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'Vouching' will not improve the quality of HN discussions. It seems like the result of an excessive focus on fairness, something I see in many online communitie

'Vouching' will not improve the quality of HN discussions. It seems like the result of an excessive focus on fairness, something I see in many online communities. It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway. The quality of discussions is what brings me to HN, and IMHO the quality is poor; it's just better than the alternatives. The vast majority of comments aren't worth my time (or anyone else's, but they can speak for themselves). In other words, there is much room for improvement and I hope that is Dan's focus. I happily would accept unfairness, and suffer its slings and arrows myself, for a higher signal-to-noise ratio. I'd happily lose a few good comments in return for of better quality overall (i.e., false-positives are not really a big deal - so what if my good comment occasionally gets voted down or otherwise buried). By prioritizing quality over fairness HN can best distinguish itself from a million noise-filled alternatives where 'rights' are the priority. Everyone has a right to their opinions, but not to my time. EDIT: Several edits to explain myself better.

lotharbot 11y ago
> "It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway." More importantly, it affects the occasional person who makes mostly good comments but got hellbanned 3 years ago for something that probably could have been handled with a simple downvote and a "please don't do this, here's what the guidelines say" instead. I regularly see high-quality comments, sometimes the highest quality in an entire discussion, that are marked dead because the account is banned.
- hueving 11y ago
  hellbanning is easily the worst thing about HN. It's the embodiment of a childish idea that nobody can change, ever. It's not even effective against trolls because a troll will just change accounts immediately. It just silences a section of the population that happened to touch a nerve back in the day. A disgusting black mark on an otherwise reasonable site.
  - brudgers 11y ago
    What are the better alternatives to hellbanning?
    - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
      Regular banning, of course. You tell the user that they've been banned and why. Optionally, offer tempbans (with a stated duration), and/or have an appeal mechanism; but even with neither of those, it's less sadistic than a hellban.
      - brudgers 11y ago
        I've had showdead=yes for a while and haven't seen anything that made me suspect live banning was employed for pleasure by Hacker News moderators. Admittedly, I'm not inside their heads and have only paid attention to a small fraction of dead posts. One difference between regular banning and live banning is that the banned person is kicked out of the community with a regular ban, but not with a live ban. A live ban mitigates the effects of problematic behaviors on the community while still allowing the person behaving problematically to retain their identity and participate in ways that aren't problematic: i.e. people who are live banned can remain part of the community. Because the live banned person remains within the community, there is an opportunity for the community to recognize unwarranted live bans based on actual exhibited behavior within the context where it is relevant. Anecdotally, I've seen unwarranted live bans lifted in real time. I've also seen members of the Hacker News community who have benefited from keeping their identity within the community over an extended period of time while continuing to exhibit problematic behaviors. People may look at that situation and see something different, I see live banning as a highly compassionate way to solve the corner cases that need high levels of compassion. From a practical standpoint doing regular banning "right" with formal notification, explanation, and appeals processes requires a non-trivial moderator time and energy. If most bans are justified, that means all that energy is wasted on accounts that the owner doesn't value and accounts that the owner values solely as a conduit for argument and/or insult. Even in cases where the person values their account as an identity within the community, formal processes are an escalation. The most likely proximate cause for needing to limit that type of account is the manner in which disagreement is expressed. Creating a context that threatens identity is unlikely to suddenly produce better behavior in regard to disagreement over a sanction already enforced. Regular banning is confrontational. One of the ways Hacker News differentiates itself from other sites where people type into boxes is by discouraging that very behavior. Lunch at Cafe Hellban comes at some cost to the community, but I believe it's lower than the alternatives.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Do you have any examples? I know that it does happen that good comments are banned, but it's not that common. And this announcement gives us tools to fix it.
  - lotharbot 11y ago
    Not off the top of my head. I don't mean "regularly" like once every few minutes, but more like a couple times a month.
pcunite 11y ago
Something that Arstechnica does that I really like is that it shows you the up/down count on an individual comment. It allows you to see the struggle and you can make a decision based on that to help it out.
- scribu 11y ago
  I'm having a hard time seeing how voting based on "the struggle" would help increase the quality of the discussion (compared to voting based on the actual merit of the comment).
- URSpider94 11y ago
  HN used to do that, and they took it away, presumably because it was engendering cooperative behavior (piling on, counter-voting to be part of "the struggle", etc.)
- scrollaway 11y ago
  As a frequent commenter on both reddit and HN, the hidden vote counts on HN are far better. Coupled with fresh comments showing up at the top sometimes, they remove most parts of the mob mentality that goes on on reddit.
krapp 11y ago
> The vast majority of comments aren't worth my time (or anyone else's, but they can speak for themselves). In other words, there is much room for improvement and I hope that is Dan's focus. The vast majority of comments are addressed to the user to whom they replied. This is the conversational nature of forums, and it's not a sign of poor quality. We're here to discuss things, not post articles to one another. If it reduces the amount of (justifiable) complaints about banning and allows legitimate content through even in a few cases then it does help to separate signal from noise.
gozo 11y ago
The number one thing that prevents me from writing "better" comments is that more often than not it's simply not worth it. Either the story is already filled with noise, gets flagged off the front page, caught in controversy filter or your comment gets downvoted because someone disagrees with one things you said or nitpicked on or it's just forgotten.
debacle 11y ago
Vouching seems to be more about people who are unfairly hellbanned being helped, rather than increasing the discussion quality. From what I have seen, a large amount of hellbanned users are trying to contribute, even if they do have slightly deviant opinions. As long as they are cordial, they should be able to take part in discussion.
d23 11y ago
It's funny, because I'd consider your comment 90% noise. You took 3 paragraphs to say nothing more than "I hate noise." You did a good job at making yourself sound superior though. It sounds like your ideal commenting environment is a bunch of people trying to one-up each other being hypercritical, never really saying much.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway. Vouching basically transfers some of the responsibility for overseeing the automated algorithms to the community rather than a central moderator. Doing so will probably affect more comments than you think -- because the frequent comments from long-time posters complaining about how particular posts are affected by the automated algorithm can be replaced by those posters taking direct action. This alone will improve the S/N ratio of some conversations significantly.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> 'Vouching' will not improve the quality of HN discussions. It seems like the result of an excessive focus on fairness, something I see in many online communities. It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway. I remember seeing cases when there was a post on HN, and the author of the posted content decided to chime in and accidentally got their account autokilled for spam. Vouching would help resolve such cases without having to explicitly involve moderators.
- dang 11y ago
  Quite so, and that's specifically one of the things that prompted the feature. There are extra restrictions on (some) noob accounts because of past abuse by spammers and trolls. But when the creator of a project shows up in the thread about their work and their comments are auto-killed, that's a disaster for HN. There's only so much we can do to solve this with either software or moderation, but community members see right away what's going on. Letting them fix it seems like the obvious solution. So far it seems to be helping! I haven't yet seen a case of the above getting fixed by vouching, but those are relatively rare. Edit: we got one! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10306786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10306786. As soon as we see vouches on these we'll mark the account legit so future comments will be ok.

lotharbot 11y ago

> "It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway." More importantly, it affects the occasional person who makes mostly good comments but got hellbanned 3 years ago for something that probably could have been handled with a simple downvote and a "please don't do this, here's what the guidelines say" instead. I regularly see high-quality comments, sometimes the highest quality in an entire discussion, that are marked dead because the account is banned.

hueving 11y ago
hellbanning is easily the worst thing about HN. It's the embodiment of a childish idea that nobody can change, ever. It's not even effective against trolls because a troll will just change accounts immediately. It just silences a section of the population that happened to touch a nerve back in the day. A disgusting black mark on an otherwise reasonable site.
- brudgers 11y ago
  What are the better alternatives to hellbanning?
  - PhasmaFelis 11y ago
    Regular banning, of course. You tell the user that they've been banned and why. Optionally, offer tempbans (with a stated duration), and/or have an appeal mechanism; but even with neither of those, it's less sadistic than a hellban.
    - brudgers 11y ago
      I've had showdead=yes for a while and haven't seen anything that made me suspect live banning was employed for pleasure by Hacker News moderators. Admittedly, I'm not inside their heads and have only paid attention to a small fraction of dead posts. One difference between regular banning and live banning is that the banned person is kicked out of the community with a regular ban, but not with a live ban. A live ban mitigates the effects of problematic behaviors on the community while still allowing the person behaving problematically to retain their identity and participate in ways that aren't problematic: i.e. people who are live banned can remain part of the community. Because the live banned person remains within the community, there is an opportunity for the community to recognize unwarranted live bans based on actual exhibited behavior within the context where it is relevant. Anecdotally, I've seen unwarranted live bans lifted in real time. I've also seen members of the Hacker News community who have benefited from keeping their identity within the community over an extended period of time while continuing to exhibit problematic behaviors. People may look at that situation and see something different, I see live banning as a highly compassionate way to solve the corner cases that need high levels of compassion. From a practical standpoint doing regular banning "right" with formal notification, explanation, and appeals processes requires a non-trivial moderator time and energy. If most bans are justified, that means all that energy is wasted on accounts that the owner doesn't value and accounts that the owner values solely as a conduit for argument and/or insult. Even in cases where the person values their account as an identity within the community, formal processes are an escalation. The most likely proximate cause for needing to limit that type of account is the manner in which disagreement is expressed. Creating a context that threatens identity is unlikely to suddenly produce better behavior in regard to disagreement over a sanction already enforced. Regular banning is confrontational. One of the ways Hacker News differentiates itself from other sites where people type into boxes is by discouraging that very behavior. Lunch at Cafe Hellban comes at some cost to the community, but I believe it's lower than the alternatives.
DanBC 11y ago
Do you have any examples? I know that it does happen that good comments are banned, but it's not that common. And this announcement gives us tools to fix it.
- lotharbot 11y ago
  Not off the top of my head. I don't mean "regularly" like once every few minutes, but more like a couple times a month.

pcunite 11y ago

Something that Arstechnica does that I really like is that it shows you the up/down count on an individual comment. It allows you to see the struggle and you can make a decision based on that to help it out.

scribu 11y ago
I'm having a hard time seeing how voting based on "the struggle" would help increase the quality of the discussion (compared to voting based on the actual merit of the comment).
URSpider94 11y ago
HN used to do that, and they took it away, presumably because it was engendering cooperative behavior (piling on, counter-voting to be part of "the struggle", etc.)
scrollaway 11y ago
As a frequent commenter on both reddit and HN, the hidden vote counts on HN are far better. Coupled with fresh comments showing up at the top sometimes, they remove most parts of the mob mentality that goes on on reddit.

krapp 11y ago

> The vast majority of comments aren't worth my time (or anyone else's, but they can speak for themselves). In other words, there is much room for improvement and I hope that is Dan's focus. The vast majority of comments are addressed to the user to whom they replied. This is the conversational nature of forums, and it's not a sign of poor quality. We're here to discuss things, not post articles to one another. If it reduces the amount of (justifiable) complaints about banning and allows legitimate content through even in a few cases then it does help to separate signal from noise.

gozo 11y ago

The number one thing that prevents me from writing "better" comments is that more often than not it's simply not worth it. Either the story is already filled with noise, gets flagged off the front page, caught in controversy filter or your comment gets downvoted because someone disagrees with one things you said or nitpicked on or it's just forgotten.

debacle 11y ago

Vouching seems to be more about people who are unfairly hellbanned being helped, rather than increasing the discussion quality. From what I have seen, a large amount of hellbanned users are trying to contribute, even if they do have slightly deviant opinions. As long as they are cordial, they should be able to take part in discussion.

d23 11y ago

It's funny, because I'd consider your comment 90% noise. You took 3 paragraphs to say nothing more than "I hate noise." You did a good job at making yourself sound superior though. It sounds like your ideal commenting environment is a bunch of people trying to one-up each other being hypercritical, never really saying much.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway. Vouching basically transfers some of the responsibility for overseeing the automated algorithms to the community rather than a central moderator. Doing so will probably affect more comments than you think -- because the frequent comments from long-time posters complaining about how particular posts are affected by the automated algorithm can be replaced by those posters taking direct action. This alone will improve the S/N ratio of some conversations significantly.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> 'Vouching' will not improve the quality of HN discussions. It seems like the result of an excessive focus on fairness, something I see in many online communities. It affects only a few comments which are unlikely to be particularly valuable anyway. I remember seeing cases when there was a post on HN, and the author of the posted content decided to chime in and accidentally got their account autokilled for spam. Vouching would help resolve such cases without having to explicitly involve moderators.

dang 11y ago
Quite so, and that's specifically one of the things that prompted the feature. There are extra restrictions on (some) noob accounts because of past abuse by spammers and trolls. But when the creator of a project shows up in the thread about their work and their comments are auto-killed, that's a disaster for HN. There's only so much we can do to solve this with either software or moderation, but community members see right away what's going on. Letting them fix it seems like the obvious solution. So far it seems to be helping! I haven't yet seen a case of the above getting fixed by vouching, but those are relatively rare. Edit: we got one! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10306786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10306786. As soon as we see vouches on these we'll mark the account legit so future comments will be ok.