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Most nasty comments seem to go unpunished. If someone says something clearly nasty that doesn't add to the conversation, why don't you personally kill it? Lots
by dcurtis 17y ago
Most nasty comments seem to go unpunished. If someone says something clearly nasty that doesn't add to the conversation, why don't you personally kill it?
Lots of communities have tried to push moderation into the hands of users via flagging, and it never seems to work. I think the best and quickest solution to the problem is to use trusted but invisible moderators.
- mechanical_fish 17y agoI agree that this is possibly the best general solution, and perhaps even the only solution, but it is certainly not "quick" when there are thousands of comments and only one moderator. The only way to keep human moderation workable is to keep the work of each individual moderator small and scale out tree-style. Perhaps that will be the ultimate shape of the Web: a set of top level news sites, aggregating the best commentary from a larger set of second-tier news sites, aggregating the best commentary from a larger set of tertiary news sites...
- dcurtis 17y agoHacker News has many moderators.
- mechanical_fish 17y agoI am sure it does.
- pg 17y agoOne reason I don't kill mean comments is that I don't want to be censoring anyone. If someone says something super nasty I might ban them, so there at least won't be any more, but I rarely kill the comment I banned them for unless it is a spam or a very clear troll. There's another more practical reason it's hard to kill mean comments: they often have replies by the time I see them. It would mess up the conversation if they got taken out then.
- tokenadult 17y agoOne reason I don't kill mean comments is that I don't want to be censoring anyone. Then you need to bring onto your team some group of curators/moderators whose number 1 task is to keep the site free of nastiness on a nonpartisan, equal opportunity basis.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoBy all means please leave the nasty comments in. If nothing else, they should serve as an object lesson to other posters. With a huge crowd, the system needs to train the users by providing cues and publicly "punishing" (through greyed-out text and negative scores) ill behavior. The more people you have, the more important this feedback system becomes.
- dcurtis 17y agoExcept that nasty comments are sometimes voted up very highly, which doesn't help anyone.
- cwan 17y agoConsider having a penalty box for a certain period of time once a flag threshhold is reached - e.g. a few hours (where the offense is clearly marked that the user alone can see with a link to TOS) to shame someone into being more civil. If it's decorum that you're trying to change, then I'd keep the flag simple - e.g. an "ad hominem" flag. Part of the attraction for me to HN is its elegance and simplicity in great and relevant stories percolating to the top in addition to the unique and remarkable community. Once an individual has a given number of penalty boxes, a moderator considers whether to ban them. The danger of doing stuff like this is that subjects that interest this community inevitably also spill over into the political realm and as others have pointed out the use of up votes and downvotes are ambiguous and further, open to abuse. If you want to publicly shame someone, then once a member is on probation after a certain number of penalties/flags, add a dot or something relatively benign in color to their name. Edit - I'd add that if it were up to me, I'd try to control personal attacks above all else given the community is pretty good at calling people out on comments that add little to no value.