can still contain lots of meaning (like my example above).

> If you do that, it's not HN anymore it's a general news aggregator. It can't be at the same time about a restricted set of ideas and topics selected by the votes of the people who are here, and also open to everyone to comment anything on any topic, that's contradictory.

I don't think there is a lot of danger of that happening, as this meta-discussion is demonstrating, the HN community is vastly interested in the quality of the site.

In addition, the topics of discussion are reasonably constrained via guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Now, these aren't rules per se, but they state what the intended theme of the site should be. I don't think there is much danger of seeing Ron Paul and Kucinich posts swamping the front page any-time soon. But a post about a new law affecting business in say South Korea is on topic. It may not be to you if all you care about is say, discussions on Scheme, but it is to me since Korea is a technology oriented place to do business and such laws may have interesting ramifications for startups elsewhere. I'm in business, I'm in technology, and I may do technology related business in South Korea.

> Or, you could find somewhere else where LOLprogrammers comics are relevant, and don't penalize 'us' who don't want to participate by trying to change here so that is relevant here as well.

That's like saying "don't penalize us who don't want to watch reality T.V. by putting it in the programming queue for the station I just happen to be watching! I'm powerless to change the channel or turn off the TV! It makes me to upset I'm going to write a letter to the station and demand that they remove all reality TV from their programming lineup!"

It's nonsensical and silly.

A submitted topic is like a virtual salon, if you don't like the nature of the conversation in that salon, feel free to try the next room, don't burn down the building.

>Given that not-everything is OK here, there will be people who don't fit in, don't like what is posted and don't like what is excluded. If that's not what you want, the choices are to find or start somewhere else where the limited subset of things more aligns with you, or to break open every niche and limited site until everywhere has everything as an allowed topic.

I'm reading that to mean that the lurking downvote patrol trolls here are the ones that don't fit in, yet don't seem to be able to "move to another salon without burning the previous one down". Again, just because you may not be interested in doing business in South Korea, doesn't mean that the people participating in that thread aren't. Feel free to move along, don't deep-six the discussion for everyone else who is interested.

> You so don't, you've argued against everything he said.

You apparently ran out of steam and couldn't be bothered to read the rest of the statement. Here, I'll paste it here for you again. "I can understand the continuous meta-discussion here about how to keep HN from sliding down the reddit->digg->4chan slope. But I think we have to be aware of, and meta-discuss how to keep HN from going the opposite direction, that of becoming so rarefied that any nonconforming comments are immediately stifled and the entire board dies except for a small group who enjoy spending their time in a self-selected echo chamber."

> Isn't that inherent the very nature of a group that can't discuss everything?

No, I think you need to lookup the meaning of the term "echo chamber". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)

In short, they are something to be avoided because they limit rational thought.