5 ms·

Comments really are a hard problem. 90% of the thought I expend on HN is devoted to saving the site from bad comments. Spammers and overt trolls are easy. Th

by pg 17y ago

Comments really are a hard problem. 90% of the thought I expend on HN is devoted to saving the site from bad comments. Spammers and overt trolls are easy. The really hard problems are fluff comments and subtle trolls (people who are fundamentally nasty, but who are sophisticated enough to stop short of name calling).

michael_nielsen 17y ago
If you ever write an essay on making online community scale, I'll certainly be an enthusiastic reader! Quite a bit has been written on the subject, but I've found surprisingly little that seems really good, despite the importance of the topic. Two useful links on the subject are http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html and http://www.meatballwiki.org/wiki/ http://www.meatballwiki.org/wiki/
- pg 17y ago
  One reason I don't is that it would attract attention to HN, and one of my strategies for staving off disaster has been to keep a low profile, so that most new users are people who hear about the site from friends.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    You can't "write an essay on making online community scale" because community doesn't scale
    - fbailey 17y ago
      Absolutely true. Social Networks can scale but communities can't. You can scale a site with community functions, that looks like a community (youtube) but there will be no sense of community.
    - Perceval 17y ago
      I wrote a long article on the subject of online community and the problems of scale: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000
- blasdel 17y ago
  Don't take a drop of advice from Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- it's all either blatantly obvious or outrageously poisonous. She is absolutely the least-moderate moderator on the entire English-language internet, and has proven herself adept at training subordinates to follow in her footsteps. pg is already more than capricious enough already, I shudder to think of how ridiculous things would get around here if he started taking lessons from the dark master.
  - blasdel 17y ago
    A nice example would be this enormous thread (2mb of HTML), that drags on documenting the incendiary results of her 'moderation' on BoingBoing. Search for "TNH": http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Century-Trotsky http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Centu... A choice summary quote: "i would never never ever hire tnh as a mod ever -- an inquisitor, maybe, a chief of secret police, certainly, but a mod, no!"
    - jrockway 17y ago
      Metafilter also deletes too many comments.
      - blasdel 17y ago
        You'd be surprised how little comment deletion there is outside of Ask Metafilter (where all comments have to answer the damn question). Pretty much the only comments deleted from the main site are personal attacks. There's an active backchannel for discussing such things where almost nothing is deleted. They take great pains to avoid banning people (excepting spammers, who get their signup fee refunded!), though sometimes they dole out timeouts. The community policing means that the shitty users tend to disable their own accounts. pg takes the opposite approach, applying a single assholish technical approach to all problems: hellbanning for everyone!
        jrockway 17y ago
        FWIW, I only read AskMe. But I agree that Metafilter handles moderation better than HN. The way voting is here, it seems like it mostly depends on the time of day as to whether a comment of mine gets -4 or +30. (Usually this works out for me pretty well... but I can't help feeling dirty when I write something that gets upmodded that high.)
jmtulloss 17y ago
I think it's especially hard on HN due to the nature of the site. Since HN is a site dedicated to discussion, it becomes important to ensure that open conversations are happening. Strong opinions shouldn't be banned just because they get a little hostile, and weak opinions shouldn't be banned just because they're a little fluffy. There's such a huge gray area that it's an impossibly difficult problem. Contrast this with Engadget, who can enforce discussion that aligns with whatever site policies they choose to adapt. Or you can take this even further, like on my blog, where openness means nothing and I can just delete anything that's not a question or an anecdote that adds to what I've written. In an open discussion forum, your biggest problem will be always be open discussion.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  I wish more blogs would take your view. People go to all the trouble of writing articles carefully, putting them on a dedicated domain with a nice design or template, and then I scroll down and there are: "nice article I wrote one like it at http://buyviagra-cheap.example.org http://buyviagra-cheap.example.org and "HOW TO INSTALL THIS???!!!!!?!!! IT DOES NOT WORK!??" Invite readers in, tempt them with an interesting article and then leave them in some internet shady backstreet area. It doesn't need free speech, delete the tripe, edit the rest mercilessly (but note that they have been 'edited').
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    > It doesn't need free speech, delete the tripe, > edit the rest mercilessly (but note that they > have been 'edited'). Can you suggest a way of doing that without don it all "by hand"? What you suggest is what I'd like to do, but it doesn't scale. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts as to a system like yours that does.
    - jmtulloss 17y ago
      My blog is very low traffic, so it's not that big of a deal, but using disqus allows me to go through and respond with "delete" in the body when I get a spammy message. Takes about 10 seconds and I can do it from my phone. Of course, I always end up missing some, so I tend to go through every few weeks and prune those that I missed. What we really need is gmail-esque spam filtering in disqus.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
inmygarage 17y ago
And yet, as digital real estate, comment sections are among the most under-optimized sections of any content site. A site with high-quality comments can increase the value of the existing content exponentially, but because there is a more removed connection to revenue generation it seems like the majority of comment sections (HN excluded, of course) are thrown in as an afterthought.
prawn 17y ago
"Comments really are a hard problem." Bit tangential, but has anyone (e.g., start-up) solved the problem of massive discussions? Anything over a hundred or two hundred comments becomes unmanageable in a hurry. Some of the larger sites (e.g., Huff Post) routinely have 2000-comment threads that would take days to plow through. Is there a solution that combines karma, upvotes as a means of identifying the 'cream' as well as grouping of sub-discussions and points-counterpoints? I haven't seen any solution take a serious shot at a way of grouping sub-arguments and discussions. The level of comments on the typical news article here in Australia is embarrassingly bad. Any discussion quickly becomes a confusing read without threading and a complete waste of time without persistent identities or moderation. Disqus has taken a crack at the basics, but is it much better for discussions over, say, 500 posts?
- cstross 17y ago
  http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight (Making Light) is routinely in the 200-1000 comments-per-thread range. They manage okay, mostly due to have a strong sense of community and several moderators and having Teresa Nielsen Hayden to ride herd on it (one of the folks who moderated BoingBoing when they reinstated comments). Here are her (very cogent) thoughts on how to moderate massive discussions: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008856.html http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008856.html

by pg 17y ago

michael_nielsen 17y ago

If you ever write an essay on making online community scale, I'll certainly be an enthusiastic reader! Quite a bit has been written on the subject, but I've found surprisingly little that seems really good, despite the importance of the topic. Two useful links on the subject are http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html and http://www.meatballwiki.org/wiki/ http://www.meatballwiki.org/wiki/

pg 17y ago
One reason I don't is that it would attract attention to HN, and one of my strategies for staving off disaster has been to keep a low profile, so that most new users are people who hear about the site from friends.
- blasdel 17y ago
  You can't "write an essay on making online community scale" because community doesn't scale
  - fbailey 17y ago
    Absolutely true. Social Networks can scale but communities can't. You can scale a site with community functions, that looks like a community (youtube) but there will be no sense of community.
  - Perceval 17y ago
    I wrote a long article on the subject of online community and the problems of scale: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000
blasdel 17y ago
Don't take a drop of advice from Teresa Nielsen Hayden -- it's all either blatantly obvious or outrageously poisonous. She is absolutely the least-moderate moderator on the entire English-language internet, and has proven herself adept at training subordinates to follow in her footsteps. pg is already more than capricious enough already, I shudder to think of how ridiculous things would get around here if he started taking lessons from the dark master.
- blasdel 17y ago
  A nice example would be this enormous thread (2mb of HTML), that drags on documenting the incendiary results of her 'moderation' on BoingBoing. Search for "TNH": http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Century-Trotsky http://www.metafilter.com/72928/Boing-Boing-Finds-21st-Centu... A choice summary quote: "i would never never ever hire tnh as a mod ever -- an inquisitor, maybe, a chief of secret police, certainly, but a mod, no!"
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Metafilter also deletes too many comments.
    - blasdel 17y ago
      You'd be surprised how little comment deletion there is outside of Ask Metafilter (where all comments have to answer the damn question). Pretty much the only comments deleted from the main site are personal attacks. There's an active backchannel for discussing such things where almost nothing is deleted. They take great pains to avoid banning people (excepting spammers, who get their signup fee refunded!), though sometimes they dole out timeouts. The community policing means that the shitty users tend to disable their own accounts. pg takes the opposite approach, applying a single assholish technical approach to all problems: hellbanning for everyone!
      - jrockway 17y ago
        FWIW, I only read AskMe. But I agree that Metafilter handles moderation better than HN. The way voting is here, it seems like it mostly depends on the time of day as to whether a comment of mine gets -4 or +30. (Usually this works out for me pretty well... but I can't help feeling dirty when I write something that gets upmodded that high.)

jmtulloss 17y ago

I think it's especially hard on HN due to the nature of the site. Since HN is a site dedicated to discussion, it becomes important to ensure that open conversations are happening. Strong opinions shouldn't be banned just because they get a little hostile, and weak opinions shouldn't be banned just because they're a little fluffy. There's such a huge gray area that it's an impossibly difficult problem. Contrast this with Engadget, who can enforce discussion that aligns with whatever site policies they choose to adapt. Or you can take this even further, like on my blog, where openness means nothing and I can just delete anything that's not a question or an anecdote that adds to what I've written. In an open discussion forum, your biggest problem will be always be open discussion.

jodrellblank 17y ago
I wish more blogs would take your view. People go to all the trouble of writing articles carefully, putting them on a dedicated domain with a nice design or template, and then I scroll down and there are: "nice article I wrote one like it at http://buyviagra-cheap.example.org http://buyviagra-cheap.example.org and "HOW TO INSTALL THIS???!!!!!?!!! IT DOES NOT WORK!??" Invite readers in, tempt them with an interesting article and then leave them in some internet shady backstreet area. It doesn't need free speech, delete the tripe, edit the rest mercilessly (but note that they have been 'edited').
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  > It doesn't need free speech, delete the tripe, > edit the rest mercilessly (but note that they > have been 'edited'). Can you suggest a way of doing that without don it all "by hand"? What you suggest is what I'd like to do, but it doesn't scale. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts as to a system like yours that does.
  - jmtulloss 17y ago
    My blog is very low traffic, so it's not that big of a deal, but using disqus allows me to go through and respond with "delete" in the body when I get a spammy message. Takes about 10 seconds and I can do it from my phone. Of course, I always end up missing some, so I tend to go through every few weeks and prune those that I missed. What we really need is gmail-esque spam filtering in disqus.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

inmygarage 17y ago

And yet, as digital real estate, comment sections are among the most under-optimized sections of any content site. A site with high-quality comments can increase the value of the existing content exponentially, but because there is a more removed connection to revenue generation it seems like the majority of comment sections (HN excluded, of course) are thrown in as an afterthought.

prawn 17y ago

"Comments really are a hard problem." Bit tangential, but has anyone (e.g., start-up) solved the problem of massive discussions? Anything over a hundred or two hundred comments becomes unmanageable in a hurry. Some of the larger sites (e.g., Huff Post) routinely have 2000-comment threads that would take days to plow through. Is there a solution that combines karma, upvotes as a means of identifying the 'cream' as well as grouping of sub-discussions and points-counterpoints? I haven't seen any solution take a serious shot at a way of grouping sub-arguments and discussions. The level of comments on the typical news article here in Australia is embarrassingly bad. Any discussion quickly becomes a confusing read without threading and a complete waste of time without persistent identities or moderation. Disqus has taken a crack at the basics, but is it much better for discussions over, say, 500 posts?

cstross 17y ago
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight (Making Light) is routinely in the 200-1000 comments-per-thread range. They manage okay, mostly due to have a strong sense of community and several moderators and having Teresa Nielsen Hayden to ride herd on it (one of the folks who moderated BoingBoing when they reinstated comments). Here are her (very cogent) thoughts on how to moderate massive discussions: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008856.html http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008856.html