What's the most important insight in this essay that HN does <i>not</i> line up well with? [1] When I look at his key points [2], the ones that HN seems to line up well with are:<p><i>The place that was founded on open access had too much openness. They had no way of saying, “No, that’s not the kind of free speech we meant.”</i><p><i>Technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There’s no way to completely separate them. Having good software isn’t enough.</i><p><i>Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogeneous groups.</i><p><i>There is always an informal piece of the Constitution. The informal part is the sense of “how we do it around here.”</i><p><i>Handles the user can invest in. A way for there to be members in good standing, some way in which good works get recognized. The penalty for switching doesn’t have to be total, but if I change my handle, I have to lose some kind of reputation or some kind of context.</i><p>Here are points we line up with, but not as much. Note how the first one overlaps with the last one above—that's because HN straddles this issue somewhat [3]:<p><i>I need to associate who’s saying something to me now with previous conversations. Weak pseudonymity doesn’t work well.</i><p><i>You need some barriers to participation, however small. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.</i><p>I found only one main point where HN differs significantly:<p><i>You have to find a way to spare the group from scale. The dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale. Less is different—small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t. </i><p>You might think HN fits this description too, because we've never tried to juice it for growth, and it's a medium-sized forum by contemporary standards. However, when Shirky says small he means "larger than a dozen but smaller than a few hundred". He recommends finding ways to factor larger groups into smaller ones so that richer interactions can happen. This is something we explicitly do not do. As HN has millions of readers and tens of thousands of commenters, it's humongous by the standard he was writing about.<p>This is the non-siloed property of HN [4]. It's probably the single most influential aspects of the site's design, and it has many counterintuitive consequences, which I've been writing about lately [5].<p>[1] I asked this in 2016: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208054" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208054</a><p>[2] Several of these quotes are spliced from multiple passages.<p>[3] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=by:dang%20community%20identity" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20silo&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716395" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716395</a> and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098</a>