Likewise. HN seems already to have some of the highest-quality discussion on the internet, and I attribute that to a lot of other factors besides the gamified mechanics of voting/endorsements/etc.
The sites that attempt to overstructure and gamify discussion to excess end up suppressing the capacity for emergent conversation and undermining the development of coherent community. I almost never visit StackExchange sites anymore, because interacting with their convoluted discussion mechanics is too much of a chore to be worth the constrained, limited payoff. I really hope HN doesn't go that route, because there's really not much else like it on the internet.
I am curious what you think is so bad about SE? Are there people that contribute only for Internet points and prevent healthy communities from developing by doing so?
SE sites are heavily straightjacketed. There's way too much procedural cruft that makes it very hard to just have a straightforward discussion: arbitrary standards of topicality, complex voting mechanics, distinct answer-acceptance mechanics, distinctions between comments and answers, reputation badges, multiple types of reputation scores, convoluted hierarchies of participation privileges dependent on those scores, excessive moderation, etc.
By attempting to heavy-handedly shoehorn discussion into a very narrow Q&A paradigm, SE drastically limits the kind of open-ended discourse that makes online communities worth participating in.
And the reality is that I can find answers to specific, objective questions just as easily on Reddit or the myriad topic-specific discussion forums across the web, without having to jump through hoops to do it.
The sites that attempt to overstructure and gamify discussion to excess end up suppressing the capacity for emergent conversation and undermining the development of coherent community. I almost never visit StackExchange sites anymore, because interacting with their convoluted discussion mechanics is too much of a chore to be worth the constrained, limited payoff. I really hope HN doesn't go that route, because there's really not much else like it on the internet.