There's an interesting meta pattern here. pg has obviously thought a lot about this change, he's the creator of HN and he's the one who knows the site the best. All pg is saying is this: let's try it out and see if it works as intended. That is, it is an experiment, and reality is the ultimate judge.
If you look in this thread, the original thread, or the latest poll you see a different attitude. It's not viewed as an experiment where reality will be the judge at all. Instead the comments basically boils down to "This is good." or "This is bad.", plus a few technical questions.
How come so few people think of it in terms of an experiment? Isn't this the supposed standard m.o. for startups as well as for coding?
Is it just that people who have the wait-and-see attitude don't comment, so all we hear about is from the vocal crowd? (This was the case for me before writing this post.) Is it some form of domain dependence going on here? I find this to be a very curious pattern.
This was not phrased as an experiment by pg. Go back and read the "Coming soon" post. It was phrased entirely as "this is the way things are going to be now" with the caveat that he could roll back the change if necessary. But just because you can undo something doesn't make it an experiment.
I feel like you're unfairly giving pg the benefit of the doubt and placing the blame on the people against this idea. When you tell people this is the way things are going to be, it's reasonable for them to get upset by that.
Seeing as 19 hours ago* he apparently hadn't thought of the blindingly obvious problem that an un-endorsed comment was equivalent to a ban maybe he hadn't actually thought a lot about it.
The reason not to move fast and break things is that reality does not come with source control; destroyed communities do not tend to recover.
If you look in this thread, the original thread, or the latest poll you see a different attitude. It's not viewed as an experiment where reality will be the judge at all. Instead the comments basically boils down to "This is good." or "This is bad.", plus a few technical questions.
How come so few people think of it in terms of an experiment? Isn't this the supposed standard m.o. for startups as well as for coding?
Is it just that people who have the wait-and-see attitude don't comment, so all we hear about is from the vocal crowd? (This was the case for me before writing this post.) Is it some form of domain dependence going on here? I find this to be a very curious pattern.