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PG's essay "What I've Learned From Hacker News"[0] is on point: COMMENTS: Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. While the quality of l

PG's essay "What I've Learned From Hacker News"[0] is on point: COMMENTS: Bad comments seem to be a harder problem than bad submissions. While the quality of links on the frontpage of HN hasn't changed much, the quality of the median comment may have decreased somewhat. There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two—mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb—but the strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn't be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness. Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they're being mean than stupid people are to know they're being stupid. The most dangerous form of stupid comment is not the long but mistaken argument, but the dumb joke. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor. Probably the cause is human nature rather than anything specific to comment threads. Probably it's simply that stupidity more often takes the form of having few ideas than wrong ones. Whatever the cause, stupid comments tend to be short. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of information it conveys, people try to distinguish them instead by being funny. The most tempting format for stupid comments is the supposedly witty put-down, probably because put-downs are the easiest form of humor. So one advantage of forbidding meanness is that it also cuts down on these. Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. People reply to dumb jokes with dumb jokes. Maybe the solution is to add a delay before people can respond to a comment, and make the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. Then dumb threads would grow slower. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

jaabe 7y ago
I think the top submissions have declined somewhat over the years. Maybe it’s just my personal taste that’s changed, but I like two types of articles. The ones that are interesting and the ones that are actually useful to me. There is still a lot of interesting articles on HN, that diver story from yesterday is a great example of one. It’s rare I see an article that’s actually useful though. Google cloud being down, and google engineers explaining what was going one is one of the few useful thing I’ve seen on HN in 2019. (And that actually mainly involved the comment section). I realise that you will always get a lot of hype-technologies on a technology focused social media, but they are actually not that interesting to me. Sure Rust is cool, but chances are that I won’t actually ever meet someone who uses Rust professionally in my lifetime. This frankly makes the majority of Rust related content rather irrelevant to me, and I say Rust, but I could be mentioning a range of the other cool, new and not-adopted technologies. Now, I’m not saying that those articles shouldn’t be here, because I think they absolutely should. It’s obviously more news-worthy to write about something new and cool, rather than something old and tried. When the majority, or all, the content is made up of technologies that will probably never see real world adoption, however, well then HN becomes somewhat irrelevant, at least to me. Maybe that means I’m just on the wrong web-page though.
deleted 7y ago
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rolsa 7y ago
I disagree. Hacker News is a time limited popularity based discussion forum. Everything else being equal, short unsubstantial comments are a lot easier to refute. It is long unsubstantial comments that inflates the issue until the effort required to argue against them makes it unfeasible to do so. These comments also create a false consensus, based on volume rather than arguments, that then continue to live on in subsequent stories. One of the few way to puncture such a bubble is to write something short but pointed. But this will more often than not be penalized by users and the system on HN. Making effective dissent against the winning narrative practically impossible.
krapp 7y ago
One problem I think HN has in the way it views comment quality is the assumption that the only reasonable metrics for "quality" in a comment are novelty ('adding something new') or information density. Comments are conversations. The deeper into a thread you go, the less relevant that conversation becomes to the general audience, as the context shifts from the broad subject to some more fine-grained tangential minutiae between fewer and fewer people. Expecting all comments to provide intellectual merit or brilliantly quotable nuggets of insight, or considering those that don't to be harmful grossly misjudges the intended use of a forum. We're not here to post theses at one another. I also disagree that humor and brevity in a comment are implicit signs of low quality. One can find many examples of brilliant people with a well developed sense of humor, and of its employment in intellectual discourse. Indeed, the lack of a sense of humor is seen more often than not as a sign of intellectual deficit. I suspect there is a correlation between HN's distaste for humor in comments and the growth of meanness in comments over time - humor as a virtue signal is suppressed, so its opposite becomes encouraged. Of course, there is a legitimate reason to want to police and reduce obviously poor comments, trolling, etc. But I think HN tends to cut its own nose off to spite its face in its efforts to engineer quality beyond what's actually necessary.

jaabe 7y ago

I think the top submissions have declined somewhat over the years. Maybe it’s just my personal taste that’s changed, but I like two types of articles. The ones that are interesting and the ones that are actually useful to me. There is still a lot of interesting articles on HN, that diver story from yesterday is a great example of one. It’s rare I see an article that’s actually useful though. Google cloud being down, and google engineers explaining what was going one is one of the few useful thing I’ve seen on HN in 2019. (And that actually mainly involved the comment section). I realise that you will always get a lot of hype-technologies on a technology focused social media, but they are actually not that interesting to me. Sure Rust is cool, but chances are that I won’t actually ever meet someone who uses Rust professionally in my lifetime. This frankly makes the majority of Rust related content rather irrelevant to me, and I say Rust, but I could be mentioning a range of the other cool, new and not-adopted technologies. Now, I’m not saying that those articles shouldn’t be here, because I think they absolutely should. It’s obviously more news-worthy to write about something new and cool, rather than something old and tried. When the majority, or all, the content is made up of technologies that will probably never see real world adoption, however, well then HN becomes somewhat irrelevant, at least to me. Maybe that means I’m just on the wrong web-page though.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

rolsa 7y ago

I disagree. Hacker News is a time limited popularity based discussion forum. Everything else being equal, short unsubstantial comments are a lot easier to refute. It is long unsubstantial comments that inflates the issue until the effort required to argue against them makes it unfeasible to do so. These comments also create a false consensus, based on volume rather than arguments, that then continue to live on in subsequent stories. One of the few way to puncture such a bubble is to write something short but pointed. But this will more often than not be penalized by users and the system on HN. Making effective dissent against the winning narrative practically impossible.

krapp 7y ago

One problem I think HN has in the way it views comment quality is the assumption that the only reasonable metrics for "quality" in a comment are novelty ('adding something new') or information density. Comments are conversations. The deeper into a thread you go, the less relevant that conversation becomes to the general audience, as the context shifts from the broad subject to some more fine-grained tangential minutiae between fewer and fewer people. Expecting all comments to provide intellectual merit or brilliantly quotable nuggets of insight, or considering those that don't to be harmful grossly misjudges the intended use of a forum. We're not here to post theses at one another. I also disagree that humor and brevity in a comment are implicit signs of low quality. One can find many examples of brilliant people with a well developed sense of humor, and of its employment in intellectual discourse. Indeed, the lack of a sense of humor is seen more often than not as a sign of intellectual deficit. I suspect there is a correlation between HN's distaste for humor in comments and the growth of meanness in comments over time - humor as a virtue signal is suppressed, so its opposite becomes encouraged. Of course, there is a legitimate reason to want to police and reduce obviously poor comments, trolling, etc. But I think HN tends to cut its own nose off to spite its face in its efforts to engineer quality beyond what's actually necessary.