3 ms·

Sometimes I would like to see comments divided in two sections: 1. discussion strictly about the contents of the submission and 2. all the rest, which I would c

by hawski 5y ago

Sometimes I would like to see comments divided in two sections: 1. discussion strictly about the contents of the submission and 2. all the rest, which I would call meta. Meta would be hidden by default and often would be a catch-all for many types of negative comments in type of ("the page is unreadable", "I hate marketing", "I don't know what this is"). I know that many of my comments, like this one, would go to the meta section, but sometimes when I think about it like that I decide not to write a comment. Interesting thing would be to divide karma and weigh content comments by content karma and meta comments by meta karma. The problem would be that a reply to a content comment could be meta, so maybe every thread would have its own section?

ericb 5y ago
That sounds amazing! That would get the content separated from the noise. I'd love it. The problem with these meta topics is that they are like the bike shed problem--emotionally driven, easy to get sucked into, everyone has an opinion, but ultimately, a distraction that takes away from the important stuff. Here's an implementation. We have up and down voting. Let me vote these sideways. This would be a left arrow, which hides them for me--conceptually like kicking them off the screen--and if a quorum develops past a threshold, by default for anyone with "meta" turned off.
- hawski 5y ago
  I was thinking about side-votes and thought the same before I read your comment.
dang 5y ago
One question is how would you categorize them. It could be some combination of software, user input, and moderator action, and there are problems with all three. I would use the word 'generic' rather than 'meta'. Generic includes meta but also all other predictable themes, and a subthread that goes off-topic isn't necessarily bad—whimsical tangents can be interesting when unpredictable, as long as they're not done too often (at which point they'd count as generic). We downweight generic subthreads and the current certainly counts as that, but I haven't downweighted it in this case because it seemed more important to communicate to the community about this. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- jffry 5y ago
  Is your downweighting process driven by manual reading through threads or are there signals that draw your attention to potentially-downweight-worthy subthreads? edit: that is to say, I wouldn't expect user-driven signals to automatically partition or downweight subthreads, I was more curious if they are useful in existing moderation actions and how they might extrapolate.
  - dang 5y ago
    It's mostly manual. Readers often email us cases that need attention, though, and that's super helpful when the top subthread is a generic black hole. If you see one, and have a minute to alert us at hn@ycombinator.com, we'd be grateful! It's probably the single biggest thing moderation can do to improve thread quality, and we can't read all the threads. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- hawski 5y ago
  It is certainly the biggest issue with the idea. I thought about having a checkbox in a reply. Also there could be a side pointing vote arrow. So if you place your comment in generic category you would only have a side- and a down- vote buttons. If your comment gets more side-votes then up-votes it becomes generic (maybe after a threshold). Also people who's comments are too often made "generic" by community or moderators would not be trusted as much on "on-topic" comment votes. Without introducing more UI/UX it could then work like this: On-topic comments would go first, then side/generic comments and then down-voted comments. Side-vote would be a little like down-vote, but side-votes would count against other side-voted comments. As always it would go down to many checks and balances. So it it easier to say then do. Your manual intervention as you describe is often visible and welcome.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
I have gotten so much more information reading the comments than the article. A lot of the "meta" is useful to me. I come here for the comments, and like all the comments, even most of the silenced blurry ones. Sometimes it sounds like a echo chamber, but I like the diversity of this crowd. I think most of the regulars here realize HN has some strong rules. A bit too strong for myself, so I refrain from saying what I really feel. I think most of us know the culture at Hacker News. Would I like to see the boundaries expanded--yes, but I understand most of you are afraid of this site becoming Reddit, and so am I. A bunch of niceties over a article, or controversial subject, is not helpful to me. (More meta coming up. Does anyone know the exact source code to HN. I've seen the old source code at Git. I'm looking for something current. I want to learn Lisp, and programming a site I like would be nice. Or, is there another language better suited (I guess more libraries) that would be a better fit for a HN clone?)
- hathawsh 5y ago
  Same here, but sometimes the meta is overwhelming. Most big technical discussion boards have hit the same issue: the signal/noise ratio falls with popularity, leading to excessive negativity and a lot of meta-discussion to clean up the negativity. Maybe @dang is right that the negativity actually results from both popularity and timing of comments. That's an intriguing hypothesis. It wouldn't be right to kill the popularity of HN, but maybe there's some way to fix the timing or visibility of comments. I hope that doesn't mean a complicated moderation system. Maybe a new algorithm could help.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Well, a lot of what you describe as meta (e.g. "this page is unreadable") is explicitly against the site guidelines, and much of the rest is more-or-less implicitly against the guidelines (ie, HN is for discussions which gratify intellectual curiosity). The right thing to do is to downvote it. If you can't downvote comments yet, well, they'll usually get downvoted by others soon enough. IMO, the nice thing about HN is that for all that it's imperfect, compared to most of the internet the community moderation (and official moderation) works very well! There are also comments that are perhaps not exactly related to the story, but are adjacent enough to be on-topic or arise naturally from conversation. It's natural for conversations to move between topics, and many of these discussions are super interesting!

by hawski 5y ago

ericb 5y ago

That sounds amazing! That would get the content separated from the noise. I'd love it. The problem with these meta topics is that they are like the bike shed problem--emotionally driven, easy to get sucked into, everyone has an opinion, but ultimately, a distraction that takes away from the important stuff. Here's an implementation. We have up and down voting. Let me vote these sideways. This would be a left arrow, which hides them for me--conceptually like kicking them off the screen--and if a quorum develops past a threshold, by default for anyone with "meta" turned off.

hawski 5y ago
I was thinking about side-votes and thought the same before I read your comment.

dang 5y ago

One question is how would you categorize them. It could be some combination of software, user input, and moderator action, and there are problems with all three. I would use the word 'generic' rather than 'meta'. Generic includes meta but also all other predictable themes, and a subthread that goes off-topic isn't necessarily bad—whimsical tangents can be interesting when unpredictable, as long as they're not done too often (at which point they'd count as generic). We downweight generic subthreads and the current certainly counts as that, but I haven't downweighted it in this case because it seemed more important to communicate to the community about this. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

jffry 5y ago
Is your downweighting process driven by manual reading through threads or are there signals that draw your attention to potentially-downweight-worthy subthreads? edit: that is to say, I wouldn't expect user-driven signals to automatically partition or downweight subthreads, I was more curious if they are useful in existing moderation actions and how they might extrapolate.
- dang 5y ago
  It's mostly manual. Readers often email us cases that need attention, though, and that's super helpful when the top subthread is a generic black hole. If you see one, and have a minute to alert us at hn@ycombinator.com, we'd be grateful! It's probably the single biggest thing moderation can do to improve thread quality, and we can't read all the threads. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20black%20hole&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
hawski 5y ago
It is certainly the biggest issue with the idea. I thought about having a checkbox in a reply. Also there could be a side pointing vote arrow. So if you place your comment in generic category you would only have a side- and a down- vote buttons. If your comment gets more side-votes then up-votes it becomes generic (maybe after a threshold). Also people who's comments are too often made "generic" by community or moderators would not be trusted as much on "on-topic" comment votes. Without introducing more UI/UX it could then work like this: On-topic comments would go first, then side/generic comments and then down-voted comments. Side-vote would be a little like down-vote, but side-votes would count against other side-voted comments. As always it would go down to many checks and balances. So it it easier to say then do. Your manual intervention as you describe is often visible and welcome.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

I have gotten so much more information reading the comments than the article. A lot of the "meta" is useful to me. I come here for the comments, and like all the comments, even most of the silenced blurry ones. Sometimes it sounds like a echo chamber, but I like the diversity of this crowd. I think most of the regulars here realize HN has some strong rules. A bit too strong for myself, so I refrain from saying what I really feel. I think most of us know the culture at Hacker News. Would I like to see the boundaries expanded--yes, but I understand most of you are afraid of this site becoming Reddit, and so am I. A bunch of niceties over a article, or controversial subject, is not helpful to me. (More meta coming up. Does anyone know the exact source code to HN. I've seen the old source code at Git. I'm looking for something current. I want to learn Lisp, and programming a site I like would be nice. Or, is there another language better suited (I guess more libraries) that would be a better fit for a HN clone?)

hathawsh 5y ago
Same here, but sometimes the meta is overwhelming. Most big technical discussion boards have hit the same issue: the signal/noise ratio falls with popularity, leading to excessive negativity and a lot of meta-discussion to clean up the negativity. Maybe @dang is right that the negativity actually results from both popularity and timing of comments. That's an intriguing hypothesis. It wouldn't be right to kill the popularity of HN, but maybe there's some way to fix the timing or visibility of comments. I hope that doesn't mean a complicated moderation system. Maybe a new algorithm could help.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

Well, a lot of what you describe as meta (e.g. "this page is unreadable") is explicitly against the site guidelines, and much of the rest is more-or-less implicitly against the guidelines (ie, HN is for discussions which gratify intellectual curiosity). The right thing to do is to downvote it. If you can't downvote comments yet, well, they'll usually get downvoted by others soon enough. IMO, the nice thing about HN is that for all that it's imperfect, compared to most of the internet the community moderation (and official moderation) works very well! There are also comments that are perhaps not exactly related to the story, but are adjacent enough to be on-topic or arise naturally from conversation. It's natural for conversations to move between topics, and many of these discussions are super interesting!