I spent a good amount of time lurking before signing up to get a feel for the culture. I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here, and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb.
With that said, I'm sure it has been mentioned before, but maybe restricting new users from commenting at all until they have held the account for a significant period of time would help.
I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here
Don't be! Another way of looking at it...
Everybody is really good at some stuff and not so good at others. Use this community and its experts as your sand box for the stuff you need to work on. Better to practice here than out there.
and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb.
So what? The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach. Anyone who'd tear you up probably has issues of their own. You mustn't let that bother you. And even if it did, just log off and come back fresh later. We start over every day.
The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach.
That's a good heuristic for what a lot of us are looking for here: not necessarily agreement, but a chance to learn. Some comments promote learning more than others.
Its a cost/benefit tradeoff and you are suggesting a black-swan sort of event as the benefit to compensate for a decreased signal to noise ratio. These events have actually happened, or at least we have had authors of various packages that get noticed and startup founders create accounts just to dive into discussions about their new hotness which we all noticed, so this benefit can't be dismissed out of hand but perhaps we need to think of some way to keep the possibility of comments like this open while raising the bar for most other comments...
Jason Fried from 37s comments regularly on stories that involve 37s. He wouldn't be an HN commenter at all if he had to jump through hoops to get here.
But forget about the "black swan" event of Rob Pike posting here on a Go story. Think about the Zappos redesign story. It's not black-swan-crazy to think the UX guy from Zappos might comment here. And lo, he did! There are lots of "normal" people who are close to the stories we post that have a moment to comment on them.
I would not say restrict them from commenting but rather make their first fee post rather critical.
Kind of like a karma multiplier so you get an instant separation of quality and then you can look at penalizing those that take the down delta rather quickly.
Choosing to assume someone is guilty before they commit an offense would surly drive bright people away.
Anyway good comment and don't get to intimidated, many of us are just wind bags anyway, bright sure but wind bags none the less.
With that said, I'm sure it has been mentioned before, but maybe restricting new users from commenting at all until they have held the account for a significant period of time would help.