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Your posting pictures of techcrunch comments. I'd qualify them somewhere between Youtube comments and yahoo answers.

• TillE 16y ago
  Indeed. Though I find it remarkable that a tech/startup blog has managed to cultivate such a ferociously stupid group of commenters. You expect that on the general internet - YouTube, news sites, TMZ, etc - but even Gizmodo has half-decent comments. Who benefits from such garbage? I'd love to know if anyone here has experience maintaining loose communities like that. Does light moderation help? I feel like letting the loudmouth morons run free tends to shut out anyone who might want to write something intelligent or useful. A crappy comment section is worse than useless; it actively makes your site look bad.
  • Vivtek 16y ago
    I think it's too late for moderation there. If you moderate, sometimes with a heavy hand, right from the start, you can build a good community (Making Light, Metafilter) - but once you have a community that isn't good, you essentially have to reboot it entirely by shutting off comments for a while, then starting over with draconian moderation (BoingBoing). I still don't know how HN happened. I suppose making it a private community to start, then opening up once the culture was established, played a large part, and I know pg does some moderation. But I personally haven't seen much evidence of moderation, so my mental model is a little soft there.
• mbesto 16y ago
  And yet this story is #1 on HN right now. Ugh.