HN Lament
I really don't want this to be yet another of those "HN is going to hell, folks!" posts, but I'm at a bit of a loss at how to continue. So, like always, I'll talk to myself by writing. You are welcome to join in. Or not.

One of my many side projects is a cute little photo blog. I won't name it, because if I do somebody will just accuse me of trying to promote it, and I'm not.

It's been around for about a month. My goal? To tag my funny photo collection and share with people. I also put things on there I want to remember.

Today I found a cool picture that involved programming, protesting, and outsourcing. It's not a "funny picture" but it grabbed my attention. I couldn't attribute the damn thing, so I posted something like "Anybody know what kind of protest this is?" But it occurred to me that traffic was so low I was unlikely to get a response.

Speaking to a friend, I mentioned maybe submitting it over here. You guys love coding, love protests, and love talking about stuff like this. Surely you've seen the picture and could have fun explaining it.

My friend was adamant: "Don't do it! If you post that over on HN, they'll flag it and ban your site forever!"

I'm like what? Why wouldn't they just let it slip off the new page and ignore it? Why wouldn't somebody just post a comment like "Here's where they got it from, Daniel. It's related to X" and that would be it? After all, it's just a picture and a question, it's being submitted from somebody who's been here over four years. There are no ads. It's not attributed, but hell, that's why I had the question to begin with.

In short, it's something I think would interest hackers. I might be wrong, but hell, been wrong a lot before. It's nothing new.

But, you know, he's right. Looking at the new page with ShowDead on, there are dozens of real people out there submitting stuff that nobody will ever see, and they don't even know it. Any kind of article that can be perceived to have be some kind of trick ("they'll say you're just blog spamming!") will not get ignored -- nope -- that'd be too nice. It'll be flagged. We must assume the worst and we must punish immediately.

But that's not all. Just last week I submitted an article about startups. I wrote it myself, it was highly on-topic, and I have written many similar articles over the years. It got five votes fairly quickly -- it was a good read -- and then somebody flagged it. That's right. They didn't comment on what I did wrong or correct me or anything. I pissed in somebody's cornflakes and this was payback time. Over the years how many people have I pissed off? Now I have to try to figure out when to submit when none of them are online? That's fucked. A couple of weeks ago I said something slightly unflattering about the Chinese government. I was refreshing the page to see if there were any new replies (I am anal like that) when I saw somebody come in, downvote my comment 3 times, then go and downvote the last 3 comments I had made. I wasn't trashing anybody, I just probably wasn't as PC as they liked.

So here's my simple question: is this what we want the site to be? Have we reached the point where if you piss off a few percent of the population, you can never submit things? Do we want to have third-world people hungrily trying to get attention for their blogs while we secretly just waste their time? Is anybody taking a look at the poor saps who add reasonable comments to the discussion, think they are contributing, yet nobody can see what they're typing because they've been banned without their knowing it? Have we reached the point where anything that can possibly be spun a bad way will automatically be assumed to be deceptive? The front page is full of gossip, meanwhile we have to plead with people to be nice to the new startups that are posting because it seems you can't submit anything here without some snarky response? Is that what being a hacker is all about?

I'm just asking. This isn't the kind of community I joined. I'm just wondering what happened to it.

It's a lament. Probably not a lot to add.