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I'm not sure what he's proposing. If he means let site owners specify that people not be able to submit their sites to HN, I've actually daydreamed occasionall

by pg 13y ago

I'm not sure what he's proposing. If he means let site owners specify that people not be able to submit their sites to HN, I've actually daydreamed occasionally about doing that myself for paulgraham.com. But it might not work in practice, because determined submitters would just mirror the text elsewhere and submit that. He's right though that Twitter has a big advantage in that it's easy to ignore jerks. It might be a good idea to introduce some form of following or blocking here.

TheCowboy 13y ago
Randy Pausch, the Carnegie professor known for The Last Lecture, once expressed a brilliant way one of his mentors talked to him about being a jerk: "And he put his arm around my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said, Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word “you’re being a jerk.” [laughter] Right? He doesn’t say you’re a jerk. He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish." I always think it would be interesting if that approach could be abstracted into a tool for online community 'civility management'. Could the upvote/downvote approach be amended? Could there be another upvote option for civility? A button to remind people to relax and take the angst somewhere else? I don't know. The best approach might be far removed from the users-as-voters paradigm.
forwardslash 13y ago
We have following and blocking of users and domains over at hubski (originally an hn clone) and it works pretty well. In particular being able to completely block someone from your feed and/or prevent them from commenting on your posts.
dgregd 13y ago
If the micro-blogging platform is worth $1.1 billion then a platform which will solve the problem we are discussing here might be worth more. Maybe you can outsource comments moderation to a group of competing startups. Not for all posts but for 10% or 20% of front page posts. Maybe we will see a "pagerank" algorithm for comments or something more clever.
scott_s 13y ago
Not everyone is a determined submitter. Perfect is the enemy of good, and all that. (Still not sure the feature should exist, though.)
MortenK 13y ago
Could be interesting to test a "block user" feature where enough blocks within a time span results in a temp or permanent ban. An inability of new accounts to post for a couple of days, might also curb the drive-by behavior.
- krapp 13y ago
  My favorite implementation of this would be simply you have a list of users whose posts you never see. Like selective hellbanning -- it doesn't affect anything other than what you yourself percieve when logged in, but it also doesn't stop them from being able to communicate with everyone else. I don't think there's any reason to necessarily link it to banning or something, though. Just make it like a per-account killfile. in fact maybe you could even add regexes to filter out phrases or urls as well.
WiseWeasel 13y ago
It might help to hire some in-house moderators to down-vote mean/obnoxious/unconstructive posts to oblivion, if the community isn't doing a good enough job. Maybe up-voting of comments should be disabled below a certain threshold of karma as well.
angersock 13y ago
Following, perhaps, but not blocking. One of the nice things that HN affords is that it doesn't really support filter bubbles--at least until mods or the community downvotes you to oblivion. Thus, there's a good chance that people at least get exposed to ideas they might otherwise ignore. Hell, I can think of several posts where I've strongly disagreed with somebody else, only to be in jovial agreement or discussion a few days later. I'm not sure that a blocking mechanism is really needed; if people are being deliberate and abusive trolls, we have ways of dealing with that, right?
- medecau 13y ago
  You don't block the people you disagree with. You block the jerks, the obvious trolls, the negative shit aka noise.
  - demachina 13y ago
    Pretty sure Dave blocks most people who disagree with him for the space of more than one tweet. People he already holds in high esteem before they disagreed with him might last slightly longer.
  - dinkumthinkum 13y ago
    I never use such features unless it is really trolling, in which case I expect the flagging system to solve the problem or anti-spam techniques. I don't really like I need protection from people's thoughts, not saying people who want such features do but it's not my thing.
    - angersock 13y ago
      Exactly--the flagging feature is there to deal with real trolls. Let's be honest--usually, blocking (in a community which has other ways of dealing with abusive users) is just a way of helping people be intellectually lazy and filtery.
djKianoosh 13y ago
More importantly, it would be nice to see the number of blocks a user has right next to their name, everywhere. Think of it as a type of public shaming. If I'm blocked by 10 different people, you see a skull and cross bones with the number 10 next to my name. That might degrade though... Or you can go a little more advanced and put some complex logic in there where I see the number of blocks by users I trust. So if I trust 5 users, and 4 of them block a certain user X, I'd see a skull and crossbones with a number 4 next to their name. The key is not just follow or block, but the combination of those...
- bennyg 13y ago
  Dangerous groupthink my friend.

by pg 13y ago

TheCowboy 13y ago

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie professor known for The Last Lecture, once expressed a brilliant way one of his mentors talked to him about being a jerk: "And he put his arm around my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said, Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word “you’re being a jerk.” [laughter] Right? He doesn’t say you’re a jerk. He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish." I always think it would be interesting if that approach could be abstracted into a tool for online community 'civility management'. Could the upvote/downvote approach be amended? Could there be another upvote option for civility? A button to remind people to relax and take the angst somewhere else? I don't know. The best approach might be far removed from the users-as-voters paradigm.

forwardslash 13y ago

We have following and blocking of users and domains over at hubski (originally an hn clone) and it works pretty well. In particular being able to completely block someone from your feed and/or prevent them from commenting on your posts.

dgregd 13y ago

If the micro-blogging platform is worth $1.1 billion then a platform which will solve the problem we are discussing here might be worth more. Maybe you can outsource comments moderation to a group of competing startups. Not for all posts but for 10% or 20% of front page posts. Maybe we will see a "pagerank" algorithm for comments or something more clever.

scott_s 13y ago

Not everyone is a determined submitter. Perfect is the enemy of good, and all that. (Still not sure the feature should exist, though.)

MortenK 13y ago

Could be interesting to test a "block user" feature where enough blocks within a time span results in a temp or permanent ban. An inability of new accounts to post for a couple of days, might also curb the drive-by behavior.

krapp 13y ago
My favorite implementation of this would be simply you have a list of users whose posts you never see. Like selective hellbanning -- it doesn't affect anything other than what you yourself percieve when logged in, but it also doesn't stop them from being able to communicate with everyone else. I don't think there's any reason to necessarily link it to banning or something, though. Just make it like a per-account killfile. in fact maybe you could even add regexes to filter out phrases or urls as well.

WiseWeasel 13y ago

It might help to hire some in-house moderators to down-vote mean/obnoxious/unconstructive posts to oblivion, if the community isn't doing a good enough job. Maybe up-voting of comments should be disabled below a certain threshold of karma as well.

angersock 13y ago

Following, perhaps, but not blocking. One of the nice things that HN affords is that it doesn't really support filter bubbles--at least until mods or the community downvotes you to oblivion. Thus, there's a good chance that people at least get exposed to ideas they might otherwise ignore. Hell, I can think of several posts where I've strongly disagreed with somebody else, only to be in jovial agreement or discussion a few days later. I'm not sure that a blocking mechanism is really needed; if people are being deliberate and abusive trolls, we have ways of dealing with that, right?

medecau 13y ago
You don't block the people you disagree with. You block the jerks, the obvious trolls, the negative shit aka noise.
- demachina 13y ago
  Pretty sure Dave blocks most people who disagree with him for the space of more than one tweet. People he already holds in high esteem before they disagreed with him might last slightly longer.
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  I never use such features unless it is really trolling, in which case I expect the flagging system to solve the problem or anti-spam techniques. I don't really like I need protection from people's thoughts, not saying people who want such features do but it's not my thing.
  - angersock 13y ago
    Exactly--the flagging feature is there to deal with real trolls. Let's be honest--usually, blocking (in a community which has other ways of dealing with abusive users) is just a way of helping people be intellectually lazy and filtery.

djKianoosh 13y ago

More importantly, it would be nice to see the number of blocks a user has right next to their name, everywhere. Think of it as a type of public shaming. If I'm blocked by 10 different people, you see a skull and cross bones with the number 10 next to my name. That might degrade though... Or you can go a little more advanced and put some complex logic in there where I see the number of blocks by users I trust. So if I trust 5 users, and 4 of them block a certain user X, I'd see a skull and crossbones with a number 4 next to their name. The key is not just follow or block, but the combination of those...

bennyg 13y ago
Dangerous groupthink my friend.