6 ms·

Yes, this is one of the problems I spend the most time thinking about how to solve. FWIW, my current theory is that the problem is not the comments themselves,

by pg 13y ago

Yes, this is one of the problems I spend the most time thinking about how to solve. FWIW, my current theory is that the problem is not the comments themselves, but the upvotes. There are often moderately stupid comments far down the page in any given thread, but they're comparatively harmless, like someone walking down the street mumbling to himself. The problem is that there's a type of stupid comment that attracts upvotes from a certain type of user. If we can recognize either the comments or the upvoters, we can solve the problem. I've been collecting a corpus of them for a while; it may soon be big enough to be useful.

MichaelApproved 13y ago
Here's a system I've been thinking about. Separate users into classes. You could deputize a hand full of trusted users who can deputize other users with their up votes. If X number of deputies give an upvote to a user's comment Y number of times, that deputizes that user. The further away a user is from an original deputy, the more X and Y increase before a new person is deputized. Hopefully, this will give you a class of users who tend to vote intelligently and comment with information that adds to the converation. Votes by these users would carry more weight than the general community. Edit: It also automates the process so you don't have to hand pick more than the original deputies.
- mikeleeorg 13y ago
  It's possible that giving someone the power to give someone else power could be abused. A person could deputize their friends in order to upvote a link in which they have a vested interest, for instance. But I think what you're essentially talking about is user reputation - the idea that the opinions of certain people weighs stronger than others. I think there's merit to that. The upvotes of a person with a high reputation on HN would weigh more than someone else. Reputation could be determined by any number of ways (has authored comments of high value, is manually designated by HN as reputable, has been active in the last N number of days, etc).
  - MichaelApproved 13y ago
    "It's possible that giving someone the power to give someone else power could be abused. A person could deputize their friends in order to upvote a link in which they have a vested interest, for instance." The X in my equation accounts for that. You'd need several different deputies to upvote (endorse) a user before it'll deputize them. You couldn't deputize someone on your own. The Y in the equation means that each deputy would have to have a history of upvoting someone more than once. So you couldn't immediately deputize someone. There should also be a time limit. Only upvotes cast within Z hours would count in the system. Also, only 1 upvote counts within A hours. This prevents someone from going into a comment history and upvoting past comments. Even though I think that I'm accounting for cheating, I also believe the system should be hidden from the users. This way no one knows if they've been deputized and they also don't know how to deputize someone else. "Reputation could be determined by any number of ways (has authored comments of high value" The trouble with a generic reputation system that values only votes is that it allows for people with any kind of comment (pedantic) to get reputation. My deputy system gives power to a few trusted users and allows that power to slowly trickle down. Hopefully, it'll sculpt the top comments and posts to what PG envisions for the site.
mikeknoop 13y ago
The reason they attract upvotes, or at least not downvotes, is because the ethos of the site seems to encourage all views of a argument to be expressed and allowed. I know I personally have dismissed down voting several "middlebrow dismissals" in the past because they seemed like valid counter arguments whereas outright useless comments like "lol this sucks" are easy for me to clearly distinguish. Maybe the rules just need adjusting to discourage mean comments whether or not the argument is valid? Is that the core problem?
ChuckMcM 13y ago
It is a common rhetorical technique, equivalent to ad hominem in that it attacks the message rather than the argument (I guess that would be ad messaginem :-) The general form is <fact>:<error claim>:<ad hominem> but to detect such you might need to extract a list of claims in the source article compare them to find the singular intersection with the comment, and then the ad hominem insult as well. Multi-fact/claim messages would get by of course.
- VLM 13y ago
  Rather than having a single numerical up/down, some kind of multi-dimensional list of fallacies? So what we're talking about would be a +1 on the "Affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent" anti-pattern, more or less? Wikipedia has a nice list of fallacies which would make interesting tags. One thing I know for certain is people like to imagine they personally invented their own fallacy, and get all outta whack if you identify their wisdom/insight as merely a poorly implemented manifestation of fallacy type #34 with aspects of type #11. For example discussions of scalability always seem to devolve into steaming buckets of pragmatic fallacy and it would be interesting to filter out because its pretty tiresome. Someone who's a total noob might actually want it because a poor map is better than no map at all, or at least they can skim some definitions out of context. Or, personally I think amphiboly is hilarious and I'd filter it up by +100, although it adds absolutely nothing to a discussion other than joy in my life, however I can see how someone could get sick of it and want to filter it out if they were looking for actual knowledge rather than a rare laugh.
clicks 13y ago
> There are often moderately stupid comments far down the page in any given thread, but they're comparatively harmless, like someone walking down the street mumbling to himself. I see that you deem these comments to be comparatively harmless, but nevertheless to combat this one relatively simple idea is to implement a 'Request deletion' feature, sitting alongside the 'flag' link on comment headers, that would notify the user that the comment they've made isn't very useful/substantive/thoughtful, and if they delete it (as other users have requested) they can re-earn any karma points they may have lost (as an incentive to encourage them to go on with the comment deletion). I think something like this would be very appropriate for a lot of occasions, it's something between a 'downvote' and 'flag' in intensity -- a downvote is too soft; 'flag' is too strong. I think it would send a good hint to have one reconsider what they've said, and have a lasting effect on the kinds of comments they make down the line. > I've been collecting a corpus of them for a while; it may soon be big enough to be useful. If you end up doing this I hope you only take into account the first few critical upvotes that send a particular bad comment to the top of the page. Because, I think 'upvoting' is a very passive, sometimes thoughtless action to a lot of people: if a comment is at the top, they'll read it first, and if it has non-zero substance to it (i.e. it attacks the article on a minor nitpick (which is your definition of a 'stupid comment' in this context, I think)) they may very well upvote it making the cycle complete.
- ChiperSoft 13y ago
  Request Deletion sounds rife for abuse.
  - delinka 13y ago
    Since it's a request from the clicker to the commenter, and since negative karma can be recovered by deleting, I see it as self-regulating.
rattray 13y ago
Multiply upvotes by log(karma) or similar? Perhaps log(karma/time) in the spirit of the reddit upvote algo? I'd be curious on others' thoughts on schemes like this.
chalst 13y ago
The Advogato trust metric sorts users into four kinds, "seed" (the built-in trusted users), "good" (those the algorithm assesses as both behaving well and certifying well), "confused" (those the algorithm asseses as behaving well but certifying erratically), and "bad" (assessed as badly behaved). I think the problem you describe is in essence the need for an automatic trust inference that recognises that worthwhile participants often certify badly and knows how to "prune" the set of tolerated participants down to those whose voting activity is high quality. Advogato hasn't really been successful overall (Steven Rainwater suspended new account creation a year ago), but there are many successes in its history (it has been run with very little intervention for over 10 years, and generally succeeded in separating spammers from free-software types for most of that period) and its experience is probably worth studying. http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
- ecuzzillo 13y ago
  I clearly remember stages in my life and particular forums in which I have been exactly 'bad', 'confused', and 'good', and this seems like a useful distinction. It requires much more forum experience to identify what kind of comment causes insipid comment threads than it does to write a good comment in the first place. That said, you could probably just measure someone's comment quality and their vote quality independently and get a lot of the benefit, with fewer errors from rigid categorization.
jnw2 13y ago
I think having multiple buttons for making positive votes about a comment might be useful. Something like insightful, agree, useful correction. These could then be weighted differently. Additionally, if people mark as insightful things that are obviosly inane, that might help to hellban the voting rings, whereas hellbanning people just for agreeing with a particular kind of stupid comment might be less fair. I've once or twice realized some longer term implication of something overnight after reading an article on HN; unfortunately, I don't remember at this point what the article was or what I realized in terms of the bigger implication. But in general, it seems like HN's structure makes it unlikely that you'll get a discussion if you comment on the article a day later. The solution may be to write a blog post and try to get it upvoted at the story level, but I'm not sure if that's the right answer to preserving the structure of which things are related to which others.
- jnw2 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5731734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5731734 has an example of something where I realized something sometime after I first saw a (somewhat) relevant story on HN.
pseut 13y ago
I understand why you're against having "advanced" features and flair, but being able to collapse the thread that follows those comments would help enormously. It's almost the same as sending the thread to the bottom of the page. Once I've decided not to read a subthread, it's a little frustrating to try to guess where to scroll to find the next constructive comment.
- cstejerean 13y ago
  Yep, thread collapsing is a huge help for avoiding entire subtrees of pointless comments and limits the damage of having a "middlebrow dismissal" as the top rated comment
- DanBC 13y ago
  Thread collapsing helps each person who chooses to collapse a thread, but does nothing to help upvote / downvote the posts in that thread. If collapsing can be linked to voting or thread positioning it'd be useful. Collapsing a thread means it's not very good[1] and thus should be further down the page. There is an extension / addon somewhere that does thread collapsing on HN. A web search should find at least one. [1] or maybe it just means that you're read it and are keeping the page tidy.
  - makomk 13y ago
    I'm not sure that's entirely true. If being able to collapse a thread means that more people actually read and upvote threads that are below it, then that in itself will help push the offending thread down the page.
ericb 13y ago
> there's a type of stupid comment that attracts upvotes from a certain type of user It might be awkward to call someone out, but I'd love to see example(s).
reaclmbs 13y ago
Maybe if you -50'd every such comment, people would quickly learn. How long would that superpower take in the REPL
mikeleeorg 13y ago
Would you be willing to publish your thoughts and findings on how you've worked to maintain a quality community someday? I'm sure everyone who is trying to do the same would find this very valuable.
alok-g 13y ago
A problem is that people upvote when they agree with the comment. The upvotes should be based on whether the reader found the comment useful, even though a downvote is OK in case of disagreement. I see comments from other people stating the same [1-2], but also with alternative opinions [3]. It would help if there are official guidelines on up/down votes just as there are on submissions and comments. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2365964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2365964 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420725 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
pcl 13y ago
I wonder if you could make early upvoters have some skin in the game. Maybe an early upvote could cost a little bit of karma (say .1 points), but if others agreed (as measured by follow-on upvotes) and the thread didn't devolve into a flame war, then that karma would be regained, possibly with a bit of karmic upside.
- wilfra 13y ago
  I think this is a fantastic idea for the New page. Give people some incentive to monitor it looking for good content. If something they are the first person to upvote makes it out of there, give them residual karma. My rate of upvoting things out of there that hit the front page is obscene, at least 50%. Assuming that is typical, that means very few people are monitoring that page. I personally would probably not do more of this for karma but I'd imagine many people would. And it may instantly solve the problem of hitting the frontpage being a lottery or determined by manipulation/voting rings etc.
kyro 13y ago
Have you tried penalizing comments based on the rate of upvotes it's receiving? If that rate exceeds a certain threshold, the comment is pushed down the page because it is likely either a) too short to contribute any real value and/or b) being upvoted more for its emotional effect. And in the case when it's neither of those, this gives other less popular opinions a chance to rise to the top.
radm 13y ago
I believe I have two or three "upvotes" in my voting history where I meant to click parent. I'm pretty sure I was not authenticated then, so maybe those upvotes were discarded, or maybe not... It's perhaps also worth noting that the "bogus upvote" problem is in some way related to some other social problems which we struggle with. Spam, and the wrong person using a password, both seem to me to be a reflection of social problems reflected by system design. For spam, there's no way to ask the supposed origin mail server "is this from:, to:, message-id: combo a plausibly legit in-flight message?" Because some systems cannot handle that functionality efficiently, mail standards people have rejected it (and similar approaches, perhaps identifying a sequence of mail servers, perhaps involving multiple queries when mailing lists are involved) for the multitude of cases where it makes sense. But note that you do not need perfection here, to massively reduce spam volume. Note also that there are efficiency arguments, here, but the original protocol worked fine on machines with <64k memory and ~1MHz clocks. Passwords and authentication protocols and buffer overflows are a more complex issue, and I'm drifting dangerously off subject already. But that's another issue, I think, where "design efficiencies" and "overly focussed thinking" sometimes bite us. (And perhaps sometimes benefit us, but how can we even measure this?) Anyways, trying to get back on topic, personally, I have little faith in upvotes here, not even my own, so mostly I rely on friends to point out if there's anything worthwhile here, for me to read. It's a triangle, someone clicked on it. Counters are a good first pass, for filtering bulk raw information and indicating things to focus on, but they are not the end-all and be-all for good ui design. Borrowing wholesale from stack overflow might be good, or maybe some variant would also be plausible (like, maybe: when replying, let people with parent posts weight child posts under theirs that they found helpful, giving some fraction of the total weight of upvotes in any child posts of their parent post to posts they want to highlight. This should be adjustable, in some simple way, or we live with accidents. There's also an issue when one person has multiple parents but maybe it's best to default to the top level eligible parent.) My above parenthetical suggestion is not perfect, but it might help for distinguishing between some sincere and insincere replies. Another approach might be to give the user some "downvote" ability - abiding by the original site design, these need not be preserved for others (it's a personal decision, after all). Ultimately, to really get this right, I would want to be able to segregate other voters into "agree" / "disagree" / "irrelevant" buckets based on a label which reflected my current point of view, and have the content displayed based on that categorization. But that's a much harder problem.
Jd 13y ago
I can understand why pg sees this as a problem that needs to be solved, but personally I see it as a natural extension of the point / counter-point dynamic, in which the obvious counterarguments or oversights of a particular article are brought to bear in a pithy comment. This doesn't take any great deal of intellectual effort (and is justifiably called a "middlebrow dismissal" ) but I personally am guilty of upvoting many of these comments simply because (particularly on articles which I don't read) I appreciate someone pointing out the obvious deficiencies. That said, I do think they often take away from detailed and serious discussion of the article, and there may be some problem with the way that they absorb upvotes and end up at the top of the page, but I don't see the general dynamic as particularly troublesome (unless you are trying to produce conformity in opinion among participants, the often problem of benevolent overlords who don't like to see strife amongst their minions).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
CleanedStar 13y ago
In Bill Ayers book "Fugitive Days", he says during the Days of Rage, some of the people marching were a little apprehensive, but then someone broke a window and the riot he desired ensued. Social research has shown this beyond that case - when an angry mob gathers, they often still repress their hostility, but when a window breaks, that is when things go into a free-for-all. I think it's the same here. People can have opinions, but once says Microsoft is great and open source sucks or something like that, you're already past the point of no return, it's inevitable the thread or sub-thread will devolve into a flame war. Certain threads are this way starting from the original topic. Like the threads, amidst the recent threads of falling programmer salaries (or perhaps mentions of the historically high unemployment rates) of the desire of the SV barons to raise the H1B cap. This again is guaranteed to degenerate into a flame war. My unscientific study of HN is that someone can get a lot of karma for saying why they think Obama is good or bad or the like. A post on that guarantees a dozen upvotes. Someone making a cogent comment on how a company should limit the scope of what parts of C++ they use is not going to get as much karma. I have been on BBSs since the 1980s. The real problem of a forum is this. It has a handful of very sharp, interesting people who like communicating with each other and who write good posts. Then you get some blabbermouths who post and post and post and fill the boards up with junk. Then the good people leave. The good people leaving is the problem. I don't think flames are the only thing to be concerned with. Blabbermouths who have nothing to say kill boards as well. Have flamewars killed the Linux kernel mailing list? Just as long as things are kept under control. The NetBSD/OpenBSD flamewar got out of control. Slashdot is a board that was good and had its founders leave and is all corporate and user-view baiting now. What are its topics right now? "Google's Nexus Q Successor Hits the FCC". Who cares? "John McAfee's Belize Home Burns To Ground". I can survive a few weeks without an update on McAfee. "NetBSD 6.1 Has Shipped". Something only the dwindling remainder of NetBSD fanbois care about. Certain topics and upvoted threads, once existing, are going to turn into a flamewar no matter what. It has to be rooted out early on for anything to be effective.

by pg 13y ago

MichaelApproved 13y ago

Here's a system I've been thinking about. Separate users into classes. You could deputize a hand full of trusted users who can deputize other users with their up votes. If X number of deputies give an upvote to a user's comment Y number of times, that deputizes that user. The further away a user is from an original deputy, the more X and Y increase before a new person is deputized. Hopefully, this will give you a class of users who tend to vote intelligently and comment with information that adds to the converation. Votes by these users would carry more weight than the general community. Edit: It also automates the process so you don't have to hand pick more than the original deputies.

mikeleeorg 13y ago
It's possible that giving someone the power to give someone else power could be abused. A person could deputize their friends in order to upvote a link in which they have a vested interest, for instance. But I think what you're essentially talking about is user reputation - the idea that the opinions of certain people weighs stronger than others. I think there's merit to that. The upvotes of a person with a high reputation on HN would weigh more than someone else. Reputation could be determined by any number of ways (has authored comments of high value, is manually designated by HN as reputable, has been active in the last N number of days, etc).
- MichaelApproved 13y ago
  "It's possible that giving someone the power to give someone else power could be abused. A person could deputize their friends in order to upvote a link in which they have a vested interest, for instance." The X in my equation accounts for that. You'd need several different deputies to upvote (endorse) a user before it'll deputize them. You couldn't deputize someone on your own. The Y in the equation means that each deputy would have to have a history of upvoting someone more than once. So you couldn't immediately deputize someone. There should also be a time limit. Only upvotes cast within Z hours would count in the system. Also, only 1 upvote counts within A hours. This prevents someone from going into a comment history and upvoting past comments. Even though I think that I'm accounting for cheating, I also believe the system should be hidden from the users. This way no one knows if they've been deputized and they also don't know how to deputize someone else. "Reputation could be determined by any number of ways (has authored comments of high value" The trouble with a generic reputation system that values only votes is that it allows for people with any kind of comment (pedantic) to get reputation. My deputy system gives power to a few trusted users and allows that power to slowly trickle down. Hopefully, it'll sculpt the top comments and posts to what PG envisions for the site.

mikeknoop 13y ago

The reason they attract upvotes, or at least not downvotes, is because the ethos of the site seems to encourage all views of a argument to be expressed and allowed. I know I personally have dismissed down voting several "middlebrow dismissals" in the past because they seemed like valid counter arguments whereas outright useless comments like "lol this sucks" are easy for me to clearly distinguish. Maybe the rules just need adjusting to discourage mean comments whether or not the argument is valid? Is that the core problem?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

It is a common rhetorical technique, equivalent to ad hominem in that it attacks the message rather than the argument (I guess that would be ad messaginem :-) The general form is <fact>:<error claim>:<ad hominem> but to detect such you might need to extract a list of claims in the source article compare them to find the singular intersection with the comment, and then the ad hominem insult as well. Multi-fact/claim messages would get by of course.

VLM 13y ago
Rather than having a single numerical up/down, some kind of multi-dimensional list of fallacies? So what we're talking about would be a +1 on the "Affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent" anti-pattern, more or less? Wikipedia has a nice list of fallacies which would make interesting tags. One thing I know for certain is people like to imagine they personally invented their own fallacy, and get all outta whack if you identify their wisdom/insight as merely a poorly implemented manifestation of fallacy type #34 with aspects of type #11. For example discussions of scalability always seem to devolve into steaming buckets of pragmatic fallacy and it would be interesting to filter out because its pretty tiresome. Someone who's a total noob might actually want it because a poor map is better than no map at all, or at least they can skim some definitions out of context. Or, personally I think amphiboly is hilarious and I'd filter it up by +100, although it adds absolutely nothing to a discussion other than joy in my life, however I can see how someone could get sick of it and want to filter it out if they were looking for actual knowledge rather than a rare laugh.

clicks 13y ago

> There are often moderately stupid comments far down the page in any given thread, but they're comparatively harmless, like someone walking down the street mumbling to himself. I see that you deem these comments to be comparatively harmless, but nevertheless to combat this one relatively simple idea is to implement a 'Request deletion' feature, sitting alongside the 'flag' link on comment headers, that would notify the user that the comment they've made isn't very useful/substantive/thoughtful, and if they delete it (as other users have requested) they can re-earn any karma points they may have lost (as an incentive to encourage them to go on with the comment deletion). I think something like this would be very appropriate for a lot of occasions, it's something between a 'downvote' and 'flag' in intensity -- a downvote is too soft; 'flag' is too strong. I think it would send a good hint to have one reconsider what they've said, and have a lasting effect on the kinds of comments they make down the line. > I've been collecting a corpus of them for a while; it may soon be big enough to be useful. If you end up doing this I hope you only take into account the first few critical upvotes that send a particular bad comment to the top of the page. Because, I think 'upvoting' is a very passive, sometimes thoughtless action to a lot of people: if a comment is at the top, they'll read it first, and if it has non-zero substance to it (i.e. it attacks the article on a minor nitpick (which is your definition of a 'stupid comment' in this context, I think)) they may very well upvote it making the cycle complete.

ChiperSoft 13y ago
Request Deletion sounds rife for abuse.
- delinka 13y ago
  Since it's a request from the clicker to the commenter, and since negative karma can be recovered by deleting, I see it as self-regulating.

rattray 13y ago

Multiply upvotes by log(karma) or similar? Perhaps log(karma/time) in the spirit of the reddit upvote algo? I'd be curious on others' thoughts on schemes like this.

chalst 13y ago

The Advogato trust metric sorts users into four kinds, "seed" (the built-in trusted users), "good" (those the algorithm assesses as both behaving well and certifying well), "confused" (those the algorithm asseses as behaving well but certifying erratically), and "bad" (assessed as badly behaved). I think the problem you describe is in essence the need for an automatic trust inference that recognises that worthwhile participants often certify badly and knows how to "prune" the set of tolerated participants down to those whose voting activity is high quality. Advogato hasn't really been successful overall (Steven Rainwater suspended new account creation a year ago), but there are many successes in its history (it has been run with very little intervention for over 10 years, and generally succeeded in separating spammers from free-software types for most of that period) and its experience is probably worth studying. http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html

ecuzzillo 13y ago
I clearly remember stages in my life and particular forums in which I have been exactly 'bad', 'confused', and 'good', and this seems like a useful distinction. It requires much more forum experience to identify what kind of comment causes insipid comment threads than it does to write a good comment in the first place. That said, you could probably just measure someone's comment quality and their vote quality independently and get a lot of the benefit, with fewer errors from rigid categorization.

jnw2 13y ago

I think having multiple buttons for making positive votes about a comment might be useful. Something like insightful, agree, useful correction. These could then be weighted differently. Additionally, if people mark as insightful things that are obviosly inane, that might help to hellban the voting rings, whereas hellbanning people just for agreeing with a particular kind of stupid comment might be less fair. I've once or twice realized some longer term implication of something overnight after reading an article on HN; unfortunately, I don't remember at this point what the article was or what I realized in terms of the bigger implication. But in general, it seems like HN's structure makes it unlikely that you'll get a discussion if you comment on the article a day later. The solution may be to write a blog post and try to get it upvoted at the story level, but I'm not sure if that's the right answer to preserving the structure of which things are related to which others.

jnw2 13y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5731734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5731734 has an example of something where I realized something sometime after I first saw a (somewhat) relevant story on HN.

pseut 13y ago

I understand why you're against having "advanced" features and flair, but being able to collapse the thread that follows those comments would help enormously. It's almost the same as sending the thread to the bottom of the page. Once I've decided not to read a subthread, it's a little frustrating to try to guess where to scroll to find the next constructive comment.

cstejerean 13y ago
Yep, thread collapsing is a huge help for avoiding entire subtrees of pointless comments and limits the damage of having a "middlebrow dismissal" as the top rated comment
DanBC 13y ago
Thread collapsing helps each person who chooses to collapse a thread, but does nothing to help upvote / downvote the posts in that thread. If collapsing can be linked to voting or thread positioning it'd be useful. Collapsing a thread means it's not very good[1] and thus should be further down the page. There is an extension / addon somewhere that does thread collapsing on HN. A web search should find at least one. [1] or maybe it just means that you're read it and are keeping the page tidy.
- makomk 13y ago
  I'm not sure that's entirely true. If being able to collapse a thread means that more people actually read and upvote threads that are below it, then that in itself will help push the offending thread down the page.

ericb 13y ago

> there's a type of stupid comment that attracts upvotes from a certain type of user It might be awkward to call someone out, but I'd love to see example(s).

reaclmbs 13y ago

Maybe if you -50'd every such comment, people would quickly learn. How long would that superpower take in the REPL

mikeleeorg 13y ago

Would you be willing to publish your thoughts and findings on how you've worked to maintain a quality community someday? I'm sure everyone who is trying to do the same would find this very valuable.

alok-g 13y ago

A problem is that people upvote when they agree with the comment. The upvotes should be based on whether the reader found the comment useful, even though a downvote is OK in case of disagreement. I see comments from other people stating the same [1-2], but also with alternative opinions [3]. It would help if there are official guidelines on up/down votes just as there are on submissions and comments. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2365964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2365964 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1420725 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

pcl 13y ago

I wonder if you could make early upvoters have some skin in the game. Maybe an early upvote could cost a little bit of karma (say .1 points), but if others agreed (as measured by follow-on upvotes) and the thread didn't devolve into a flame war, then that karma would be regained, possibly with a bit of karmic upside.

wilfra 13y ago
I think this is a fantastic idea for the New page. Give people some incentive to monitor it looking for good content. If something they are the first person to upvote makes it out of there, give them residual karma. My rate of upvoting things out of there that hit the front page is obscene, at least 50%. Assuming that is typical, that means very few people are monitoring that page. I personally would probably not do more of this for karma but I'd imagine many people would. And it may instantly solve the problem of hitting the frontpage being a lottery or determined by manipulation/voting rings etc.

kyro 13y ago

Have you tried penalizing comments based on the rate of upvotes it's receiving? If that rate exceeds a certain threshold, the comment is pushed down the page because it is likely either a) too short to contribute any real value and/or b) being upvoted more for its emotional effect. And in the case when it's neither of those, this gives other less popular opinions a chance to rise to the top.

radm 13y ago

I believe I have two or three "upvotes" in my voting history where I meant to click parent. I'm pretty sure I was not authenticated then, so maybe those upvotes were discarded, or maybe not... It's perhaps also worth noting that the "bogus upvote" problem is in some way related to some other social problems which we struggle with. Spam, and the wrong person using a password, both seem to me to be a reflection of social problems reflected by system design. For spam, there's no way to ask the supposed origin mail server "is this from:, to:, message-id: combo a plausibly legit in-flight message?" Because some systems cannot handle that functionality efficiently, mail standards people have rejected it (and similar approaches, perhaps identifying a sequence of mail servers, perhaps involving multiple queries when mailing lists are involved) for the multitude of cases where it makes sense. But note that you do not need perfection here, to massively reduce spam volume. Note also that there are efficiency arguments, here, but the original protocol worked fine on machines with <64k memory and ~1MHz clocks. Passwords and authentication protocols and buffer overflows are a more complex issue, and I'm drifting dangerously off subject already. But that's another issue, I think, where "design efficiencies" and "overly focussed thinking" sometimes bite us. (And perhaps sometimes benefit us, but how can we even measure this?) Anyways, trying to get back on topic, personally, I have little faith in upvotes here, not even my own, so mostly I rely on friends to point out if there's anything worthwhile here, for me to read. It's a triangle, someone clicked on it. Counters are a good first pass, for filtering bulk raw information and indicating things to focus on, but they are not the end-all and be-all for good ui design. Borrowing wholesale from stack overflow might be good, or maybe some variant would also be plausible (like, maybe: when replying, let people with parent posts weight child posts under theirs that they found helpful, giving some fraction of the total weight of upvotes in any child posts of their parent post to posts they want to highlight. This should be adjustable, in some simple way, or we live with accidents. There's also an issue when one person has multiple parents but maybe it's best to default to the top level eligible parent.) My above parenthetical suggestion is not perfect, but it might help for distinguishing between some sincere and insincere replies. Another approach might be to give the user some "downvote" ability - abiding by the original site design, these need not be preserved for others (it's a personal decision, after all). Ultimately, to really get this right, I would want to be able to segregate other voters into "agree" / "disagree" / "irrelevant" buckets based on a label which reflected my current point of view, and have the content displayed based on that categorization. But that's a much harder problem.

Jd 13y ago

I can understand why pg sees this as a problem that needs to be solved, but personally I see it as a natural extension of the point / counter-point dynamic, in which the obvious counterarguments or oversights of a particular article are brought to bear in a pithy comment. This doesn't take any great deal of intellectual effort (and is justifiably called a "middlebrow dismissal" ) but I personally am guilty of upvoting many of these comments simply because (particularly on articles which I don't read) I appreciate someone pointing out the obvious deficiencies. That said, I do think they often take away from detailed and serious discussion of the article, and there may be some problem with the way that they absorb upvotes and end up at the top of the page, but I don't see the general dynamic as particularly troublesome (unless you are trying to produce conformity in opinion among participants, the often problem of benevolent overlords who don't like to see strife amongst their minions).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

CleanedStar 13y ago

In Bill Ayers book "Fugitive Days", he says during the Days of Rage, some of the people marching were a little apprehensive, but then someone broke a window and the riot he desired ensued. Social research has shown this beyond that case - when an angry mob gathers, they often still repress their hostility, but when a window breaks, that is when things go into a free-for-all. I think it's the same here. People can have opinions, but once says Microsoft is great and open source sucks or something like that, you're already past the point of no return, it's inevitable the thread or sub-thread will devolve into a flame war. Certain threads are this way starting from the original topic. Like the threads, amidst the recent threads of falling programmer salaries (or perhaps mentions of the historically high unemployment rates) of the desire of the SV barons to raise the H1B cap. This again is guaranteed to degenerate into a flame war. My unscientific study of HN is that someone can get a lot of karma for saying why they think Obama is good or bad or the like. A post on that guarantees a dozen upvotes. Someone making a cogent comment on how a company should limit the scope of what parts of C++ they use is not going to get as much karma. I have been on BBSs since the 1980s. The real problem of a forum is this. It has a handful of very sharp, interesting people who like communicating with each other and who write good posts. Then you get some blabbermouths who post and post and post and fill the boards up with junk. Then the good people leave. The good people leaving is the problem. I don't think flames are the only thing to be concerned with. Blabbermouths who have nothing to say kill boards as well. Have flamewars killed the Linux kernel mailing list? Just as long as things are kept under control. The NetBSD/OpenBSD flamewar got out of control. Slashdot is a board that was good and had its founders leave and is all corporate and user-view baiting now. What are its topics right now? "Google's Nexus Q Successor Hits the FCC". Who cares? "John McAfee's Belize Home Burns To Ground". I can survive a few weeks without an update on McAfee. "NetBSD 6.1 Has Shipped". Something only the dwindling remainder of NetBSD fanbois care about. Certain topics and upvoted threads, once existing, are going to turn into a flamewar no matter what. It has to be rooted out early on for anything to be effective.