What criteria do you use to determine 'health' in online communities?

This is a question that I think is too broad to be worthwhile, because signs of health in one community aren't necessarily signs of health for another.

As an example of two communities that are effectively polar opposites (at least in theory, anyway; in reality they're pretty close): HN & /r/NFL.

'Health' in /r/NFL's case is closer to emulating a gathering on someone's couch to watch American football. Checking a random example off the front page, the comment section has a Nazi pun at the top, and countless single- or double-word replies to that. It seems pretty healthy.

'Health' in HN's case can be taken a few different ways.

If we look at the original announcement for it (or, at least, the announcement that it was being renamed and refocused)[1], it's supposed to be a clone of 2006's reddit; intellectually-gratifying stories on the front page; high-quality, civil comments; primarily self-moderating (if nothing else to the point of not needing babysitting). We can then conclude that it's failed at most of this, and as a result, not healthy. That seems to be the conclusion Graham hit. [2]

However, that's not very satisfactory, is it? Plenty of things end up worse than originally intended to be. Let's reframe a little bit.

Are some of the stories on the front page intellectually-gratifying? As an uncontroversial example, 'afandian's blog post (which at the time of writing this is at #22) is certainly intellectually-gratifying. On the other hand, there are more than a few that are uncontroversially not so.

Are most of the comments civil and high-quality? I leave answering this as an exercise to the reader.

With that framing, it's kind of healthy.

Let's hit it from a different angle: is it better than the average public-facing Internet community aiming to do the same things presently? For the most part, I would say so, especially at the scale it's at.

Conclusion: Healthy enough.

How do these differ from those criteria you use to determine ‘health’ in offline communities you are in?

I disagree with the premise of this question as-worded.

How does HN exemplify or not exemplify 'healthy' behaviors?

I think HN embodies the healthiest example of large-scale heavily- and strictly-moderated conversation on the Internet. On the other side of that, I think the community reacts poorly to it as a result: it's done well enough to where it doesn't feel like it's as moderated as it is, so when people notice that it isn't they're surprised and alarmed.

What behaviors of your own would you acknowledge may or may not contribute to the overall ‘health’ of HN?

My submissions are pretty great overall. My comments aren't as good as I'd like them to be, and I occasionally find myself commenting on things I don't care about, so I've been reconsidering commenting at all lately.

What makes you stay?

kuro5hin is dead, and I've been reading this site for ages. Since the best is dead, most communities have little if any redeeming qualities, a good mail client doesn't exist (great discussion still happens on some mailing lists), and HN is by and large still decent, it's the closest alternative that isn't a microblogging community.

I also recommend that you examine the corpses of dead online hangouts for this. Many places were fantastic for years but died due to events that weren't necessarily tied to the core functions or community of the hangout (kuro5hin being an example of this alongside many newsgroups).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...