7 ms·

The quality of comments has been declining very gradually for years. There's a lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet undiscove

by pg 15y ago

The quality of comments has been declining very gradually for years. There's a lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet undiscovered. This is somewhat uncharted territory. I'm medium hopeful.

diego 15y ago
It's not just the comments, I'm more concerned about the submissions. Look at the front page right now, and see how many items are not "Hacker News" even with a very lax definition of "stuff that's interesting specifically to hackers." For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497331 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497331
- chc 15y ago
  I think these are related. The kind of people who like to comment on some things — say, politics — tend to be less tactful. This drags the average down. Then, unless you're very lucky, people readjust their norms and start acting ruder themselves — and then you have yourself a vicious circle. I've seen it happen in a lot of places. It makes me sad every time. I'd strongly suggesting policing OT posts more proactively. Like PG said in his essay about starting Hacker News, this is a social problem, not a technical one. We need to refrain from doing things that make jerks feel like this is the place for them.
- physicslover 15y ago
  I agree, Diego. I now find a few articles a day on the front page interesting, whereas before this seemed much higher. It seems that hacker news may be getting too popular for it's own good. At which point, you start getting submissions from people who are more interested in promoting themselves or some agenda and finding ways to game the ranking system to get content on the front page.
- bronxbomber92 15y ago
  This is related to my Ask HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3498229 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3498229 My question was asking if there may be a correlation between the quality of the content and the actual name of Hacker News being misrepresentative due to the ambiguity in the definition of "hacker." Which I asked because my thoughts seemed to wander a bit too far from what you were asking.
- tptacek 15y ago
  It's clear why this happens. The people interested in fuzzy, quasi-political or "outrage" issues are passionately engaged with them. People are less passionate about the debate over the worst-case complexity of hash table lookups. At a step's remove, it's evident that the topics HN was intended to cover are systemically disadvantaged compared to whatever the moment's advocacy topics are --- and every moment has at least one advocacy topic: the TSA, SOPA, Occupy, Wikileaks, police misconduct, Asian manufacturing, ebook licensing, DRM, &c &c &c. More passion, less thought, less tolerance for conflicting views, worse threads. Paul Graham seems cautiously optimistic about comment quality. I think he's being too generous. I suspect that advocacy energy is cumulative; it doesn't go away when the topic fades, but sticks around and waits to bind to subsequent advocacy topics, causing the site to steadily crud up with them.
  - ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
    ===== Why It Happens Theory #1 - "Community Size Syndrome" ==== I am guilty of this. And I think I know why I/we do it. When a topic comes up, and you feel your voice isn't/won't be heard, it tends to make you over-emote, yell, and stomp though the place to get more attention / vent frustration. Think about it. It wasn't like this when Hacker News was smaller, because when HN was smaller there were less people, less comments, and everyone had a voice that could be heard. Now that the place is bigger your "voice" is easily lost, your comment ends up at the bottom, you feel like your opinion won't matter. This stresses you out and pisses you off so you go and piggyback off of someone else's comment near the top and just vent. We see this in political ralleys, demonstrations, protests. When humans feel they are NOT being listened to, they get loud and angry.
  - tikhonj 15y ago
    I don't think it's really an issue of passion. Rather, it is an issue of demographics: almost everybody is affected or at least mildly interested in politics; only smaller subsets of the population are interested in Haskell/Erlang/complexity/aglorithms...etc. Frankly, I bet some people are as "passionate" (for a loose definition of "passionate") about, say, functional programming as others are about politics; there are just more people with at least a casual interest in the latter than the former. Also, as HN gets more readers, it becomes more diverse. I've seen doctors, medical students, lawyers...etc post. It's no surprise somebody like that is going to skip a post about using abstract mathematics to model programming or about optimizing lunch at your startup; they are probably gravitating towards the political articles. On the other hand, just being interested in start-ups and CS does not preclude looking at politics. So really, I think this is a function of diversity: in a purely democratic system--everybody has an equal vote--less specialized things really have an advantage. This is why I don't bother reading the newspaper or front page of reddit, but still enjoy /r/haskell. I'm sure there are also plenty of confounding variables; I just think it's more broad appeal than passion. (Seriously, have you read the responses to people's blindly disparaging functional programming? At least as passionate as most political posts ;).)
- nilsbunger 15y ago
  I'd vote for that too!
citricsquid 15y ago
The problem is one I've experienced too on forums I both use and operate. The larger the community grows the less respect people have for each other because there's so little "connection" between them, the more people become "combative" to be heard and the more people feel the need to be more "vicious" with the way that they post. There is no way to limit this beyond restrictions of the people that post and the community size, in an environment with conflicting opinions it's inevitable. It's easier to pass off urine in an ocean than it is in a shot.
- atarian 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
adrianpike 15y ago
Are you willing to share or discuss some of the ways you're quantifying "quality"? It seems like an extremely difficult problem, and relevant to the problems many of us are trying to solve. I can come up with plenty of simple metrics, but they all fall apart pretty fast, especially if the community quality starts to tank hard. Think of the sheer number of upvotes that most inane meme references get on reddit. Situations like an inflammatory comment sparking an insightful debate are one of the things that initially seems like a poor quality comment (and it quite likely is), but overall might be a positive thing for the community.
- angstrom 15y ago
  Think of the quality constraints of /r/askscience Quality is discourse, not peanut gallery, vacuum sucking commentary that builds on puns, memes, insults and karma whoring. Inflammatory comments often devolve into nothing. No insights, no evocative call to action. However, constructive assertions backed by reason are not inflammatory and equally capable of evocative statements that can be challenged.
  - adrianpike 15y ago
    Agreed on all your points. What I'd love to dig in around, though, is if there's a way to quantify the difference between an inflammatory comment vs. a constructive comment. Just thinking out loud: Source links/references perhaps? If it's a primarily English-speaking community, look for specific keywords? As a negative metric, look for an extended back-and-forth between two people? This is one of the things I'm struggling with - it's easy to come up with "dumb" metrics & ideas, but the false positives/negatives are a real problem.
mbesto 15y ago
Yet the amount of karma distributed has been growing exponentially. The community is becoming too large to sustain it's quality. No offense, but the best days are past us. Yes I realize there is always the inevitable discussion of "HN is declining" and like most things, perception is reality.
pathdependent 15y ago
A few years ago, posting on HN felt like posting to a small community. Reputation and civility seemed to matter a lot. When people posted something offensive or rude, they were sanctioned to the point that they would often delete the offending comment. (I remember deleting a comment I made on an old account merely because, without tone, it seemed inflammatory; I felt compelled to delete it even though it had no malicious intent because it damaged the conversation.) Now, I think it has become too large and feels anonymous. Posting something offensive has no cost because it doesn't feel like a "know your neighbor"-type community anymore. The costs imposed by karma seem to be less significant. I even think that if you post a rude or ideologically motivated comment, there are other rude people who will agree with you, attenuating the negative signal. The HN is turning to reddit mime is genuine. I think it's just a consequence of having a very large community. Although a lot of HNers may disagree, I think the herd must be culled. I'd be happier of participation was limited. If I was the benevolent dictator, I'd collect a list of people whose contributions are most valuable and remove everyone else. Then, give those high-signal / low-noise contributors the ability to invite other people. Continue to have all content publicly readable, but ration the writes. (Disclaimer: Although I have many doubts, I do believe it is possible to have an HN-scale community that remains civil; however, without the data, I'm not very comfortable just enumerating implementation ideas.)
- diffeomorph 15y ago
  I agree that participation should be limited. I understand the desire for open posting but, in my opinion, it's been shown to be a failure by its inability to deal with content decay(both in posts and comments). It's time to experiment with new social designs.
- polyfractal 15y ago
  I participate in several different forums and find that avatars really help me feel more connected to other users and their comments. On the SA forums, I quickly recognize various posters by their avatar. Different subforums have their respective groups, which you learn once you spend some time inside the subforum. Despite being a huge ecosystem, they have managed to keep many of the subforums feeling small. On HN...I rarely notice who is posting. A few influential posters stand out but for the most part I do not remember names well. Everyone blends together.
lhnz 15y ago
I am not sure that the moderation is aggressive* enough to shape the growth that the site is experiencing. I feel like the smartest most insightful people in the community should be being more decisive in their flagging/moderation/conversation. You can non-aggressively tell somebody to not be rude and I don't see that happening... Perhaps something should be done to alter the direction that the content is moving, too. I personally agree with tptacek that gossipy advocacy/techpolitic issues are now far too important to the site. I enjoyed them a little, too, but I feel like the community is now addicted to them. Honestly I don't want to see anymore gossip pieces from torrentfreak... * For example, (1) give people limits on how often they can post while their average karma is low, (2) allow people to flag for more reasons (hivemind posts, aggressive posts, bigotry, rudeness), (3) give people a couple of weeks/months to time-out from the site if they get flagged and there turns out to be a problem with their behaviour. I think there is a danger on a site like this of people over-complicating the problem when there are simple things you can try. :)
bootload 15y ago
It's not just the quality, but quantity. A lot of articles have no comments, but vote high enough to hit front page on 'classic'. Comments are clumpier. To me it's a signal the article is good enough to skim, but not worth the effort to add detail. Reading the comments prior to the article is/used to be my default because of the added insight.
Historiopode 15y ago
Out of curiosity, has there been any exchange (either formal or informal) of ideas and/or data with other organizations which suffer from the same issue? Quora, which spoke very openly about the problem of mantaining a high standard of quality in spite of growth, is a prime example since the structured Q&A format makes inadequacies even more evident; as of today, it seems hard not to think that their efforts could simply fail. (If you are interested in this specific case, take a look at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_can_quora_balance_quality_and_openness.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_can_quora_balance_q... or, for a longer read, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_quora/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_quora/all/1)
Forrest7778 15y ago
Most long-term forum members of any forum tend to think that the forum is degrading over time. I don't know why, and I'm not accusing anyone of being a certain way, it's just a pattern that I've noticed and want to point out, although I have no explanation for it. I think that HN is set up to only be as 'good' as the users, and I know that this is true of any community, but there are still issues that often spur from differing opinions no matter how awesome the community is. I believe that the best way to combat something that you don't approve of is to just ignore it. I think that the comments that people consider unfit for HN are few and when ignored will make the poster consider changing his posting technique to gain more popularity and give weight to his words, because after all we all want to be heard. That being said, is the present that much different from the past? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143148 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143148

by pg 15y ago

diego 15y ago

It's not just the comments, I'm more concerned about the submissions. Look at the front page right now, and see how many items are not "Hacker News" even with a very lax definition of "stuff that's interesting specifically to hackers." For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497331 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497331

chc 15y ago
I think these are related. The kind of people who like to comment on some things — say, politics — tend to be less tactful. This drags the average down. Then, unless you're very lucky, people readjust their norms and start acting ruder themselves — and then you have yourself a vicious circle. I've seen it happen in a lot of places. It makes me sad every time. I'd strongly suggesting policing OT posts more proactively. Like PG said in his essay about starting Hacker News, this is a social problem, not a technical one. We need to refrain from doing things that make jerks feel like this is the place for them.
physicslover 15y ago
I agree, Diego. I now find a few articles a day on the front page interesting, whereas before this seemed much higher. It seems that hacker news may be getting too popular for it's own good. At which point, you start getting submissions from people who are more interested in promoting themselves or some agenda and finding ways to game the ranking system to get content on the front page.
bronxbomber92 15y ago
This is related to my Ask HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3498229 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3498229 My question was asking if there may be a correlation between the quality of the content and the actual name of Hacker News being misrepresentative due to the ambiguity in the definition of "hacker." Which I asked because my thoughts seemed to wander a bit too far from what you were asking.
tptacek 15y ago
It's clear why this happens. The people interested in fuzzy, quasi-political or "outrage" issues are passionately engaged with them. People are less passionate about the debate over the worst-case complexity of hash table lookups. At a step's remove, it's evident that the topics HN was intended to cover are systemically disadvantaged compared to whatever the moment's advocacy topics are --- and every moment has at least one advocacy topic: the TSA, SOPA, Occupy, Wikileaks, police misconduct, Asian manufacturing, ebook licensing, DRM, &c &c &c. More passion, less thought, less tolerance for conflicting views, worse threads. Paul Graham seems cautiously optimistic about comment quality. I think he's being too generous. I suspect that advocacy energy is cumulative; it doesn't go away when the topic fades, but sticks around and waits to bind to subsequent advocacy topics, causing the site to steadily crud up with them.
- ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
  ===== Why It Happens Theory #1 - "Community Size Syndrome" ==== I am guilty of this. And I think I know why I/we do it. When a topic comes up, and you feel your voice isn't/won't be heard, it tends to make you over-emote, yell, and stomp though the place to get more attention / vent frustration. Think about it. It wasn't like this when Hacker News was smaller, because when HN was smaller there were less people, less comments, and everyone had a voice that could be heard. Now that the place is bigger your "voice" is easily lost, your comment ends up at the bottom, you feel like your opinion won't matter. This stresses you out and pisses you off so you go and piggyback off of someone else's comment near the top and just vent. We see this in political ralleys, demonstrations, protests. When humans feel they are NOT being listened to, they get loud and angry.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  I don't think it's really an issue of passion. Rather, it is an issue of demographics: almost everybody is affected or at least mildly interested in politics; only smaller subsets of the population are interested in Haskell/Erlang/complexity/aglorithms...etc. Frankly, I bet some people are as "passionate" (for a loose definition of "passionate") about, say, functional programming as others are about politics; there are just more people with at least a casual interest in the latter than the former. Also, as HN gets more readers, it becomes more diverse. I've seen doctors, medical students, lawyers...etc post. It's no surprise somebody like that is going to skip a post about using abstract mathematics to model programming or about optimizing lunch at your startup; they are probably gravitating towards the political articles. On the other hand, just being interested in start-ups and CS does not preclude looking at politics. So really, I think this is a function of diversity: in a purely democratic system--everybody has an equal vote--less specialized things really have an advantage. This is why I don't bother reading the newspaper or front page of reddit, but still enjoy /r/haskell. I'm sure there are also plenty of confounding variables; I just think it's more broad appeal than passion. (Seriously, have you read the responses to people's blindly disparaging functional programming? At least as passionate as most political posts ;).)
nilsbunger 15y ago
I'd vote for that too!

citricsquid 15y ago

The problem is one I've experienced too on forums I both use and operate. The larger the community grows the less respect people have for each other because there's so little "connection" between them, the more people become "combative" to be heard and the more people feel the need to be more "vicious" with the way that they post. There is no way to limit this beyond restrictions of the people that post and the community size, in an environment with conflicting opinions it's inevitable. It's easier to pass off urine in an ocean than it is in a shot.

atarian 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

adrianpike 15y ago

Are you willing to share or discuss some of the ways you're quantifying "quality"? It seems like an extremely difficult problem, and relevant to the problems many of us are trying to solve. I can come up with plenty of simple metrics, but they all fall apart pretty fast, especially if the community quality starts to tank hard. Think of the sheer number of upvotes that most inane meme references get on reddit. Situations like an inflammatory comment sparking an insightful debate are one of the things that initially seems like a poor quality comment (and it quite likely is), but overall might be a positive thing for the community.

angstrom 15y ago
Think of the quality constraints of /r/askscience Quality is discourse, not peanut gallery, vacuum sucking commentary that builds on puns, memes, insults and karma whoring. Inflammatory comments often devolve into nothing. No insights, no evocative call to action. However, constructive assertions backed by reason are not inflammatory and equally capable of evocative statements that can be challenged.
- adrianpike 15y ago
  Agreed on all your points. What I'd love to dig in around, though, is if there's a way to quantify the difference between an inflammatory comment vs. a constructive comment. Just thinking out loud: Source links/references perhaps? If it's a primarily English-speaking community, look for specific keywords? As a negative metric, look for an extended back-and-forth between two people? This is one of the things I'm struggling with - it's easy to come up with "dumb" metrics & ideas, but the false positives/negatives are a real problem.

mbesto 15y ago

Yet the amount of karma distributed has been growing exponentially. The community is becoming too large to sustain it's quality. No offense, but the best days are past us. Yes I realize there is always the inevitable discussion of "HN is declining" and like most things, perception is reality.

pathdependent 15y ago

A few years ago, posting on HN felt like posting to a small community. Reputation and civility seemed to matter a lot. When people posted something offensive or rude, they were sanctioned to the point that they would often delete the offending comment. (I remember deleting a comment I made on an old account merely because, without tone, it seemed inflammatory; I felt compelled to delete it even though it had no malicious intent because it damaged the conversation.) Now, I think it has become too large and feels anonymous. Posting something offensive has no cost because it doesn't feel like a "know your neighbor"-type community anymore. The costs imposed by karma seem to be less significant. I even think that if you post a rude or ideologically motivated comment, there are other rude people who will agree with you, attenuating the negative signal. The HN is turning to reddit mime is genuine. I think it's just a consequence of having a very large community. Although a lot of HNers may disagree, I think the herd must be culled. I'd be happier of participation was limited. If I was the benevolent dictator, I'd collect a list of people whose contributions are most valuable and remove everyone else. Then, give those high-signal / low-noise contributors the ability to invite other people. Continue to have all content publicly readable, but ration the writes. (Disclaimer: Although I have many doubts, I do believe it is possible to have an HN-scale community that remains civil; however, without the data, I'm not very comfortable just enumerating implementation ideas.)

diffeomorph 15y ago
I agree that participation should be limited. I understand the desire for open posting but, in my opinion, it's been shown to be a failure by its inability to deal with content decay(both in posts and comments). It's time to experiment with new social designs.
polyfractal 15y ago
I participate in several different forums and find that avatars really help me feel more connected to other users and their comments. On the SA forums, I quickly recognize various posters by their avatar. Different subforums have their respective groups, which you learn once you spend some time inside the subforum. Despite being a huge ecosystem, they have managed to keep many of the subforums feeling small. On HN...I rarely notice who is posting. A few influential posters stand out but for the most part I do not remember names well. Everyone blends together.

lhnz 15y ago

I am not sure that the moderation is aggressive* enough to shape the growth that the site is experiencing. I feel like the smartest most insightful people in the community should be being more decisive in their flagging/moderation/conversation. You can non-aggressively tell somebody to not be rude and I don't see that happening... Perhaps something should be done to alter the direction that the content is moving, too. I personally agree with tptacek that gossipy advocacy/techpolitic issues are now far too important to the site. I enjoyed them a little, too, but I feel like the community is now addicted to them. Honestly I don't want to see anymore gossip pieces from torrentfreak... * For example, (1) give people limits on how often they can post while their average karma is low, (2) allow people to flag for more reasons (hivemind posts, aggressive posts, bigotry, rudeness), (3) give people a couple of weeks/months to time-out from the site if they get flagged and there turns out to be a problem with their behaviour. I think there is a danger on a site like this of people over-complicating the problem when there are simple things you can try. :)

bootload 15y ago

It's not just the quality, but quantity. A lot of articles have no comments, but vote high enough to hit front page on 'classic'. Comments are clumpier. To me it's a signal the article is good enough to skim, but not worth the effort to add detail. Reading the comments prior to the article is/used to be my default because of the added insight.

Historiopode 15y ago

Out of curiosity, has there been any exchange (either formal or informal) of ideas and/or data with other organizations which suffer from the same issue? Quora, which spoke very openly about the problem of mantaining a high standard of quality in spite of growth, is a prime example since the structured Q&A format makes inadequacies even more evident; as of today, it seems hard not to think that their efforts could simply fail. (If you are interested in this specific case, take a look at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_can_quora_balance_quality_and_openness.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_can_quora_balance_q... or, for a longer read, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_quora/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_quora/all/1)

Forrest7778 15y ago

Most long-term forum members of any forum tend to think that the forum is degrading over time. I don't know why, and I'm not accusing anyone of being a certain way, it's just a pattern that I've noticed and want to point out, although I have no explanation for it. I think that HN is set up to only be as 'good' as the users, and I know that this is true of any community, but there are still issues that often spur from differing opinions no matter how awesome the community is. I believe that the best way to combat something that you don't approve of is to just ignore it. I think that the comments that people consider unfit for HN are few and when ignored will make the poster consider changing his posting technique to gain more popularity and give weight to his words, because after all we all want to be heard. That being said, is the present that much different from the past? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143148 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143148