Personally, I find these two below mentioned reasons for HN's appeal toward intense intellectual discussions, unparalleled to any other place on the web --<p>1. Bare-bones design -- This acts as a great filter and barrier-to-entry of sorts, wherein only those who _actually_ want to consume (or contribute) content stick around.<p>2. Text heavy content -- Again, I personally find this super appealing. Text only content keeps the reader's focus on what the author is trying to convey, which more often than not brings out the best in one's writing. Contrast that with many competing 'multimedia-heavy' forums where there's a greater chance of a reader getting distracted by unrelated content (suggested, similar, etc).<p>Bonus: Well implemented nested comments -- Following two HN users have a go at each other (respectfully, that is) in a fine display of one-upmanship is absolutely gratifying with a super-low chance of it going ad hominem.<p>What'd you guys think?
That's quite a premise! I disagree with it extremely strongly.<p>People mostly don't go back to any HN thread that's more than a day old. So any conversation that requires more than a few hours of thinking can't happen here, because by the time you finish thinking hard about what you just read, no-one is reading anymore. How could that possibly lead to the superior intellectual forum on the web? It's a place for people to share their initial opinions about something in response to news. That can be good! Often people have interesting first opinions! But it's not the pinnacle of intellectual thought.
Occasionally, you can find great discussions on HN because HN has a large amount of domain experts on various sciencey topics. Apart from that, I don't really think HN is that incredibly fantastic.<p>If you compare it with your average social media (facebook, twitter, mainstream reddit), then yeah, you could say HN is more intelectually sophisticated than that.<p>The realest, greatest and most fantastic forums are the tiny ones, ones dedicated to a very specific topic, attracting only those who have a major interest in that topic.<p>Think of various tiny dedicated subreddits, or Lambda the Ultimate, or a huge collection of sites no-one here has ever heard of...<p>HN's great, but absolutely doesn't deserve the title of "superior intellectual forum on the web". That's <i>way</i> too much.
> <i>"The superior intelectual"</i><p>??<p>I believe this is arrogant and wrong. Both the words <i>the</i> and <i>superior</i> give me that impression.<p>I also believe both points you mentioned are just characteristics that fits the culture of its members in a self-reinforcing loop. Not causation for the quality of its comments.
1. The actual people who choose to be here.<p>2. The reasons they choose to be here.<p>3. Good moderation, in part because it is paid, but in part for other reasons. (I know a forum where, in my opinion, the paid staff are The Problem.)<p>4. "Table Stakes" -- for some people here, there is potentially a lot on the line. This means the most influential people have intrinsic motive to reign themselves in and cooperate with the moderating staff's agenda instead of taking some big stand <i>on principle</i> etc.<p>5. The nature of those "table stakes" probably helps to combat classism, sexism, racism, etc.
It's the zeitgeist. HN aggressively self-moderates, the actual moderators have a light but objective touch. With exception to a few characters, I've chatted with people here who have not only changed my beliefs but also changed theirs. The community believes in scientific rigor, but also share illuminating anecdotes.<p>You can't distill HN into a formula. It is the sum of the participants.
While I do think the user base is intellectual, theres really not much conversation.<p>In the good old day there would be a proper forum with conversations that went for months.
None of the features you mention have any but the weakest relationship to the intellectual quality of Hacker News.<p>Take all of them together, you could describe Reddit before the rebuild. Minus the nested threads, you could be describing 4chan (which, despite being an imageboard, has a lot of textual content.)
I think the key is heavy handed moderating. It creates a culture where certain types of comments aren't allowed(aggressive, and flippant) which brings up the level of commentary.