5 ms·
HN Idea: Hard limit 5 comments/day, 2/day for new users
As the site grows, you lose signal:noise ratio.
So, perhaps setting a maximum number of comments per day would help keep comment quality high.
Perhaps 2/day max for a new user, and a limit of 5/day total regardless of age or karma? You would give up some good points, including the occasional good back and forth. But it'd cut off arguments and I think people would be hesitant to write a silly quip, "good post" noise, or argue/flame if they know they're using up their limited breath by doing it.
Personally, I'm for quantity over quality - I'd rather learn five interesting points across fifteen good comments than ten interesting points across 70 comments, less than half of which are good. There'd have to be some testing on the numbers, but experimenting with some kind of comment limits might help hold back the tides of mediocrity.
- russell 18y ago-1 I would rather not. Sometimes arguments or inane remarks are an annoyance, but I would not want a good post because someone hit an arbitrary limit.
- lionhearted 18y agoI'm upvoting you and offering this scenario for thought: At some point, there's 10x as many users here as now. How important is signal:noise? I really enjoy the points I learn here, but after being present on the site for a touch less than half a year (lurking before starting an account), I've seen how the site growing is affecting the quality and it looks dangerously like something that happened slowly somewhere else I used to enjoy greatly. I think the end result is that you will miss good comments, because they're never made if the noise gets too loud. That someplace else I used to greatly enjoy: Compare "Facing Losses, German Billionaire Takes Own Life" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422284 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422284 to "German mogul kills self over financial meltdown" http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/7nrxi/german_mogul_kills_self_over_financial_meltdown/ http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/7nrxi/german_mogul... I picked that quickly as the first thread I saw on both Reddit and HN, but the comments on that Reddit thread are actually many times better than average Reddit comments, perhaps because of the serious subject matter. And - Old Reddit was close to as good as current Hacker News. Really. If you weren't there back then, it seems strange to imagine such a great place becoming what it did, but that's the reality. I don't want it to happen here, or we'll lose good comments - not to arbitrary thresholds, but to good posters leaving. Really, how many times do people write more than five excellent comments per day? There's some cases of two people having intelligent discussion, or an author replying to questions in a thread. Not sure how we'd address those cases. But I'm theorizing if there was a limit, people would adjust to stop making wisecracks, argue less, and make less "fluff" posts instead of not making inspired points.
- tokenadult 18y agoSuch limits are a HUGE source of annoyance to users who want to become deeply involved in an online community. I've been in communities with such limits, and in many communities without, and those without thrive better. I will note that as long as karma is what the site rewards, and as long as it takes submissions and comments to get karma, there are considerable incentives here to submit and (especially) comment. Exactly how to adjust karma rules so that quality is rewarded along with quantity (as for example by downvoting comments) is an ongoing area of investigation here and on other sites with karma systems.
- lionhearted 18y agoInteresting - I guess a major issue is that any comment that's not terrible won't get downvoted, which encourages people to make more comments than less if they want karma.
- HeyLaughingBoy 18y agoSo what's wrong with the existing rating system?