19 ms·
It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in t
by pg 14y ago
It's a genuine problem and has been growing gradually worse for a while. I think the cause is simply growth. When a good community grows, it becomes worse in two ways: (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members, and (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group.
I've spent many hours over the past several years trying to understand and mitigate such problems. I've come up with a bunch of tweaks that worked, and I have hopes I'll be able to come up with more.
The idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem. Although snarky comments themselves are the most obvious symptom, I suspect that voting is on average dumber than commenting, because it requires so much less work. So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less.
- bdunn 14y agoConsidering it's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is, I'm assuming you'll figure out whether a comment is good/bad based on the ratio of upvotes to downvotes, and penalize those who voted against the grain. I get this, but wouldn't this lead to making HN more conformist than it sometimes already is? "Either you agree with the majority of us about X, or..."
- Zak 14y agoit's probably tricky to programmatically determine what a nasty comment is I've actually been working on that problem with a bot that assists in moderating a subreddit using a text classifier. It's tricky, and needs more work, but it is not impossible.
- trafficlight 14y agoOut of curiosity, what subreddit is it?
- Zak 14y ago/r/ronpaul As you might expect, a subreddit about a politician with (in)famously devoted followers attracts its share of strife. It can be difficult to distinguish legitimate arguments from flamebait, and there's no shortage of people eager to take any bait offered. I should note that I'm not actively running the moderation bot at the moment.
- sbierwagen 14y agoI'm sure a bot that algorithmically classifies mean comments is possible. I'm not sure that the same can be said about trolling. Poe's law? Deep cover trolling? When one of the criteria of trolling is the hidden intent of the person writing, then there's no physical process that can reliably find a trolling, short of looking inside their head.
- Zak 14y agoA well-executed troll is, by definition difficult for humans to detect.I don't think there's much chance of reliably doing it with software. Fortunately, most political squabbling on reddit consists simply of people expressing scorn or outrage that someone would post something on the internet that disagrees with their deeply-held beliefs. That's a bit easier to detect.
- MartinCron 14y agoIf you do ever get a moderation bot running (especially in something like /r/ronpaul) I would be eager to read a writeup of your experience. Improving the quality of discourse is a subject close to my heart, and I've never thought about how robots can help us act more human to each other.
- Zak 14y agoI plan to. I've been doing a lot of work with text classification over the past couple years and would like to base a startup on it. I just need to come up with a product that's commercially viable and non-evil.
- hnriot 14y agoit's not that hard. Those that work with classifiers, this kind of thing is pretty easy. Identifying sarcasm and irony are hard, but 'nasty comments' can be identified pretty simply using the well known text classifier algorithms. You find the training data and use it to train something like an SVM.
- Zak 14y agoI'd be surprised if pg hasn't experimented with it at least a bit given his history with text classification algorithms.
- gruturo 14y agoI'm sure that the author of "A plan for spam" (introducing the idea of bayesian filtering to recognize spam) can find a way to classify nasty comments.
- rglullis 14y agoOne thing that would solve the problem with growth would be partitioning the "community" into smaller groups that are manageable by each user. Reddit does it through subreddits and it works somewhat. I would favor an approach where users could white/gray/blacklist other users, and use these as modifiers to the overall score.
- unimpressive 14y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
- dustingetz 14y agomaybe the new kids don't know any better? can we crowd-educate them as to acceptable comments? stackoverflow has used strict categorization of "reasons for flagging post" to great success in influencing how the crowd moderates. "-1, poor tone" "-1, offtopic" "-1, factually incorrect"
- carterschonwald 14y agoYeah, the slashdot approach to mods might also be worth looking into. They do a sort of randomized statistical moderation thing that makes its less autocratic than other schemes, while still retaining the human nuance.
- danielweber 14y agoExtra information in the upvote might help a lot. Right now I can only say "more of this" when I click the up-arrow. But does that mean I like the comment? I like the user? I like the tone? Sometimes I agree with one of those but not the other.
- emperorcezar 14y agoSlashdot has been doing something similar for a while. I like their commenting system.
- brianto2010 14y agoThat's a neat idea. -1 doesn't mean much without a comment explaining why. I do have a concern, though. If this system is implemented, doesn't that mean that the "new kids" will also have access to this system and may use it to exasperate HN's "new kids" problem? What about modifying the existing HN guidelines to include comments and promote the guidelines more? For example, cite a downvote with an appropriate quote from the guidelines.
- sigkill 14y agoBut with a clear cut system like the one mentioned above, why shouldn't new members get to downvote as well? The system would clearly convey its intended usage, and in the process bring new members up to speed faster. If you still want to impose a restriction, it definitely shouldn't be karma based. I find it a bit counter-intuitive. [Assume maximum evil] You're going to allow someone to downvote others based on how quickly and effectively he can troll the hivemind to give him 500-1000 or heck even 5000 karma?
- ewillbefull 14y ago> So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less. Why don't you automate this process? All of the people you upvote have the most credibility, the posts they upvote have a little less, and people who upvote those posts gain a little credibility too, and so on. Tuned right, voting itself becomes a function of whatever the base of the community is. New users -- depending on what kind of posts they upvote and who upvotes their posts -- must be able to gain credibility quickly, not just by upvoting the top posts, but picking winning and losing comments in the long term.
- JohnsonB 14y agoThat, and assign a couple people he knows well that will make similar good judgement calls the same privileged, that way you increase the amount of work being done. I think a method like this is necessary, as I really don't think you could determine post quality with an algorithm itself. You can't automate that type of intelligence.
- adgar 14y agoIf the client allowed us to pick someone other than pg as the root, then people could comment however they like and more easily view the comments they value. Given HN's current latency, though, you'd need a few orders of magnitude more resources.
- russtrpkovski 14y agoWould Kaggle be a good fit to help solve this problem?
- WiseWeasel 14y agoWhat if people who up-vote nasty comments don't really do it consistently, they just vote a lot? Maybe votes need to be precious, so people use them more carefully. Slashdot addressed the problem by limiting the mod points available and introducing meta-moderation. Meta-moderation won't work in an up/down voting system like this, but limiting votes, for example to a certain number per day, is a powerful option. You could even have tiers, where people with more karma would get more votes per day. Maybe every 100 karma points gets you an extra vote per day.
- palebluedot 14y agoThe idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem. Although snarky comments themselves are the most obvious symptom, I suspect that voting is on average dumber than commenting, because it requires so much less work. So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less. Interesting - also, if it is as you suspect and voting is easier and thus part of the problem, perhaps adding more friction to the process of voting would be useful. Something like having to spend karma to vote, or having a limited number of votes per day to spend.
- niels_olson 14y agoI posted a friend's start-up here (she wants traction), and her effort was summarily eviscerated. But not until after I'd already sent her a link to the thread. I feel terrible about that now. I think nasty comments tied with a product or site announcement might be a low-of-lows to look for? Or at least finding site announcements might be easier than finding "all nasty comments" and then evaluate that subset first?
- true_religion 14y agoI see exactly one comment on your friends post and its rational.
- niels_olson 14y agoIt seems rational from the outside, and when my brother and I played out customer #1, we provided similar feedback, but with a lot more nuance. It's quite a bit more demoralizing when a someone on HN dismisses it out of hand in one sentence. The tone was was not neutrally rational, it was dismissive. Not supportive. For example, lead with something positive, anything, then challenge her on why is the price what is is.
- jedberg 14y agoOne possible solution (that you might already be doing) is to make the value of the vote proportional to how long the user has been a member, especially down-votes. That solves the problem of more recent arrivals not having the same qualities as the original members. To be very clear so as to prevent conspiracy theories, this is something that we never did on reddit because we didn't want to put that much power into the hands of the older users. However, HN has a different philosophy and it might make sense here. To say it one more time, reddit doesn't do this and never did.
- georgemcbay 14y agoOn one hand, it seems like having the value tied to the voter's karma would make more sense, since someone here from the beginning with little karma says very little about their contributions or judgement. On the other hand, either of these solutions seems destined to increase the inevitable echo-chamber herd mentality groupthink that already tries to creep into any community.
- ktrgardiner 14y agoBut that would only work to a certain extent. All you would need is one lucky submission (think Steve Jobs' passing) to get around this.
- dean 14y agoPerhaps only consider the karma earned from comments and exclude the karma earned from article submissions.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoWasn't Digg killed by "power users" with all the power? I worry this might happen here too.
- chris_wot 14y agoI don't think so. HN has been hell banning for some time, often quite unjustly, but the general quality hasn't been affected by it.
- sw007 14y agoThanks for your response, I appreciate you looking into it. As I say I'm a huge HN fan but with the growth of the community there has been a sharp rise in people seeking to make a name for themselves and seeking to criticse rather than critique constructively.
- grey-area 14y agoI think the cause is simply growth. Absolutely, the more the original community is diluted, the more anonymous people feel, and the less restricted they are by perceived norms (as there are none). You can see this in extreme form on some forums like Kuroshin (remember that?) which have been abandoned to the trolls and are now overrun. The problem with most systems to control quality is defining what is good, and what is not good. That's not a simple problem and I'm not convinced you'd ever be able to get a crowd to decide on it satisfactorily - there's a reason that mass-entertainment panders to the lowest common denominator, and a crowd's votes are likely to trend the same way and any automated system is subject to gaming and the ignorance of crowds as soon as you let a lot of people have input, however small. Another solution used by sites like reddit or stackoverflow is to segment the communities into small enough groups to be self-policing. Another approach I wondered about recently was along the lines of 'A plan for Spam' - it'd be interesting to use the massive comment base of HN to build up some sort of corpus of good and bad comments and apply Bayesian filtering to comments. You could use this to: Set an initial point score for comments based on their content Weight comment votes from users who consistently scored highly You would have to seed the corpus of course, and let it learn from trusted users' votes, but otherwise this sort of system would in theory continue to work as long as there were enough good comments being posted.
- mc32 14y agoI think those a great ideas. One question I would have is how would one prevent people from karma burning? Could enough poor comments form a high-karma person make them forfeit their karma/gravitas --thus highly discourage such behavior?
- kafkaesque 14y agoI'd like to make a somewhat unrelated observation as a new user and someone who is new to programming. I've noticed a submission might get a huge amount of upvotes yet the highest voted comment goes against the article/post submitted. I understand there are a few things that could be going on: you can learn from bad articles/posts; those who like the article/post submitted find it unfair to downvote just because they don't agree on a contentious issue; or it becomes a what side can out-vote the other side (the one against vs. the one in favour of the submission). Is there a commonly held view on why this happens? Sometimes I click upvote to save an article I've not read yet, not necessarily because it is a great or good article. However, I also sometimes click upvote because there is a comment inside it that I find very enlightening. Would it help at all to be able to save comments like we 'save' submitted articles? My apologies if this is too unrelated and meant to go somewhere else (email). Please let me know if this is the case. Thank you!
- guga31bb 14y agoThis happens quite frequently on reddit as well. I'd imagine it's due to the fact that the set of people who vote on a story are different than the set who vote on comments. For example, people could find a title appealing and upvote without actually reading the article or any of the comments. At the same time, the people who take the time to read the article (and corresponding comments) vote up the comments criticising the article. Since it takes relatively more time to read and understand an article, the knee-jerk reaction voters cause the story to be highly rated even though the top comment is critical.
- dwiel 14y agoIt seems lile that could be fixed by tracking which articles a user clicks and disregard an upvote if they didnt read the story or they read it 5 seconds ago.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoWhat if they already read the story from a different source?
- mibbitier 14y agoWhy not simply limit the size of the community? Heck charge a membership fee... Making it invite only would have (IMHO) improved things a massive amount. Have people do a test to gain entry. Any community that is free and open will just deteriorate over time.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- briandear 14y agoThe problem with invite-only is that you get an exceptionally inbred set of ideas and it becomes little more than a self-congratulatory circle jerk. I wouldn't mind a small membership fee which would confer voting rights.
- eli 14y agoMetafilter seems to be doing alright with its $5 membership fee, but then they also have pretty hands-on moderators (as opposed to community votes)
- MattSayar 14y agoHow about weighting votes from veteran members more, and if new members consistently vote similarly to veterans, their votes are fast-tracked to being weighted the same? I can see it bubbling up quality content without punishing promising new members.
- cjlars 14y agoOne idea I've had to help mitigate this problem is to develop a sort of "intelligence" score, where you weigh votes from high scoring individuals over votes from low scoring individuals. The easiest way I can think of to do this is to use a Flesch-Kincaid grade level test, which uses sentence length and word length to estimate reading level. A quick and dirty calculation for any post might look like: (character count / word count) + (word count / sentence count) = Writing Level. The problem, of course, is that it's only a tiny subset of users that actually comment with any frequency so you can quickly kill the democratic appeal of the site, but I'm frankly less concerned that my vote is actually counted and more concerned with seeing quality content on the front page. * wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...
- sigkill 14y agoI actually like this idea. The idea of Flesch-Kincaid tests. There was a guy on reddit who analyzed the words on different subreddits and he came to the conclusion that the average word was 'because', and average word length was around 6.7 I would think we could modify the scoring system a bit where common English words are penalized, and uncommon words are weighted a bit more. The only problem I see is, if someone plans to post code, that's going to wreck their score. Another thing would be that most of our programming names/terminologies contain very few letters. So, an exclusion/inclusion list would definitely be needed.
- danmaz74 14y agoTo (a) and (b) I would also add (c): The signal to noise ratio goes down, so it's more difficult to find and upvote the best comments. Moreover, when there already are a lot of comments - and this can happen very fast - new comments, even very good ones, have a very difficult time emerging, and I guess this creates a disincentive. One solution to try could be to give more time "up there" to comments from commenters with a high karma (only considering the karma from comments, not that from stories, which IMHO is a completely different signal).
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoI have noticed a bit that the top ranking comment will then contain a bunch of fragmented, semi-unrelated sub-conversations and the top comment almost becomes an OP of its own.
- danmaz74 14y agoYes, I noticed the same thing. Sometimes the first comments becomes so long, that it's almost impossible to reach the other comments - I even built a Chrome extension to be able to collapse them, but when the first comment is really too long it becomes difficult to manage anyway.
- hnriot 14y agoSometimes saying an idea is pointless is positive feedback, there are a lot of people here that 'launch a startup' which basically means some half-assed website that does something utterly pointless and then expect the community to be like some kind of benevolent uncle and pat them on the back and say what an awesome idea and execution. Many many ideas really are pointless and negative criticism is very much a part of being an adult. This isn't grade school where it's all about self esteem boosting. The OP sounds like he should find some other support group, this is a community of smart people that will quite happily - and quite rightly - rip any pointless idea apart. If you're going to editorialize and discount any comments/votes you consider not aligned with boosting anyone's self esteem, or what you consider negative you will create an artificial community - one that is the website equivalent of the old boys network, where the old timers consider themselves superior to the newcomers. Negative comments can be as useful as all the back patting attaboys. If you really want to do this, the simplest solution is one I am sure you're aware of. Pick a few dozen people you 'like' (their voting habits) to train a Bayesian classifier, then you can weight those those that don't fall in-line with the way you'd like to see you community behave. Can't we all just act like adults and learn to deal with the negative comments - possibly even learn from the? Do we really need to protected from snarky comments? This reminds me of a comment thread I saw earlier about people getting bent out of shape by cell phone usage in restaurants! I find lots of things are annoying, loud trucks/buses, cyclists that ignore road signs, rude people etc etc, but I am not going to complain and try to stop buses or give discounts to people who drive to discourage cycling. People need to start learning to cope with the real world and not expecting 'the system' to protect us from ourselves. It's embarrassing to be part of a community that needs voting bias that only encourages positive comments.
- raffi 14y agoI joined Hacker News 1,570 days ago (~4 years). I launched my first two ventures here. One of them, Feedback Army, was concieved and built entirely from my interaction in this community. Three years ago, the feel of this community was very much one of support and maybe, a little self esteem boosting. It certainly worked for me and I was very grateful to this community for what it contributed to helping shape me as an entrepreneur. I still come here for the articles and I occasionally read the comments but I don't participate much. I feel the same way as the original poster. I see someone post something genuine and then I see someone else rip it apart in a condescending way. I used to come to HN and on the other side of the usernames, I pictured the leaders in our field, the pioneers of the next steps of our information age, and people who I wanted to emulate. It's not this way for me any more.
- pitdesi 14y agoAgreed. Glad you're tackling this. While you're at it, can you un hellban me? I can't figure out why I've been banned.
- alpine 14y agoWhy don't you charge eg 10 cents per comment?
- raleec 14y agoWhat if the poster had an option to restrict the ability to comment on a submission to members with a certain threshold of karma or account age, not to exceed the poster's own level?
- paulsutter 14y agoPlease consider releasing a dataset, even to a limited set of qualified folks under NDA. There are lots of ways to spread the work out. A number of the people here have backgrounds in search (which is really all about ranking and not much about searching). Even a closed Kaggle competition could yield some really interesting algorithms (Anthony is a great guy and would be happy to discuss it I'm sure. Note that a closed competition is done under NDA by only the most qualified participants). Spreading it out might be fun, hope your consider it. Lots of smart guys love HN and would probably want to help.
- tptacek 14y agoI wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbness (all of them are gameable, and the brand of dumbness you're fighting is not at all incompatible with an intuitive talent for that gamesmanship) and more time into just setting better community norms. It is hard to imagine that the site guidelines you write years and years and years ago when this place was tiny are, intact and without change, the optimal guidelines for the site in 2012. It's also the case that the things you say to guide the tone of the community, for better or worse, have a huge impact on how the community works. If it should be a norm of HN that criticisms be kept constructive, and that the community should have a default position of supporting entrepreneurship (and, more generally, of supporting attempts to build anything) --- and, that should be a norm. --- why can't you just say so? Not in comments, buried in random threads, but in somewhere prominent on the site. Like, for instance, the guidelines. Which you need to update. Please.
- mhartl 14y agoI'm sympathetic to your point, but I fear that the worst offenders are among those least likely even to read the guidelines, much less adhere to them.
- jilebedev 14y agoIt's good that you bring that point up. I disagree with you, and if I could be so bold, I'll paraphrase tptacek's post above: communities are built on principles that goad people to excellence, not forbid them from mediocrity. Communities are built by principles, not by laws. I firmly believe this, and it's why I agree that more good will come on HN from stating what people OUGHT to do instead of listing the kinds of behaviours they oughtn't engage in.
- kls 14y agoUnfortunately I agree, it is no big secret that tech as a segment has a fairly sizable portion of it's population with smartest guy in the room syndrome. The problem with smartest guy in the room syndrome is they already know the answer. Therefore they are not information seekers and they disregard anything that is objective to their world view. It is what killed Slashdot and sadly it is becoming unbearable here. Self policing does not help with this personality type, because they have no vested interest in anything other than everyone seeing them as the smartest guy in the room. Their concern about the community only extends to their recognition. It is a self centered world view and therefore I don't think that self enforced measures will work on this personality type. I almost think a third measure is needed, like a flag as abusive. Knowing that they can be flagged as abusive (even if the system dumps the flag and does not use it in any calculations). Will cause them to reflect on the policy, as it directly threatens their ability to use HN as a platform for self glorification.
- Silhouette 14y agoThe idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem. I think the principle that (give or take passing a karma threshold) all contributors are equal and one vote is one vote has probably outlived its usefulness. Perhaps up and/or down votes from established, positive contributors should simply carry more weight. Another possibility might be to give a handful of extremely highly regarded contributors a third option to super-downvote a comment by a new or low karma contributor, such that just a couple of those (or even just one) would cause the offending comment to be killed immediately. I'm thinking that rapidly killing off things like Redditesque extended joke threads that obviously don't suit the culture on HN might help, by the "broken windows" theory.
- sigkill 14y agoAlthough I want to agree with you, I'm highly skeptical on the super-downvote feature. In my relatively short time here, I've seen comments by certain top contributors being argued viciously(is that the word, English is not my first language sorry). People made good points and even attacked the top commenters points, quite a lot of which I felt was valid. Now on a purely egotistical basis if he/she wanted to superdownvote the entire thread nobody could possibly do anything to prevent it. Basically what I'm saying is that even they are humans. I'd rather have a system where instead of simple up/down vote you have an elaborate system of 'Offtopic', 'Poor taste', 'Incorrect' as mentioned in a comment somewhere above. But also, I'd like to add positive halfs of these such as 'Insightful', and maybe one or two other labels. The idea being that they can select only one out of the total, and each label should secretly have different values. So maybe flagging a comment as Incorrect isn't as penalizing as putting one as Off-topic or Poor taste. Insightful may have different positive value as compared to maybe something labelled as 'Excellent advice' or something. With a lot of options, I don't think newbies would actually click randomly on any button without knowing the meaning and context of each button. Anyway, the buttons need not have full names, simple short letters like P/OT/I/EA/X may be enough. Of course, this automatically requires to have a way to retrieve your vote, if you accidently click on the wrong button, but it should still allow only one option to be used.
- gfodor 14y agoAn alternative idea to technical countermeasures is to do it the way the SA forums have doing it for 10+ years. $10 to get in. Appoint moderators who can ban or probate users at will if they post trash or break the rules. If you're banned you shell out another $10 if you want to join again. (And no, this is not comparable to app.net. The money isn't sufficient, you need the moderators just as much. You need both.)
- 127001brewer 14y agopg, I have notice two (2) recent trends that have, in my opinion, degraded some of the quality of this site: 1. Postings that are more advertising than informational, which I briefly commented on here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350447 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4350447; and 2. Members who submit their own postings. Briefly, while I appreciate the sharing of information, any content that becomes an obvious sales pitch doesn't belong on this site. When I read a posting from this site, I want to learn and be informed - I do not want be sold on something. And - there may be disagreement with my second point - I do not find any significant value when a member submits their own positing, because I feel they're trying to sell me on something. (Please understand this does not apply to "Show HN" - just to articles and blog postings.) Overall, I really appreciate members asking for feedback on their projects. They should be challenged and not degraded or insulted. This is a great community with great insights, so it's up to everyone to be "good neighbors". Edit: Grammar.
- its_so_on 14y agoI did have one idea. I don't know if it would work. I've often wished that Reddit had an "adult table", which is NOT a separate place, but a separate DIMENSION of comments in the SAME thread. Let me explain. Currently everything has one score. So, give it a second score that also starts at 0. Instead of score "1 point" it would score "1 point (1 point at adult table)." Then the adults at the adult table would immediately downvote anything that isn't adult (this only concerns its score at the adult table) and can upvote highly reasoned but nuanced posts, and so forth. However, there are not so many at the latter table. So, the former table might go from -2 to +100 maybe the second score has most comments untouched (at 1), with a few downvoted, and a few upvoted. This way, you could have a children's table (current reddit) with its thousahds of votes, and good comments languishing at 0, and the adult table, where the same 0 normal score comments can have high votes at the adult table, and so forth. So, here on hackernews, you could have a "serious" or a "founder's" table. And you could have a snarky table for people that just like having everything picked apart - where, "correctly" (per policy) we (the serious table) would vote the snarky comments down. So, to illustrate. Here is a snarky comment "Oh, I see. So it's like a coupon system where you insert yourself into a transaction and book the whole transaction as revenue, deducting the actual 'rest of the transaction' as cost. So even though you lose on every transaction, you make it up in volume! Hey, it worked for groupon, right? :)" This starts at 0, 0 for the snarky and serious table respectively. The serious table immediately gives it a downvote, so it is now at 0, -1, and then another, 0, -2, and soon it's hidden here: 0, -3. Meanwhile the people shifting through the trash say, "hey, ZING!!" and promote it, it gets to 5, -3, then 10, -3 then - if this place degenerates into reddit, hundreds of points, -3 respectively. The serious or adult table is not impacted. It's not even visible. Meanwhile the snarky guys can have their children's talk. ----- (here is the rest of my comment. I shifted the above to the top for more visibilty.) like many others I had a "rude introduction" to hackernews, not from real connections in the startup world (which I have) but from low-quality forums. In my case I regret even the choice of username, and would change it if I could (maybe indicated to show that it's new). I wouldn't now shirk away from using my real name or a close alias - something I never do online. So, in my case what would have mitigated my behavior is seeing where my traffic was coming from and treating accordingly. I certainly wasn't typing it into the browser URL bar. Secondly, you could have a prominent button "New to hackernews? Learn about this community, which is a more serious one than most online communities: a lot of personal connection is on the line". Then explain why, and what we get out of behaving the way we do. Finally, as of now I can either upvote or downvote a nasty comment. There is no right answer. But you can change this in a minute. If defining the correct way to vote as "downvote any negative comment not leavened by positivity - we need all the positive thinking we can get", then I would start voting correctly. It's like Wikipedia. I don't add what I know - I add what I can prove with a reference. I don't delete uncited folklore because it's not a good read - I do so because that's the correct action. So, policies (as is the case with Wikipedia) help immensely.
- hexadecimator 14y agoRather than trying to identify nasty comments, how about weighting votes in such a way that it's proportional to how often a person has voted over time. I would think that a vote from someone who upvotes something occasionally is worth more than someone who has a tendency to upvote more often. Of course, this won't be perfect in that you will have people trying to game the system with idle accounts, but I think with some work it could be doable. 'Nasty' comments can be difficult for humans to spot, let alone machines. A lot of important information is lost when we go to a strictly text only medium. If we're going with the group to decide what's good and what isn't, then we run the risk of group think as well. So I am a little cautious about endorsing any automatic filtering of content in this way. People who are new also, have the ability to upvote but not downvote. I think this might be causing a disproportate amount of upvoting, which may also pertain to 'nasty' comments. Perhaps maybe disabling upvoting for new people for a certain period and/or after a receiving a certain karma score might alievate this a little?
- gcmartinelli 14y agohow about a 'quarantine' period. users can only comment after being registered, after voting and after viewing a certain number of posts/comments. I believe communities change (sometimes for worse) when new users don't get what the community is about and just hit the ground posting/commenting.
- tokenadult 14y agoThe idea I'm currently investigating, in case anyone is curious, is that votes rather than comments may be the easiest place to attack this problem. Although snarky comments themselves are the most obvious symptom, I suspect that voting is on average dumber than commenting, because it requires so much less work. So I'm going to try to see if it's possible to identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments and if so count their votes less. It seems plausible that lazy voting is identifiable as a user-specific signal, and that lazy voting (contrary to the welcome message http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html "don't be rude or dumb in comment threads") is a big part of the reason why comments that don't fit the community culture stay so visible. May I suggest that it may also be possible to identify good comment voting (upvotes on comments that link to reliable sources to answer questions, or that say "I'm sorry" or "thank you" as part of a comment) as a user signal? It will be interesting to see what happens to comment scores over time if more overt thoughtfulness (in all senses of the word "thoughtfulness") is upvoted often and comment rudeness or stupidity are (net) downvoted as the software tweaks are implemented. P.S. I have been puzzled by a downvote and upvote pattern I seem to be observing in this thread itself, with of course only my own score on my own comment being DIRECTLY observable to me as I revisit this thread from time to time.
- nilsbunger 14y agoHow about an "outside community norms / not nice" vote on any comment? If a user accumulates too many of them (relative to positive votes?) their comments get pushed down. I think it's different from the existing "flag", or at least how I understand it: Currently, I'd only hit flag if something is deeply offensive / illegal / spam. And I think flag only exists on posts?
- railsjedi 14y agoAnother simple idea (that you've no doubt thought of): using Twitter (or App.net) authentication. That way people are a bit less anonymous and more accountable. I can imagine people would hate this, but they might be the same people who are the haters to begin with. I don't think this phenomenon is just on Hacker News. I believe the recent negativity shift is an actual change in the startup community's perceptions of the world. When things are "hot" in our industry, and seemingly trivial companies are exiting for billions, the people who are still struggling start to develop a somewhat bad attitude. I see it all the time particularly from people who are working on "serious stuff" and then lash out when they see Instagram's success (which they've been saying for years: "sure, but what's their revenue model??"). I don't condone it and honestly think it's genuinely strange. Now is as amazing a time as any to be founding a startup. Success of others (no matter how trivial) only makes things better.
- MuGo 14y agoI think it should be a more aggressive approach. Delete insulting comments that cross the line. Trolling is like pornography. You know it when you see it. After three offenses, delete that person's account. After 5, ban their IP address.
- nikcub 14y agoMoving the snarky comments from the top of a comment thread to the bottom won't help much. The snark sets the tone of the thread and disuades better comments. You need a way to remove them.
- ibejoeb 14y agoI've observed that simple, positive feedback like "Looks good, keep it up" gets downvoted as nonconstructive. Karma is more than internet points here since the thresholds drive so many features, so I bet people who would otherwise comment in the affirmative simply don't. Paradoxically, nit picking and verbose argument can score a lot. I don't want to offer any particular suggestion because I don't have any data to support anything. A hunch, though, based on your idea: if someone want to downvote, a comment must be provided.
- hobbyist 14y agoI have one solution for this. I just read some another post on tor networks and taking ideas from it I think it can be really good if hackernews is removed from this ip addressing layer and taken inside the tor. This would help as hopefully nt many ppl wud be willing to install tor and taking too many pains to come to hacker news :) PS: I hope
- hobbyist 14y agoI have one solution for this. I just read some another post on tor networks and taking ideas from it I think it can be really good if hackernews is removed from this ip addressing layer and taken inside the tor. This would help as hopefully nt many ppl wud be willing to install tor and taking too many pains to come to hacker news :) PS: I hope
- alecco 14y agoWasn't OP's 11kclub.com post dead'ed by mods? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323459 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4323459
- DanI-S 14y agoYou could view this as a UX issue. New members don't get enough information from the HN interface to infer how to behave. Now we've got a theory, how can we address it? (a) more recent arrivals don't have as much of whatever quality distinguished the original members Try to make it obvious who distinguished members are, so people can emulate them. Colour-coded usernames based on age/reputation, starred 'high quality' comments, reputable upvoters (quora-style). (b) the large size of the group makes people behave worse, because there is more anonymity in a larger group. Try to reduce anonymity. Tiny little grey names are fine for 100 users, but after a point they all look the same. We're visual animals - maybe we need recognizable avatars, symbolic or otherwise, so we recognize the people we're replying to. Even allowing users to choose a single unicode symbol in addition to their username might be enough.
- adrianwaj 14y agoYou could color code people who are in the current (or past) YC cycle. You could also make quality participation an element to the application process (like it once was) - the forum has been cannibalized in a way.
- EdiX 14y agoMake upvotes and downvotes visible (i.e. not the final number the actual list of users). Knowing that no one will know fosters petty up/down votes.
- OmIsMyShield 14y agoI'm sure you already do, but just to get it off my chest: please use unusual amounts of caution when implementing a technical solution like this. My gut feel is that your example of the voting system tweak will make users like me might not count. Granted, I don't comment nor contribute directly by providing links. I have various reasons for my silence like the fact English is not my first language (nor even my second language, so it takes me forever to compose something in English, and I still run the risk of my comment turning into grammar crit, with the point I try to make being lost in that noise), a lot of people on the site is intimidatingly intelligent, my points have already been made, etc, etc. But. I do vote. Due to my non-existent karma I cannot downvote, only upvote. It's limited power, but I try to use it wisely. I cannot downvote the horrible negativity I saw, for example, in the wikipedia design thread (a submission I found fascinating even though it was flawed, as it was lovely to see how their thought process worked as they redesigned the visuals), but I did upvote one or two comments that I thought were thoughtful and added to the discussion. I would like to believe that I made some difference to the tone of the thread, even if it's in a very limited way. Those that see the world as all shades of gray are not generally very vocal - you don't see a vocal middle ground in most arguments. But this doesn't mean we don't exist. And I don't know how "negative" comments will be classified, and I think people like me run a very real risk of silently becoming false positives when we stupidly upvote things using our own dodgy rules. So - please consider unexpected side effects such technical things introduce. I guess what I'm saying is I'm already put off by some of the unwritten rules I perceive on this site, if the voting system is also rigged to make some people silently powerless I don't see how to be useful at all. It is off course your prerogative to decide that my type, the silent-but-voting user is unwanted, and if so, that's fine. But I hope I contributed something from time to time.
- acabal 14y agoAs I mentioned below, I've run a social network called Scribophile for about 5 years now. What I've learned is that you simply can't engineer away a social problem. People will always find a way to be jerks; the only way to mitigate them is either through: 1) Social pressure: the community must evolve in such a way that its members as a whole frown upon negativity. Hard, because it takes time and can go wrong. Or, 2) Moderation: a group of members you trust is tasked with actively deleting useless comments and threads and banning useless contributors. A zero-tolerance policy for stupidity. Is that elitist? Maybe. But an elite community is hard to grow when idiots are tolerated. There is literally no way to engineer away jerks. A social problem requires a social solution.
- hobbyist 14y agoI have one solution for this. I just read some another post on tor networks and taking ideas from it I think it can be really good if hackernews is removed from this ip addressing layer and taken inside the tor. This would help as hopefully nt many ppl wud be willing to install tor and taking too many pains to come to hacker news :) PS: I hope
- lobotryas 14y ago>identify people who consistently upvote nasty comments What's your definition of a "nasty comment"? How do you distinguish between a "nasty comment" and a comment that voices an unpopular opinion? I understand what you're trying to accomplish, however I worry that a side effect will be the further silencing of opinions that go against the HN popular consensus.
- slantyyz 14y agoThere's also a UX component to this: I have accidentally upvoted nasty comments and downvoted comments I liked because the touch targets for the vote icons are so small on my phone. Even worse, it appears that I can't undo my mistaken votes either.
- paulsutter 14y agoHave you read the PageRank paper? It's mostly intuitive so it's not painful to read: http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf Note expecially section 6, "Personalized PageRank", where they replace the random jump with a jump back to some basis pages. Your own up votes/downvotes probably make a pretty good set of reference points, so a PageRank-like algorithm could be heavily weighted according to your own judgement. To be totally clear, I'm not suggesting everyone get personalized results, but rather that HN is the same for everyone, one view "personalized" according to your judgment (and obviously that propagates through to include the judgement of the people you respect, and they respect, etc). Yes this is a handwave, and Google has gone lightyears beyond this early paper. But intuitively it may help you think about the problem. It's really going to be some iterative algorithm that flows through all the upvotes and downvotes to determine the authority of each vote, perhaps in a similar way to how the authority of each link on the web can be calculated.
- bonch 14y agoIn my opinion, the best solution is human moderators. The untrustworthy collective is too unreliable.
- tprice7 14y agoPerhaps you could have a system where users vouch for other users who make good submissions, and then have submissions ranked with something along the lines of PageRank, with "vouching for" taking the place of "linking to". The advantage of identifying good users over identifying bad ones is that recognition of goodness can propagate: if you believe A to be a good user and A believes B to be a good user, that is some indication to you that B is a good user. Replace "good" with "bad" and this no longer holds.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- wololo 14y agoA couple questions: 1. Why not assign karma by running something like pagerank over the vote graph? I think giving overwhelming weight to high karma old-timers would make HN more like them, which would be an improvement, right? 2. What about assigning karma not by your comments, but by the responses to them? I figure karma-from-replies would shift the conversation to "what should we be asking about this", whereas karma-from-comments incents "what can i say that the masses will like". Given commenting has a higher work threshold than voting, it might be "manipulated" less. Gaming it would be more obvious. And subjectively, posts that are questions seem to lead to higher quality discussion (more genuine?). Maybe you'd have to put more work into getting users to not feed trolls and assholes, and ask/reply more to excellent comments. Not sure if practical... Would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.
- JEVLON 14y ago(2) probably would not work. Commenters could troll, and then the community replying in disagreement would up-vote their comment. Here are my ideas: (A)Not showing someone their karma score ever, unless it is negative. (B)Leaving a line between the comment field and the reply button saying, "Stay constructive." (C)That line of text could link to the guidelines. (D)Detect if someone says 'idiot' and then change the line to, "You said 'idiot', do you still want to post?"
- sgrove 14y agoI actually quite like those suggestions. Subtle but I could see them working well.
- mindcrime 14y ago(D)Detect if someone says 'idiot' and then change the line to, "You said 'idiot', do you still want to post?" I like this idea. In particular, I like the idea of analyzing content - but not programatically rejecting the post completely. Another forum that I frequent tries to keep things civil by banning certain words. Sounds good on paper, but then you try to use the phrase "knee-jerk reaction" and the system rejects your post because it has "jerk" in it. D'oh. Pointing out the possible (but not definite) incivility, but allowing the post anyway (after a confirmation step) could be a nice way to remind people to be polite, but without being overly draconian.
- SeanLuke 14y agoReal Names. I believe that I am much less a jerk on HackerNews than I am on Reddit, where I post under a pseudonym.
- pknerd 14y agoHow about giving an option to OP to judge which comment is being helpful for him one way or other. If a member is constantly being penalized by OP for giving negative/useless comment then revoke voting rights. Stackoverflow model could also work. My 2 Cents.
- downandout 14y agoGood. Something needs to be done. Every time I click on a link about a start up or a new site, I see the negative feedback and I cringe at the thought of putting anything I do on here only to reach an inevitable fate that could permanently damage the reputation of the project during its launch phase.
- jarrettcoggin 14y agoAre people banned/ghosted here? I'm assuming so, because that's how most forums work, but I'm not sure since this seems to be custom built. While I don't think that HN has hit this level yet, one solution that I've read about involved people who trolled or posted general nastiness. When people had reached a certain threshold or pissed off the wrong high-level mod, they got "ghosted". What this meant was that people who were "alive" or considered "living" could see "living" contributors' posts, but could not see "ghost" posts. Ghosts, however, could see other ghosts' posts, so they could, for what it was worth, writhe in their own debauchery and piss each other off, but not the pleasant and constructive members. I thought it was an interesting solution and apparently it worked very well.
- Karunamon 14y agoThere is a hellban system in place.. your posts are hidden but you don't know it. You have to explicitly go to your options and enable "showdead" so these work. Problem is it's not entirely clear what some people have done to get hellbanned sometimes.. I'm not sure what the requirements for getting it reversed are, either. I've seen some very constructive comments in that mess before..
- vannevar 14y agoI would agree, the ideal solution would be a self-organizing trust network where higher-quality comments tended to be promoted. I've previously suggested one way to implement such a system here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753 .
- buro9 14y agoSome thoughts, Communicate the influencers more... most people follow leaders, and it would help set the tone for new members. HN's guidelines should be turned into LightBox style documentation. Put it where it matters right next to the input boxes (and in the case of dupe-checking do it by AJAX and communicate it inline). Guidelines should encourage the positive, and where something is negative then it should be pointed out that they should attack the argument and not the person. Have a very small set of very clear rules that are enforced transparently, openly and brutally. The lines will only trip up the worst offenders. If you move these lines, only do so because you've listened to the community and they believe the lines are wrong. I use a system on one of my sites in which I track how much a thread is read, and if a post is flagged by more than a certain number of people then I know the community is saying something got through and the rules either aren't being enforced or might not be right. Mostly: This is not a technical problem. It's a people problem. There may be some tools you can build to help, but it is people who will use those tools and it is they that make them effective. Even then, there's only so much you can do without fully empowering others. One ends up realising that a forum is a microcosm of society, and the owner/leader either chooses a form of government in which the citizens will be happiest and yet the aims of the government are achieved, or the owner/leader delays such a decision whilst the population grows and increasingly friction occurs.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- gcb 14y agoslashdot has pretty much solved that problem. Although i have never looked at that Perl code... And depending how you configure your filters you'd get Reddit or hacker news from the same bunch of comments.
- EGreg 14y agoI agree with tptacek - I think a forum can benefit from posting its guidelines somewhere prominent, especially during signup for new people. That way, the community knows what the values are, etc. To be honest, looking at HN I'm not sure where on the site to find these values right now, myself. I just try to be my own reasonable self :)
- sandee 14y agoAnother technique could be to split the ranking into two modes, a general mode and a power mode(where rules are much strict and biased towards a filtered set of core community users). Using the power mode, readers would view the community core (who defines the site ethos) but may not be able to interact (vote,comment and submission not appearing here without upvote from core members). Such an approach should be taken with a goal to gradually adhere the general user behavior towards the community core. May be add a tab for this. The thinking is based on the premise that the site still has a lot of its core users and community values have not changed over time.
- wvenable 14y agoI would like to see agree/disagree buttons -- no other voting site has this but I think it would solve the disagree=downvote / agree=upvote problem that Hacker News and Reddit have. By separating out the two options, you might get people more to upvote good comments and downvote poor comments.
- samstave 14y agoPg: here is an idea I have been keeping inside me for over a decade: User-account reputation karma. Based on the voting system that slash of had, but on the character of the account rather than the comment the account made. Here is how it works: You have your comment up down arrows, then username, then a drop down to mark the character of the account at the time they made the post. So you could see a comment by samstave and upvote/downvote it, and then also tag my character as [insightful|helpful|abrrasive|troll] etc (whatever the tags are you want to make) These tags affect the overall account. So if I were tagged by a ton of people as a troll account the more troll votes I get, the worse my account experience is... And eventually too many could lead to hellban. On the other end, having a very high positive account character would make for a better experience - see stories esrlier, be able to affect other accounts in some way etc. or just a leader board of who is the most technical, helpful, insightful, innovative etc...
- jim_lawless 14y agopg - I'm curious if you've ever given thought to the idea of exposing a filter or ranking Domain Specific Language to us ... something that we could enter in a spot in our user-profile ... so that we could either choose the current ranking algorithm or could write our own. It seems that HN may be different things to different people, so perhaps allowing the presentation to be customized might put people at ease?
- dennisgorelik 14y ago1) Define moderators as subset of voters that you trust. One of such moderators would be you. 2) Rate every other voter against moderators' votes. If voter upvoted the same as moderator, then increase weight of such voter in the future. If voter upvoted against moderator vote -- decrease future voter's weight. 3) For every comment calculate weighted upvote/downvote total based on voters clicks and weights calculated in #2.
- rexreed 14y agoHow about just getting rid of this upvote / downvote point system? I have to say, when I first joined, I didn't get it. Now I do. It's a competition. But not one that seems to improve the quality of the posts or comments. One that improves ... not sure what. So is it valuable? Remember the BBS forums and forums of old days when you didn't have points and rankings? Yeah. The forums often degenerated there too. Points didn't seem to help or matter. But moderated forums worked well. If you want high quality, you'll need a walled garden. But walled gardens rarely work and stifle creativity. However if you think a point system is a substitute for moderated comments. Well, then, the results speak for themselves. So, points and voting be gone, maybe? I doubt the quality would change much. Even PG admits that it's not the voting per se, but the entrance of a larger volume of people.
- chris_wot 14y agoI don't agree with this comment, but ironically someone voted him down and neatly highlighted the problem. Why did they downvoted the post? It is a constructive suggestion, and has its merits. That it got downvoted is pretty much what is wrong! It might not be a snarky response, but it's still a nasty way to criticise!
- chris_wot 14y agoWhat about consistently downvoted decent comments? Voting is anonymous, which isn't bad. But if you got people to explain why they downvoted, then that would help.
- gasull 14y agoPaul, what about making votes have values diferent of +1|-1 depending of who is voting? People who have been longer in the community and have a good kharma would have the power to vote +1|-1, while people who have less kharma or have joined the community recently would be able to vote, say, +0.1|-0.1, and there would be a lot of people in between (+0.3|-0.3, +0.5|-0.5, etc.) It just makes sense that your upvotes/downvotes should have more voting power than the ones coming from, say, myself.
- larrys 14y agoThere is no agreement on exactly what a vote in either direction means as there is no restriction on anyone doing either for any reason. And to different people it means different things. As far as "who is voting" for arguments sake a member of SCOTUS joins HN and decides to cast a vote. Or a member of SCOTUS joins HN and after a period of 2 years has low karma, because, they don't have much time on their hands. I'm not exactly sure why someone who has not been a member for a long time or doesn't have a high karma score isn't to be trusted with voting. And why someone who decides to spend a lot of time on HN should be given more privileges.
- fingerprinter 14y agoHey PG - Honest feedback from someone in one of the largest tech communities in the world (Linux). Technical solutions won't solve the problem. Even things that various communities have tried around governance won't solve the problem. It basically takes strong leadership, preferably from one person or a (very) small group of people. Look at GNOME these days. They are rudderless and mostly because they have absolutely NO leadership either from community people or RedHat (GNOME is basically RedHat). They are dying slowly. Look at the Kernel, though. Linus controls it, sets the tone (often harsh!) and it hums along. Look at Ubuntu. People may hate the direction, but Mark runs that show and they people know what they are doing and where they are going. IMO, the idea that the community will govern itself has never held up. Communities are formed around ideas or interests, but are led by people (leaders).
- einhverfr 14y agoWith a big site like HN I don't know how you can control it. However, in a more focused site, the answer would be hands-on involvement. It doesn't take that much involvement, just a little. The thing about systems is that we tend to think of them as if people are not a part of them. But people are a part of them. One thought I would suggest is that it might be worth giving people with very high karma (maybe high enough that only a few people have this) an ability to post highlighted reprimands, and an automatic banning of a user if he or she gets more than, say, 5 of these in a month. These could then be reviewed of necessary. One thing I would think about is that rather than having a system where computers try to control people, have a system which empowers the community leaders to set standards of interaction.
- xg 14y agoIt’s hard to encourage and nurture positivity on the web. Tumblr’s done it by not explicitly building comments into the product—so if you’re going to say something critical, it shows up in your personal space. It's conflicting to build a growing community vs. a good one. One of the only ways to do it is to have some sort of asymmetric follow relationship that allows all users to create their own smaller communities. Clay Shirky: “The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn’t supportable at any large scale. Less is different — small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can’t.” David Foster Wallace: “TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.” David Foster Wallace: “We should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do with lewdness or bad taste. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.” http://christmasgorilla.com/post/29694673248/its-a-genuine-problem-and-has-been-growing http://christmasgorilla.com/post/29694673248/its-a-genuine-p...
- freakball 14y agoI haven't been here in quite awhile, and immediately I see meta-threads about how this site operates... But the latter half of your comment intrigues me...
- devbug 14y agoI've thought about this for quite a while and have concluded: you could start a community and weight comments based on concurrence with the community (most likely from the get go) but unfortunately it's a fine line between stagnation and simplification.
- snowwrestler 14y agoI think it would be worth taking a look at the Slashdot voting system, which IMO does the best job I've seen of getting the best signal out of the noise of mass voting.
- thebigshane 14y agoPrivate comments and automatically fold/collapse long/low-point threads and negative-comment scoring comments. Optionally mark your comments as private for grammar/spelling/technical errors, way off topic comments and personal requests. I think graying out works for comments scoring 0 or maybe -1, but beyond that, might as well fold/collapse them. I also think something like xkcd's Robot9000[0] would be useful to prevent some clutter like "me too!", "awesome!", "Thanks" [0]: http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/ http://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-at...