If you start a private forum, this has the disadvantage that it would put up a barrier to people could make use of the valuable information. A public forum would need to be carefully curated to avoid having it drowned out by the clueless majority. Both would need to attract an audience.
HN has the audience and is close to what you want, but the problem is that thoughtful discussion is drowned out by the sea of clueless groupthink. Someone who wants to contribute to the thoughtful discussion has to read, evaluate, and deliberately not respond to the "you're so wrong" comments.
But suppose I could highlight the thoughtful responses, and share that with anyone who wanted to see the thread through that filter. Now anyone can see just the posting and the thoughtful responses, if they want to. And it's a lot less work for them to join in a thoughtful discussion, because they don't have to plow through the clueless majority opinions.
Next, imagine you could create a group, such as "successful entrepreneurs" which would be able to share responsibility for maintaining your filter (instead of just one person having to do it). You would be in charge of membership of a group you created. Now anyone in your group could mark a post or comment as being thoughtful (or interesting or useful) from a "successful entrepreneur" perspective. And if I was interested in that perspective, I could choose to view HN through that lens.
This would also solve the problem of good content quickly falling off the front page. Everything that had been selected by your successful entrepreneur group would remain available in the lens archive.
I don't think there's any way to filter out the "sea of clueless groupthink" that you mention, which is the reason for the private forum. The privacy would give it a chance to develop a culture of its own, and effective reinforcement mechanisms to incentivize the behavior we'd want.
I also don't think there'd be any way to authenticate or filter the people who joined, other than an initial mutual agreement of the creators about what they want (probably a good first topic of discussion.)
Possibly the name of the group could work as a filter, though. I'd choose the name "Unashamed Capitalists". Every startup person should be a capitalist right? And shouldn't be ashamed, right? This is a bit broader so that people who are not yet "successful" would be welcome (newbies and pros are what I'm interested in, though the OP wanted a forum for successful people... my perspective is that the problem isn't newbies but the culture. I could be wrong.)
Given the way voting has happened in places like here (where a comment of mine that simply states two objectively verifiable facts has a negative score because those facts are inconvenient) and reddit and dig makes me wary of it.... however, it might work as a form of ad hoc curration. Some set of people deemed "successful" or "clued in" could do the voting, and maybe there'd only be an up vote.
Anyway, just my thoughts. I think the person who actually finds some software and sets something up will have the most influence... but I'm much more interested in a private forum with reasonable open admission policies than I am a public forum...
How so? Do you mean that you don't believe a filter as I described is technically possible, or that it wouldn't solve the problem for you, or...?
Not making a judgement as to whether it would be better than a private forum for you, merely responding to your comment that you wish there was a way to change HN.
If you start a private forum, this has the disadvantage that it would put up a barrier to people could make use of the valuable information. A public forum would need to be carefully curated to avoid having it drowned out by the clueless majority. Both would need to attract an audience.
HN has the audience and is close to what you want, but the problem is that thoughtful discussion is drowned out by the sea of clueless groupthink. Someone who wants to contribute to the thoughtful discussion has to read, evaluate, and deliberately not respond to the "you're so wrong" comments.
But suppose I could highlight the thoughtful responses, and share that with anyone who wanted to see the thread through that filter. Now anyone can see just the posting and the thoughtful responses, if they want to. And it's a lot less work for them to join in a thoughtful discussion, because they don't have to plow through the clueless majority opinions.
Next, imagine you could create a group, such as "successful entrepreneurs" which would be able to share responsibility for maintaining your filter (instead of just one person having to do it). You would be in charge of membership of a group you created. Now anyone in your group could mark a post or comment as being thoughtful (or interesting or useful) from a "successful entrepreneur" perspective. And if I was interested in that perspective, I could choose to view HN through that lens.
This would also solve the problem of good content quickly falling off the front page. Everything that had been selected by your successful entrepreneur group would remain available in the lens archive.