I'm relatively new to the Hacker News community, so forgive me if this is totally off-base, but in my opinion the issue is that the community feels relatively anonymous. Perhaps this is by design, the point being that the comment should be more important than the commenter, but it has its downsides.
It's easy to act viciously when you're only identified by a username, and this lack of identification, I think, breeds contempt. Though it's possible to dig deeper and find out more about each commenter, while skimming comments on an article, I don't "see" a collection of accomplished human beings having a conversation. At a glance, I don't know whether I'm talking to a bunch of snarky twelve year-old know-it-alls or founders with a wealth of real-world experience. To me, this matters.
I wonder whether there are simple ways to shift the tone of the HN community - for example, by assigning a short byline to each username that gives an indication as to who the user actually is, and why I should care about what they have to say (the "about" field already exists, but maybe it needs to be brought front-and-centre somehow).
Again, I've jumped into the HN community late, so perhaps I'm being a little naive. However, maybe a newcomer's perspective could be helpful.
I think there is a lot of identity associated with users. I'm relatively young, and often I will see one user identifying another user by their first name, which I don't know at all. People know each other here.
This might be bad. If so, I'd say all comments should be anonymous for 2 days. Give out a pseudo-random pronounceable handle to each user for posting on each thread. People making dick comments will still have to deal with their commenting history as posts are "unmasked" in 48 hours. (This well could cause more problems that it solves.)
That's interesting, and it's probably something I'll come to recognise as I spend more time here. However, from where I'm standing, it does seem as though the issue is that those ties are breaking as the community grows. I'm not totally sure adding a further layer of anonymity would strengthen discourse (though it could be an interesting experiment).
It's easy to act viciously when you're only identified by a username, and this lack of identification, I think, breeds contempt. Though it's possible to dig deeper and find out more about each commenter, while skimming comments on an article, I don't "see" a collection of accomplished human beings having a conversation. At a glance, I don't know whether I'm talking to a bunch of snarky twelve year-old know-it-alls or founders with a wealth of real-world experience. To me, this matters.
I wonder whether there are simple ways to shift the tone of the HN community - for example, by assigning a short byline to each username that gives an indication as to who the user actually is, and why I should care about what they have to say (the "about" field already exists, but maybe it needs to be brought front-and-centre somehow).
Again, I've jumped into the HN community late, so perhaps I'm being a little naive. However, maybe a newcomer's perspective could be helpful.