10 ms·

Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyo

• DannoHung 16y ago
  You could try fragmenting HN in the same way that Reddit allows; this makes it possible to turn off the bullshit that invariably rises to the top. I mean, I don't even read reddit main or /r/programming anymore; they're just garbage. Otherwise... aggressively ban people that don't contribute well enough. It is literally the only non-fragmentary way to fix the problem, because it's not a technical issue. People are just terrible. (I'm of the opinion that fragmenting is simply a less aggressive version of banning: leave the trolls to their shit-heaps, forge new ground.) I'd say you should be banning at a rate over half of the new users you see. And if you look at my posting history, you'll probably see that I'm not exactly grade A material, so I'd expect to get chopped off eventually, probably sooner than later.
  • froo 16y ago
    What about perhaps a combination of the two ways? Fragmentation and access restriction (lets face it, banning is just complete access restriction) Those users who are noted as being excessively mean spirited should have to learn to play in a sandbox nicely with others before they're let back into more active areas of the site. The net effect is perhaps less of a knee jerk negative reaction so that users can eventually learn to contribute again in a positive manner and it keeps the more frequented areas clean again.
  • alex_c 16y ago
    In my experience, aggressive moderation often ends up having a worse effect than the symptoms it's trying to treat. Clamping down on a popular (but, in the moderators' opinion, negative) voice usually spawns arguments and discussion that are very rarely productive. Moderating this follow-up discussion leads to a spiral of arguing, resentment, and mistrust between users and moderators. It happens all to easily, and it's not pretty.
• treeface 16y ago
  Have you ever considered giving people the option to register their abstinence from voting on a comment? Right now we have up and down, but a lot of the time I feel like I wish I had an "abstain" button. This would be reserved for the comments that aren't mean-spirited, but don't add much to the conversation. Then perhaps a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral would rank lower than a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral. The idea being that, all things being equal for two comments, the one with more indifferent voters is considered less valuable, and is thus ranked lower. Maybe a neutral vote simply works by increasing n when judging the size-weighted score that HN uses to calculate rankings now. I'm sure there are flaws in this line of reasoning..perhaps someone would be so kind as to point them out?
  • swolchok 16y ago
    A flaw: I might vote neutral as "I agree with this comment's current point value." In that light, 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral is a fairly confidently ranked 16-point comment, but 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral is not. However, the less confident one should be "floated" to a small portion of users to get more votes.
    • davidw 16y ago
      > I agree with this comment's current point value. That would be a really cool feature. I would often use it for comments at 0 - something that's factually wrong and needs to be voted down, but without nasty pile-on downvoting that sometimes happens, that to me looks a bit mean-spirited. If the comment in question went below zero, my 'stay' vote would count as an upvote. If it went higher, as a downvote.
      • treeface 16y ago
        I like this idea as well. It also would be easier to implement than my idea :-]
  • mahmud 16y ago
    I think the abstain effect can be emulated by just skipping that comment :-)
• plinkplonk 16y ago
  pg, (this might be somewhat obvious but)couldn't you detect and (penalize?) the "punishing" some folks compllain about? someone downvoting a specific person across discussions. I would imagine most people do this by bringing up the target's profile first and then downvoting all his comments. Hard to think of a lgitimate use case for this behaviour.
  • RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
    Case in point ... I've occasionally found a comment that I felt was both mean-spirited and largely content-free. I've down-voted that. Then I wondered if that person had a history of such comments, so I've brought up their profile, looked through their comments, and attempted to assess each one on its merits. In cases of doubt I've left them alone, but if I've felt that the comment in question was again mean-spirited and content-free, I've down-voted that as well. I've realised that such actions, while intended well, might be viewed as "punishing" the "contributor" in question. Further, I suspect that PG already detects and inhibits this behavior. So here we have a case where I believe I'm doing the right thing to help reduce the mean-spiritedness of comments, and I get prevented from doing so.
• AndrewMoffat 16y ago
  increased popularity has decreased the signal/noise ratio. just reverse the popularity :) or just make somewhere new to migrate to.
• maxklein 16y ago
  I believe that the less anonymous a forum like this is, the more polite it will be. You have said you want people to speak to each other here as they would in the real world: well, I believe the more strongly you tie their real world identity to their account here, the more polite they would be. My suggestion, similar to that experiment in the past, and similar to twitter, add a "verified user" badge in the users profile. However, to become verified requires a simple step: add a link to your facebook, linkedin or xing profile. Any already verified user can then verify you. Non-verified users then have a very minor voting hit, for example a comment karma cap at 50 or so. This will encourage people to associate their real life accounts with their hacker news accounts, and will result in conversation that more accurately reflects what one would say in real life. The fundamental dynamics of the site would not change, since the advantage to being verified are not that major.
  • SandB0x 16y ago
    As an anonymous user I actually kind of like your idea, but can you clarify whether you propose that being "verified" would mean your identity is available to everyone or just to other verified users? ("I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code." - Emo Philips)
    • maxklein 16y ago
      It would be available to everyone and google, since the point is that what you say is forever linked to you on the internet.
      • SandB0x 16y ago
        > and google > forever linked to you on the internet I'm happy for you as a respected user of this site to know who I am. Google - forever and ever - not so much. As far as comment quality goes, you might cut out some of the crap, but you may also get more sterile discussions from good citizens such as myself. My hunch is that some people just have an attitude problem, and will be a detriment to HN with or without their identities on display.
• humbledrone 16y ago
  I wonder if it would help at all to add some kind of persistent disincentive for users with low (negative) karma. Maybe the rate at which low-karma users are allowed to post comments could be limited, or maybe low-karma users' posts could start in a slightly shaded state (like downvoted comments). I guess the success of that strategy would depend heavily on whether a user's karma is a good indicator of the likelihood that they will make a mean-spirited comment in the future. It would also depend on whether the low-karma disincentive is actually undesirable to a potentially mean-spirited poster.
  • Kaizyn 16y ago
    This could also possibly encourage more bad behavior. After all, if the site is going to treat them like a bad actor with no hope of redemption, why even try to avoid trolling?
• 8ren 16y ago
  Two sets of scores and arrows: one for agree/disagree, the other for high/low quality. Separating the concepts would emphasize the issues as distinct, and also make them easier to vote on. The high "quality" score would act like the current "flag" button, but with a finer control. Although a much more complex UI model, it's maybe worth trying.
• davidw 16y ago
  Since you asked... I've always thought you should be a bit more rigorous about eliminating the sorts of "rah rah!" topics that get people fired up. That's not a technical solution, but it's not really a technical problem either. What I mean by "rah rah" things includes political articles that make people think "right on!" Paul B's article on Proposition 19 falls into that category for me: I strongly agree with him. But when I step back and look, I think that I don't want to read everyone's "rah rah" articles because they tend towards flame wars, and, if opposing views are trampled to the point where those people go elsewhere, group think. I also think that, since they are topics that anyone can have an opinion on, that they are much more likely to draw people only marginally interested in the core topics of "hacker news". Those people in turn will submit more articles about politics. At a certain point a few days ago, between Prop 19, John Carmack's libertarianish views, and something else I don't recall, the top three spots on HN were occupied about articles that were essentially political in nature. I would much prefer that articles like that one, much as I agree with it, and think Paul B is an awesome guy and a great contributor here, were ruthless pruned from this site.
  • anigbrowl 16y ago
    The proximity of an election is likely a factor in this.
    • davidw 16y ago
      That's a good point; hopefully it will subside afterwards.
      • Locke1689 16y ago
        There's always another election and another hot-button topic right around the corner.
  • ahoyhere 16y ago
    What you're talking about is the primacy of emotional alignment vs intellectual improvement. That is, identifying with the emotional content (like you said - "RIGHT ON!" or "NO WAY!") vs reading content that causes emotions. The former is, of course, the Twinkie of human growth. HN is becoming Twinkie-ville. Reddit is Twinkie-ville already, but it's Twinkie-ville with a sparkling sense of humor, which HN lacks (cultural difference). Granted, we're all emotional creatures first and foremost -- false impressions of reason aside -- but… there's something that's dramatically changed in the last two months. Don't you think? Even the non-emotional-alignment stuff is more boring. Boring things stay on the front page longer. Articles that would normally have captured the HN spirit languish. What's going on? I almost miss the "What makes an entrepreneur?" pr0n.
• demallien 16y ago
  I think the problem comes from the fact that we don't have a tool for expressing that we disagree with the tone of what someone is saying, but we agree with the position of the comment. This means that someone can write a mean spirited comment that happens to support a popular position in this community, and they won't get downvoted. Other people, seeing this, will take it as permission to be rude in their own posts. I would suggest having a "tone" button that downvotes for tone. The level of fading applied to a comment will be bases on whichever of the two scores is the lowest, tone or voting - so a post with 10 upvotes but -4 tone will be invisible. To avoid abuse of the "tone" feature, it should be possible to recover the user names of those that flag a post for tone.
  • patio11 16y ago
    Particularly for folks who are not malicious, a reply saying that the tone is not normative is often enough to correct them.
  • dtf 16y ago
    I always downvote on harsh tone or meanness directed at others (but not directed at myself). I upvote for valuable and interesting information, and intelligently argued points. I try not to upvote for mere agreement (although sometimes it's hard not to), and I never downvote for disagreement. (There are some exceptions - questions that are phrased as surveys etc). Since my time here on HN, it seems to me that most people follow something like this, much more so than on most of reddit where upvote-if-funny/upvote-to-agree/downvote-to-disagree is the law of the land.
  • nailer 16y ago
    Agreed. there's a perrfect example of this in recent nosql debates - a few abusive comments are sitting at plus 17 because people agree with whats being said, but the tone is very, very nasty towards anyone being disagreed with (which includes myself amongst others).
• metamemetics 16y ago
  keep track of submission karma and comment karma separately. People should not be able to downvote in comments unless they have earned the karma threshold required to do so from comments. Ex [of what to prevent]. someone submits the latest tech-crunch article first and gets upvotes from everyone else trying to submit it. They can then downvote in comments without first being subjected to a socialization period of earning upvotes from thoughtful comments.
  • benohear 16y ago
    But then what's the incentive for good submissions? If it's gotten to the point where essentially every article from certain sites (eg Techcrunch) gets submitted by karma gold-diggers, it might make sense to just have them auto-submitted so no one gets the karma, but they can still get discussed. EDIT: Another thought: Only allow submissions from people above a given karma. That way you would always have to earn your stripes through commenting. Downsides: Wouldn't allow sensitive anonymous 'ask HN' posts from throwaway accounts, and we would lose all the good submissions from new accounts.
• fizx 16y ago
  Can we hide negative comments, ala reddit, slashdot, everywhere else? I hate yielding real estate to trolls.
• 8ren 16y ago
  The marker for high avg. karma that was previous tried for a day. Indicative data: if mean-spirited comments correlate with low avg. karma. EDIT The previous experiment and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 (4 Feb 2009)
• anigbrowl 16y ago
  Weight votes by some derivative of karma, without showing fractional values.
• sharpn 16y ago
  I have a suggestion: after first creating an account, users could be redirected to the 'guidelines' page. That might help frame the tone of subsequent comments.
• spuz 16y ago
  How about you add a little note just above the reply button. Something like: Does this comment add value/insight/healthy debate to this topic? Very low tech I know, but sometimes people need a little reminder to think about the tone of their message and how it will be received by the community before they hit that reply button.
  • almost 16y ago
    Having a reminder whenever you comment could cut down on thoughtless comments. Everyone makes a bad comment every now and then I think, a little nudge in the other direction could be all that's needed in some cases.
  • JofArnold 16y ago
    Totally agreed. I made a similar comment above. I think it'll work.
  • JeremyChase 16y ago
    In general, text like that is never read on websites. It just adds clutter.
  • zdw 16y ago
    Two improvements: 1. Make it a checkbox people have to check. Just to force people to take one minor action, and read it. 2. Rotate the text with a variety of different statements, just to mix it up: "Are you being nice?" "Does this contribute to the conversation?" "Following the golden rule here?" and most importantly: "Will this get upvoted?" :P It's a low tech solution which focuses on fostering community values.
• Kaizyn 16y ago
  Why not do something quite simple. Have it setup so that if a user has over a certain karma threshold they can flag a user's post in some manner as being mean-spirited or other such. If a certain number of users also flag the comment, then the poster does not get any of the karma points their comment may have earned. Alternately, the commenting flagging could be coupled with a slashdot style moderation and meta-moderation system.
  • 8ren 16y ago
    Already implemented, but "hidden": you must be on the link to that comment to see the flag link - eg. to see it on pg's GP comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852736 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852736
• staunch 16y ago
  Try to prevent people from feeding the trolls. When people reply to a -4 comment it makes it harder to ignore that comment. It effectively pushes it up on the page. So disable replying to -4 comments. It's probably also necessary to hide any existing replies. Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852305 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852305
• jozo 16y ago
  It seems to me that many of the 'bad' comments come from users who has a strong feeling on a subject and therefor posts many comments on story, where one might get upvoted early on. I think it could be a good idea to account for the consistency of scores on comments by a user within a story. Edit: I also think that the effect of the first downvote on a new comment is (or was) to powerful. Especially when the leading comments have many replies.
• crististm 16y ago
  what about a "members only" club, where you need an invitation to get inside? It worked for google to get members if this is a problem and it may show the relative quality of the members subtree.
  • 8ren 16y ago
    You make me think of a way for every user to make their own members only club, by filtering, and they 100% control who is visible in it; others can view through another's filter: 1. every user can config a "whitelist" of users, to personalize HN to only show comments from those users (and access other users via parent links). This is the "filter", of who they "follow". 2. you can set your whitelist to be the whitelist of any other users. This is "subscribing". Some few users would end up working to maintain detailed whitelists (like, who they "follow"), and most others would just "subscribe" to them. New users would be left out in the cold til one of these services picked them up (like new bands getting signed to music labels?) No way would pg go for this, but it's interesting to me. It's sort of a variation of subreddits; and a bit like the various newswire services (like reuters etc) being picked up by local newspapers...
    • crististm 16y ago
      Actually, none of the two items were on my mind: you are a member but you don't own the club to set the rules. You are just allowed to invite someone else in. I'm not sure manually whitelisting scales.
      • 8ren 16y ago
        Yeah, it's a different idea, but inspired by yours. Good point about scaling: perhaps your whitelist could include selected whitelists of others; you can aggregate whitelists.
• rjurney 16y ago
  Flagging an entire thread by clicking 'troll' would help. The up/down voting tends to promote trolling, as the first controversial cliche is the top comment, having spawned a deep threaded conversation with lots of emotions and voting. A different symbol is needed. Something that makes people take pause and say, 'Is this a good subtopic of this link, or is it the exact debate anyone would have predicted?' Put troll threads/comments at the bottom of the page, or hide them. Or use spam ratings to amplify users' votes who up vote non spam comments. Short of that, add the ability to minimize entire threads.
  • DTrejo 16y ago
    I would say that many do not know the flag options exists, because you first have to click the comment's link, and then click flag. If more people knew about the flag button, and if more people remembered to use it, then I think these threads would disappear more quickly.
• ramanujan 16y ago
  You have the full HN dataset and voting logs. What if you used it to train a simple classifier that would predict the likely karma of a comment as a function of a number of features, including username, username responded to, bag-of-words vector of the comment, time of day, total number of comments in thread, "controversy" of the comment (as reflected by a mix of up & down votes) and similar factors? The goal could be something like Google's Beer Goggles, but for comments: "it looks like you're writing a flame, are you sure you want to do that?" Another thought: there's a big difference between a comment at -1 with 10 upvotes and 12 downvotes vs. one that has occasioned 2 downvotes. Might be interesting to see the effect of showing both the number of up & down votes rather than just the sum. The idea is that genuinely trollish comments at -1 will be differentiated from minority points of view.
  • joelmichael 16y ago
    I hope you would reward controversy rather than punish it? I don't come to HN to read happythoughts.
    • ramanujan 16y ago
      Indeed, the idea is that a "controversial" comment can evoke both disagreement and support, while a trollish comment would just result in downvoting. OTOH, some particularly clever trolls are of course intended to provoke division of an intellectually unproductive sort. Not sure if machine learning could identify that...though features computed from the commenter's past history could be informative.
  • noverloop 16y ago
    I think it's more effective to train classifiers on users' voting logs and comments in order to maintain the quality and thoughtfulness of HN. This allows you to classify all your users into classes that resemble their characters. e.g. A genuine nice guy won't post mean comments and won't pick 'punish' a user he disagrees with. A person who downvotes when he disagrees can be classified as such. I'm sure a troll has a specific pattern too. Then you can enable or disable aspects of the site for each user-category. e.g. disable comments from trolls, disable downvoting for people who downvote when disagree as this stimulates groupthink, etc... A set of users can serve as a training set for each category. It is possible to let the 'genuine'-category classify comments from users from the other categories in order to enhance the classifiers. Actually this is an interesting machine learning problem, I still need to pick a project for my course in machine learning so I can research this if I can get my hands on the datasets.
• JesseAldridge 16y ago
  Possible solution 1: Smaller communities; Dunbar's number. I know it's been suggested before, but here it is again... When everybody knows everybody, people are nicer. Just create one unique, isolated instance of the site for every X number of users. Distribute current users randomly (or whatever) among the instances. Assign new users to the least populous instance. If an instance gets over max_number of users, split it in two. Don't bother trying to do fancy stuff like connecting votes between communities; if something is really good people from each community will submit it separately. Also, it might be nice to be able to move between communities... but that sounds like something for version 2. You could have these smaller communities run in parallel with the main site if this seems like too big of a shift. Possible solution 2: Not sure if this really addresses the issue squarely -- but what if, when ranking stories and/or comments, you factor in the number of votes in the intersection between the current user and the submitter/commenter. Something like: define votes(username): return ids of last n upvoted items for username item_score *= (length(intersection(votes(user_x), votes(user_y))) / (n / 2)) Just use the original algorithm if the user hasn't yet cast n votes. One man's garbage is another man's gold, as they say. You could do something similar by checking downvotes as well. If two people are polar opposites (one person upvotes stuff the other downvotes), then comments by one could be greyed out or hidden for the other. If there were simply a box I could check to make my votes public, then maybe somebody could write a Chrome or Firefox extension to pull this data and handle the re-ranking. Neither of these two ideas would be perfect, but I think they would improve the user experience significantly. If nothing else they would be interesting experiments.
  • ramanujan 16y ago
    Solution 2 is very interesting and a form of instant personalization. "You will like this if this is the sort of thing you like." People who want to seek out disagreement/incongenial views might be able to turn it off should they so please. With the right data structure you could do this with a single matrix-vector multiplication per page view.
  • kristaps 16y ago
    Possible solution 1 sounds like a horrible idea. By fragmenting the community it would fragment the knowledge, quite a high price to pay for clean comments.
• DeusExMachina 16y ago
  Educate people on flagging inappropriate comments, like offensive ones, instead of downvoting. Downvoting can be used for disagreement, but nasty comments deserve to be flagged and then eliminated. Then, put a heavy fine on it: for example, if a user has a comment eliminated due to flagging, he loses a big amount of karma (20%?) and he cannot comment/submit for one day.
  • silentbicycle 16y ago
    The flag button doesn't appear until you get to the reply page - making sure people know they can flag comments would be a good start. Also, 20% of karma isn't very useful for troll / griefers on throwaway accounts. A fixed value (-100?) might be better.
• paolomaffei 16y ago
  It was already suggested often that people should "pay" karma to post and maybe even to comment Users should be encouraged to comment LESS, only if they have something useful to say. That's what I'm doing anyway, because I really don't care about karma and speak only when I have something worth to say, would be cool if anyone was acting like this since we have no shortage of users.
• cageface 16y ago
  I'd like to see the karma system dispensed with entirely. I don't think it encourages thoughtful and productive discussions.
  • m0nty 16y ago
    > I'd like to see the karma system dispensed with entirely Totally agree with that. Comments should be judged on their merits, not the number of points they have gained or lost. Disagreement should be expressed using actual words rather than "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Removing comment karma would slow people down as they scan comments: rather than just looking for the highest-rated ones, they would have to look at the meaning of all of them. Bitch-slapping commenters with a down-vote doesn't add anything to community or discussion. Clicking the "me too!" upvote button doesn't help that much either. Keep a flag for "spam", "inappropriate" or "offensive" and leave it at that. People who habitually misuse those buttons should lose the ability to use them at all. People who are constantly (and justifiably) reported using them should have their account limited in some way, maybe limiting the frequency or number of comments they can make. (I mean comment karma, specifically, not submission karma.)
  • frossie 16y ago
    The karma system discourages duplication and it is worth its weight in gold just for that. Imagine if the 50 people that agree with a comment felt the need to chime in. Whereas with karma you upvote and are done with it. To a newbie, karma voting patterns have huge instructional value (at least they did for me) HN without karma wouldn't be HN.
    • cageface 16y ago
      Why assume that everybody that upvotes now would take the time to "me too"? If anything what I see again and again is that some comment takes a quick lead in upvotes in a topic and dominates the conversation afterwards, despite being often followed by more interesting comments.
• JofArnold 16y ago
  Perhaps clearly stating the policy/approach at the top of the HN page? Not of the form "You must do this". But rather of the form "The mission of HN is to supply stimulating, insightful, {insert mission here}... Therefore always be polite, thoughtful, engaging and supporting". That'll be enough I think. It's currently not immediately clear what the mission is unless you explore and delve deeper.
  • JofArnold 16y ago
    It's also the simplest non-tech thing to try first ;)
• hasenj 16y ago
  Limit the amount of downvotes one can perform per day, or per X hours. Points from comments should have way more weight than karma points from submissions. It's easy to get massive karma points if you submit something interesting. On the other hand, you could spend a lot of time writing a comment and you wouldn't get than many points from it.
• rms 16y ago
  I think you need to do as reddit did -- hire a full time person as community manager (http://blog.reddit.com/2008/10/welcome-erik.html http://blog.reddit.com/2008/10/welcome-erik.html, http://www.reddit.com/user/hueypriest http://www.reddit.com/user/hueypriest). You can only take technical tricks so far, community management is an AGI-hard problem.
• alphamerik 16y ago
  Have you considered charging for write access? Allow the site to be publicly readable but charge people a yearly fee to submit stories and posts. They would be much less likely to act abusive if they are paying and their access could be revoked. Several membership levels and tiers of forums could be provided, including private and invite only.
  • blasdel 16y ago
    No need to make it that complicated — just require a one-time $5 fee to create an account. Metafilter has done this very successfully for the last 6 years.
• MisterWebz 16y ago
  Only accounts older than 2 (or more) months should be able to comment. Make sure you can't register more than 1 account in x days/weeks. The majority of spammers who'll use proxies to register tons of accounts will probably forget they even had the accounts after 2 months. Problem partially solved.
• SemanticFog 16y ago
  I think the problem is lack of a clear data element that captures what you need. The current vote up/vote down system blends a lot of factors together, which is valuable for some calculations, but not the one you're looking for here. I suggest a "flame" flag for every comment, which can roll up into a user's rating as a "flamer." The flag would only be available to HNers with a low flame rating themselves and a significant history of comments. By default, no one would see comments that have high flame ratings. Users that accumulated flame points would get a time out from commenting, leading to a permanent ban if the behavior doesn't stop. The site is wonderfully minimal at the moment, but using a UI graphic such as a fireball or flame could draw attention to the importance of civility.
• edw519 16y ago
  You're almost there with your "reply time delay". Just take it all the way... Limit the number of times one person can post in the same thread to once (or maybe twice), either from the top node or a sub-node. Example: PersonA says, "blah blah blah..." PersonB says, "You're an idiot because blah blah blah..." PersonA is locked out from replying to PersonB. This will do 7 things: 1. It will eliminate argument strings between 2 people. 2. It will remove the incentive to flame because your flame can't turn into an argument. 3. It will encourage people to think through what they have to say, anticipate counter-arguments, and address them in their original comment (or with an update in the 2 hour edit window). 4. It will foster a greater sense of community by encouraging people to stick up for each other. (PersonA made a good comment, PersonB trolled, PersonA can't reply, so I will.) PersonB will get the message much better when confronted by the community instead of PersonA. (Of course, if no one sticks up for PersonA, then maybe they really were wrong.) 5. It will encourage 2 people to take their legitimate discussion (of little interest to others) off-line. 6. It will reduce the length and indentation of threads making them easier to read. 7. It will encourage everyone to slow down and think a little. Those who don't will stick out (not in a good way). Trolls will get more satisfaction somewhere else. (This is already working by accident. I have gotten so busy that I only visit hn in short bursts. Often, when someone challenges me, I don't reply because I have left and returned much later. But others have replied for me. The resulting thread is invariably better than if I had replied myself.)
  • AlexC04 16y ago
    I'd worry that it also eliminates the opportunity to have those tremendous back and forth type discussions where people help each other and make incremental improvements to the idea they're working on. That's a lot more rare than two people griping back and forth - but what price would you pay for the sublime? You would really lose the 'discussion' aspect of things by turning it into a 'say once' system. People in complex situations almost never behave exactly as you'd expect them to. An artificial limit to discussion might have terrible unintended consequences. What about the problem of someone asking a question in their comment. "Hey, wait a second, what did you mean by X?" [I'm sorry you're prevented from replying in this thread]
• chaosmachine 16y ago
  Downvoted comments are bad for the community. They are literally negative. Remove downvotes. Anything that truly deserves downvotes probably deserves flagging/deading, too. Downvotes change how you think about reading comments. Instead of "was this helpful?" you're thinking "do i love this or hate this?". It's polarizing, and as the number of users increases, it's easy for a comment to hit -4 in a couple minutes. People feel bad when they get downvoted (often because they feel the downvotes are unjust), and some of them turn to trolling or flaming as a defense mechanism. This spreads across threads and infects the whole community. Emotions are contagious. Also, add the ability to undo your upvote.
  • JeremyChase 16y ago
    I'm embarrassed to say that I have accidentally upvoted many times. This always happen on a particularly egregious comment that caused you to be distracted while clicking. We should not remove down votes outright. I've seen a comment get downvoted to -4 because people didn't like the commentary, but then shoot back up to +10 when it was shown that they were correct after all.
    • po 16y ago
      …but if we remove downvotes, they will just stay at 1 instead of getting downvoted. Later they will still be able to shoot up. They will only get flagged if they are actively in the wrong spirit of the community. (spam, abuse, etc..) The concept of "down" is conflated in people's minds in a way "up" isn't. It is used by people to mean either "I disagree" or "totally inappropriate". The first is not supposed to affect karma but the second is. If you simply replace "down" with "flag" it changes how people think about it. As for accidental up-voting, moving the links so that there is separation would fix that.
      • JeremyChase 16y ago
        Ah, ok, that makes a lot more sense. I was imagining removing comments that had been downvoted; not removing the link to downvote. I generally agree with that, but it reminds me of another problem. The Karma number is now an ever-growing and meaningless figure. I think it should be harder to improve your karma as you get higher, and it should be easier to lose it. That it actually has a meaning.
• ajb 16y ago
  Okay, here's a trick. The goal is to detect people who can't discriminate bad stuff from good, can't restrain themselves from replying to a troll (or can't identify when they are doing so). The mechanism is, counter-intuitively, to allow people to rate their own comments. However, this rating is not to be directly used to affect how the comment is displayed, since that would obviously be easy to game. Instead, it would be used to identify people who can't restrain themselves from engaging in a low quality discussion; ie, replying to a troll or similar. Obviously we can't expect trolls to rate their own post as trollish, but we can expect at least some people to have the self-knowledge required to admit when they are posting while annoyed or similar. So, the system assumes that a comment is only as good quality as its parent, or at least, not much better. Obviously, one can make a good contribution in reply to a bad one, but it's not necessarily a problem to discourage this - since the reader of such a contribution has to read the bad contribution to get to the good one. Internally, each user has their own scale, which their replies - and the replies to their comments - relate to the scales of other users, using the above assumption. A user would then be shown only comments to which they are likely to reply; this means trolls see all the trolls, but quality users see only other quality comments. There are a couple of potential problems. One is that it would bias people against replying to deeply nested comments; and ultimately, towards making submissions instead of replies. One rather drastic way to deal with this would be to remove the submission mechanism, and only have one conversation tree; the frontpage items would then be the roots of current discussions inferred from the structure of the tree. The second problem is that while this mechanism would help current users filter out trolls, it would do nothing to help new users find the best discussions. There is a conflict between preventing the system being gamed, and allowing new users to find the best discussions; because the former would prefer the ratings to be secret, but the latter would allow information about them to be public. It is not obvious that there is a workable trade-off.
• enneff 16y ago
  http://www.levien.com/free/tmetric-HOWTO.html http://www.levien.com/free/tmetric-HOWTO.html
• ezy 16y ago
  The ability to post should be linked to the rate of posting. Or maybe the rate of pt change in general. This has two purposes: It cuts down trolls who snipe in lots of different threads at once. It cuts down on me too commenters, or the know it all contigent who seemly does nothing else but post on HN, again hitting lots of threads at once. It encourages people to think abiut what they're writing, instead sending out one sentence snark, or writing a long missive they feel they can "clarify" later in a pointless semantic debate. This isnt a complete solution... I have no idea how to correct for mean spiritedness, for example. But some kind of limit that tells people that they should stop venting/pontificating and take a walk might help.
• jdietrich 16y ago
  I havent figured out anything specific, but I have a couple of thoughts about the karma system. It occurs to me that the main failure of karma-type systems in general is valuing quantity over quality. This is perfectly rational for a commercial site that seeks to maximise engagement and page views, but it seems to actively harm both comment quality and the community dynamic. It seems that the prime concern we have for HN is maintaining a high S/N ratio; Why should the karma system not make that desire more explicit? I may be completely wrong here, but I think most of us would like to see a community where people think carefully before they post. If we want to discourage flaming and poor-quality comments, I think we need to think harder about behavioural prods to discourage them. I propose removing the display of a users' total karma on their user page and replacing it with their average karma. I would like to see voting privileges made contingent on average karma and would be interested to hear possibilities for punishing users with a high proportion of low- or negative-karma comments. It is of course dangerous to use heavy-handed technical changes because of the myriad possible unintended consequences, but we all know that internet communities almost inevitably fail. As a community, we should be considering our options now while things are generally OK, perhaps even designing a 'nuclear option' for the possibility that HN experiences some sort of Eternal September scenario.
  • pg 16y ago
    We also measure average comment score. It's the avg field on the profile page.
  • pg 16y ago
    We also measure average comment score. It's the avg field on the profile page, and it's displayed along with total karma on the leaderboard: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
    • deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  • SapphireSun 16y ago
    I don't think it's useful to punish users with low or negative karma ... because they can just get another account. Karma will only make you invested once you've accumulated enough. Maybe a nuclear option would be good. We certainly had success with Operation Erlang I & II. Maybe a nuclear option would consist of locking out access for 24 hrs to all but the old guard and then requiring that for the next week or so that new accts must be active for more than 24 hrs before they can post.
• dlokshin 16y ago
  I just read Paul's essay in Hackers and Painters on his spam filters using Bayesian probability of words in the message. Could something like that work on trolls? The body's corpus would be only replies marked with a certain flag?
• Sukotto 16y ago
  Griefing: If the system does not already, I think it should flag for review users who consistently downvote a particular user. Cliques: Likewise if the same few people are consistently the first to upvote stories or comments of a particular user. Multies/Sockpuppets: I think votes for a user buy another user from "too close" an ip address should be automatically discounted. I'm not sure how to define "too close" (and I suspect HN already does this) Anonymous posting: I like the way MetaFilter handles anonymous posting instead of people making throwaway accounts. The downside of this is that 1) Posters have to really trust the site admins; 2) This becomes more work for the admins Disallow noob posting articles: What % of the [DEAD] articles were posted by users with a very low karma? What % hit the front page? (Yes, those last two are not directly related to the OP's comment but I feel they're ideas worth throwing out there)
  • jacquesm 16y ago
    I would be highly surprised if the majority of your suggestions are not already in HN, in some way except for the anonymous postings. As for the trust factor, that applies to MF just the same, unless you go out of your way to hide your traces you are always going to be identifiable to the site admins. Fortunately. Disallowing noob posting articles would be a good thing, a very low karma cap on posting articles would help (5 or 10 or so). That would be just enough to increase the cost of spam to the point where it would no longer be worth it.
  • alanh 16y ago
    The first thing I ever did with my HN account was make a submission that made it to the front page. There will be some false positives from banning noob submissions.
• fragmede 16y ago
  Force users to give a reasons when voting. This would allow two things. First, users can downvote for specific reasons - mean spirited/dumb/insulting/off-topic. If a comment is technically correct, but unnecessarily mean, then I can its disposition. Secondly, it would provide feedback to the commenter. If my 'me too!' comments are being downvoted, it'd be great to have some reason why.
• Alex3917 16y ago
  For every one mean-sprited comment, there are probably at least five comments that are just plain wrong about something. Are mean-spirited comments really that big of a problem compared with, say, commenters critiquing the methodology of academic papers they haven't read? edit: Jon Stewart is generally quite mean spirited, in that he goes out of his way to get people fired and treats people he disagrees with like little kids, but if he were an HN contributor would he really make the community worse?
  • maw 16y ago
    It's a good point. I stopped reading another well-known site years ago in large part because so much there was outright wrong, and I was afraid that I'd picked up and internalized false ideas, and would continue to do so, in unwary moments.
• rokhayakebe 16y ago
  Don't allow downvote without a comment. Maybe use a different color font for username who downvoted.
• vog 16y ago
  Insert a delay of, say, 10 minutes until a new comment is shown. Of course, the commenter should see it immediately and should be able to correct it (or even delete it) in the meantime. But everyone else should see it only after 10 minutes. This will slow down A-B-A-B-... types of conversation which are usually only productive when being written thoughtfully and thus slowly anyway.
• huhtenberg 16y ago
  Please consider running the anonymization experiment. Mean-spirited comments can quite possibly be the response to the rampant favoritism that exists on HN and that can be as dangerous to maintaining discussions balanced and interesting.
• Tycho 16y ago
  Perhaps a gentle warning built into the voting system will suffice. I like the concept of downvoting to express disagreement (rather than cluttering the thread with replies), but I don't think anyone should downvote a comment into negative figures unless it was actually abusive. That creates bad will, which breeds more bad will, et cetera. So what about a little message that pops up saying "Are you sure you want to downvote this comment? Doing so will push its karma into negative figures. At HN we don't encourage this type of downvoting except in response to abusive content. " In my experience some people just don't have a clue how to behave online and it's not even expected of them in most places. HN is different.
• petervandijck 16y ago
  When you sign up, a page that explains the community guidelines (before you're moved into the site) might help a little. I for one have actually never seen/found them, and I've seen plenty of comments asking if something was appropriate.
• petervandijck 16y ago
  As Shirky says, "handles you can invest in". One way to invest in handles would be to add more social features like points you can give to awesome comments (you can only give 1 point a day or something), etc. Then again, all these social mechanics are complex and easily gamed. Another way would be simply to promote handles more: make an easily searched HN users list etc.
• iuguy 16y ago
  After thinking about it, how about adding a 'flag' link next to the comment headline? You can see it individually when you reply, but not on the main thread page.
• petervandijck 16y ago
  Every forum says "don't feed the trolls", but there are always people who do. If you can identify troll-feeders, you might be able to stop them from feeding the trolls (just a text reminder above a comment field might be enough), hence create less incentive for trolls. Not an easy problem to solve though, I've tried myself and didn't succeed. May try again.
• mkr-hn 16y ago
  A picture of a puppy above the comment field. Alternately, what are voting ratios looking like? Are there some people downvoting more than up? If so, a notice above the comment field letting them know could help.
• GHFigs 16y ago
  Replace the total karma score by the username in the upper right of the page with the average that's already visible on the profile page. An average is a better indicator to the user of how well they are engaging with the site. It only goes up if the user consistently posts worthwhile comments, which rewards being selective about when you post and thoughtful about what you post. Fewer and better is encouraged. Consistently good is encouraged. Lousy comments (like one-on-one arguments and "Me too!") are discouraged even if nobody votes them down. This bridges the gap between two existing forms of feedback: total karma (which nobody really cares about, even though it's on every page) and the voting on individual comments (which is the closest thing we have to an indicator of comment quality), and gives the user continuous feedback on how much value they are adding to the site. It makes it much easier to know if your commenting is getting better or getting worse. That is, it is much easier to tell that my average is up or down from the last time I looked than it is to detect the fluctuation in the rate at which my karma accumulates. Even if lousy comments get voted up--as happens when, for instance, someone first-posts an opinionated quip on a controversial submission and people swarm to vote in agreement--the impact on the user's average karma (which better reflects their value to the community) is much lower than the immediate spike in their total karma (the feedback they currently see). You don't have to stop people from writing such comments--just give them a smaller cookie when they do. Obviously you can't make anybody alter their behavior over a number, but I think most here would if given a number that they could trust as representative of the shared goal of keeping this place from sucking. tl;dr average karma is better feedback than total karma
  • pg 16y ago
    Ok, let's try that for a while.
    • plinkplonk 16y ago
      Is there any way I can see other people's average karma? The individual users pages (except my own) still seem to display total karma. The leaderboard is still ranked by total karma. If we are adopting (temporarily perhaps) average karma as a metric , it would be great to see who is ranked highest on it or even just how much average karma a user has, just as we can check total karma of a user today I also suspect that the frequency of average karma calculation may need to be increased.
• spinlock 16y ago
  If I could fix this I'd be launching the next billion dollar start-up around the technology. Just about every site goes through this type of growing pain: in the beginning it's obscure and spreads by word of mouth so that all of the people who visit the site share a common ethos; then, it grows and starts to attract other people who do not share the spirit that started the site; eventually, the "new" users outnumber the old users and they begin to set the standard for the sites personality. You can try to raise awareness and ask people to not be evil on your site, but that's almost as effective as asking the tide not to come in. There are many bitter people in the world and they outnumber the well adjusted people who would rather spend their time building up a project instead of tearing down someone else's. These trolls crave attention - the negative attention they get by aggravating people on-line - so it's really not affective to point out the problem and ask them to stop or to ask the community to gang up on them; that's what they want. We need a solution that frustrates these people. I've seen some sites where the comments a troll posts look like they are live on the site to the troll but they are hidden from everyone else. I think this is a very effective technique because it denies the troll the attention he is seeking and it saves the rest of the site from his attacks. But, perhaps the best response is to remember Margaret Thatcher's advice about people trying to make you angry (i.e. no one can make you angry without your permission). If you see something that's not in the spirit of hacker news, just ignore it. Don't respond; don't show it to other people; just let it die a bitter and lonely death.
• noodle 16y ago
  i'd like to see two things: 1) a metric based on account age, submission karma, and comment karma. less weight on submission karma, since that is easier to manipulate. make this metric the barrier of entry for features instead of basing it purely on karma. it makes manipulation harder, and it encourages actual community participation/development. 2) add another meta-moderation tool similar to the "flag" option. i mostly use flagging for spam or offensive posts. i'd like to see something else (unlocked by #1) that allows you to mark something that is off topic, non-contributing, or otherwise adding to "the decline". accounts accumulate these like points, and the more points an account has, the more features get revoked from it as punishment (which leads up to a temp ban). points decay with time, and have a hard cap on how many can be obtained in a single day or by a single comment, but a long history of points leads to more points being obtained per flag. edit: just to add some thoughts -- the only way to prevent people from being anonymous internet idiots and adding noise to the signal is either with a carrot or a stick. there's not much we can offer as a carrot that other sites can't, or that they can't get by non-participation (just reading the site). that is, unless you want to implement a private karma-barrier section of the site (unless you already have an i'm not in it... :( but then i wouldn't know about that carrot and wouldn't change my actions to reflect wanting to obtain that reward). the only real alternative is the stick, hence the revoking of features.
• phjohnst 16y ago
  I think there just needs to be a better way of communicating the reason for a downvote (or, in fact, asking for a reason for a downvote, like popup and select troll/OT/etc.) so that it costs you a little more in thought/time. It's currently just as easy to downvote as upvote, but the cost of a single downvote to the comment/user is greater than the benefit of a single upvote. Additionally, I've been thinking for a while that it would be cool if threads were ranked a little differently, and not just on the points/time of the parent. Sometimes there are really, really great comments that are replies to low-ranked ones, and the resulting thread gets kicked to the bottom of the page. Something like Avg points/time or just accounting for the average points of next-level comments when determining rank of a reply at each level.
• cperciva 16y ago
  Add a "time-out" mechanism: If a comment is killed by the editors (and/or by being flagged many times) then for the next X minutes (I'd go with X=60) handle any GETs from that user by redirecting to a page saying: The following comment has been judged to be unhelpful and as a result you are now on time-out: <comment quoted here> You may return to Hacker News in Y minutes.
• WiseWeasel 16y ago
  Downvotes could be made precious by limiting the number one could make each day, ensuring that people will use them more carefully. It could then be conceivable to give the downvotes more weight, perhaps putting users in a karma hole, with their posts starting out at 0 points, appearing at the bottom of the comments page, if they have accrued too many downvotes. They would then have to dig themselves out by posting more valuable comments.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• justlearning 16y ago
  is it too late for me to chip? if a user is downvoted>n times, delete the comment with added penalty factor. this would keep the content clean forever. Despite the downvoted comment being hidden, it almost stands out the elitist comment(and nowadays the chain of explanations growing usually offtopic) Could we restrict users to one user per ip? I sometimes suspect people using multiple ids to upvote their comments/posts. There are some posts way out of HN league that get upvotes within minutes from the new page (even the spammer ones). Would it be hard to have new users moderated? One way is for new users to write few lines about themselves. Moderator would look for human(no-spam) and genuinity. Show a warning or part of content from http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html upon submission of a post or comment - until they attain their downvote karma rights. One liners like 'i like it too' should be deleted. Perhaps there should be a minimum amount of words for a reply or a warning telling the user to verify if he really wants to post. Link searchyc.com on top of the page beside 'submit' - new users don't know of this awesome search site. While there is a search link at the bottom of the page, I wouldn't be using it more than once that I know it's googlified. SearchYC works! with lots of criteria. imho, this would reduce many of'django vs rails' kind of questions, that have been discussed in the past.
• tel 16y ago
  Replace comment arrows with a plus and a flag. Plus increases karma and plays into the comment arrangement on the page. Flag is scored separately and silently as a measure of meanness and/or community culture clash. From two dimensions of data you'll have a better capacity to guess whether someone is a bad participant on HN.
• ihodes 16y ago
  I want to measure the worth and contribution of a comment; here's how I tried. (defn v-rat [uv dv] (/ (expt uv 3/2) (+ uv dv)))) (define nest-weight [comment] (/ 1 (+ (nest-level comment) (/ 3 (nest-level comment))))) weight:: (+ (/ ak 2) (v-rat uv dv) (reduce + (map (fn [c] (* (nest-weight c) (v-rat (upvotes c) (downvotes c)))) (remove (fn [c] (= user (user c))) comments)) Where ak is the average karma of the user (only on comments, if possible), uv and dv are upvotes and downvotes respectively, and comments is a list of comments in reply to the comment we're weighing. ===== Abstractly, I'm trying to consider the comment based on both its individual value as well as how much good discussion it generated. I also take into account, plainly, the average past worth of their comments. This could certainly use some tweaking, but I like the values I've plugged in so far, and it promotes discussion as well as thoughtful contribution, and gives a nod towards users who have high quality comments in the past. I'd be interested in tweaking it some more if this seems at all a step in the right direction. I think I could use a better heuristic for replies, as well as a more sophisticated v-rat. I also wonder if it would be possible to see which users downvote and upvote, and give those votes more power (technically possible, that is), and also take into account the users who are replying, and to what effect. This would require a lot more testing, and maybe more CPU cycles than PG would like. I'm not sure taking time into account is a great idea past the first ~10 minutes of submission. For those first ~10 minutes, perhaps weigh the comment solely using the avg karma of the user + some constant. After those first x minutes, rank by the algorithm.
• oreilly 16y ago
  Use the same system that decays a post's weight on the front page to decay a comments weight on a thread. This will balance out the uneven distribution of karma that is talked about above, as new comments will be seen and given a chance to voted on even well into a conversation. Having done this, comments that stop being relevant to the conversation should drop to the bottom and naturally attract less attention. Ideally, this will leave trolling posts ignored. (This can be helped further by having user selected timeout apply. If comment / responses are mapped as a tree, hide all branches that have no new activity for the past x hours, allowing users to change x as they choose. Give visual feedback to a comments age by fading old comments) This solves the 'income' end of the system, as karma should now be distributed a little more evenly over time.
• lazyant 16y ago
  I suggest hiding the points from submissions, comments and other people's summary page. Seeing the points doesn't add value and it distorts the opinions and upvotes (people tend to like more what other people recommend).
• gasull 16y ago
  Paul, what about having anonymous comments to avoid groupthinking, but keeping those comments linked to the poster's karma?