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It's fine for people who aren't officially credentialled experts in something to talk about it. The best insights often come from outsiders. The problem comes
by pg 13y ago
It's fine for people who aren't officially credentialled experts in something to talk about it. The best insights often come from outsiders. The problem comes when people express their ideas intemperately, either by making extreme statements that should be more qualified and tentative, or by being uncivil to one another.
I believe I've finally come up with a solution for that, incidentally, after years of searching. It will require surprisingly little new code. I almost started implementing it during the 4th of July holiday, but I started writing a new essay instead.
- davidw 13y agoOne thing that comes to mind is that the costs for informed comments with supporting arguments are often higher - much higher - than the costs for uninformed rants. It's easy to say any old thing off the cuff, but takes more effort to refute it. Also, truly expert people have less time, than, say, someone fresh out of college.
- antimora 13y agoWhat is the solution if you don't mind sharing?
- drhayes9 13y agoA truly marvelous solution too big to fit into the comment thread? ( = What's the broad strokes idea?
- pg 13y agoYeah, I realized as soon as I posted that that I'd have to explain. I'm going to define a state for comments between living and dead called pending, and I'll give everyone over a certain threshold of karma and/or age the ability to promote comments from pending to live. Pending comments should be promoted if they (a) make a positive contribution to the discussion, and (b) are not unnecessarily harsh or uncivil. I may try this out on individual threads before switching the whole site over.
- collypops 13y agoI'd be interested to know how you'll decide which threads to pilot this feature on. If it isn't random, I think it may give us more insight into what topics/biases you feel draw out this kind of behaviour.
- gfodor 13y agoCan you explain the reasons why you see this as being an effective way to filter out overly-pedantic or critical comments? These comments seem to be the focus on HN not just because they are common, but also because they get upvoted to the top of the discussion, perpetuating the theme. Presumably the sub-audience who finds such comments productive to discussion enough to upvote them will happily flip them live, too. It seems like the only reason to think otherwise is if you think that most people who have high karma are not guilty of upvoting these types of comments.
- tptacek 13y agoBecause there's a karma threshold attached to promotion, a user who has some demonstrated engagement with the site will have to make a deliberate decision to grant a forum to limbo comments. That person will have to believe the comment makes a positive contribution and maintains civility. The phenomenon that bolts fatuous vitriol to the tops of threads requires no such deliberation. I have no idea if this is going to work, but I'm psyched to see it play out.
- fossuser 13y agoWould having the solution public make it no longer effective?
- obviouslygreen 13y agoThe problem comes when people express their ideas intemperately, either by making extreme statements that should be more qualified and tentative, or by being uncivil to one another. I hit plenty of opposition here when writing in favor of more qualified and tentative statements in precisely this context. Perhaps now your cult of personality will come around to my/our/your point of view! ;)
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- spartango 13y ago> It's fine for people who aren't officially credentialled experts in something to talk about it. Sometimes this is true, but sometimes undertrained perspectives can be quite detrimental. The most clear-cut example is that of medical discussions; medical commentary or speculation from under-qualified individuals can do real harm. Many communities on the web have recognized this and have taken measures to protect users[1]. Medical advice is a pretty extreme example as far as detrimental discussions, but there are some shades of gray that I've seen show up on HN. As a biologist, the ones I've found most grating are those that reflect poor training in the the life sciences, where HNers make pseudoscientific or unscientific claims. It's easy to call these things "opinions", but they are actively harmful when most users will not be able to tell that they are incorrect. There are certainly other cases where underinformed commenters end up doing harm, from legal speculation to "get your pitchforks" outrage attacks. Note that I'm not arguing against free and open discussion in forums such as HN; people should be physically able to post whatever they want. My point is instead that the community should be sensitive to underqualified commentary in disciplines beyond its expertise. Less accepting, in a way. Credentialing is but one way this has been done, but understandably not the best one here. [1]http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s4chc/meta_medical_advice_on_askscience_the_guidelines/ http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/s4chc/meta_medic...
- cpher 13y agoI hear where you're coming from, but I disagree with regards to the HN community specifically. I hope most members here understand that there's a huge gray area between our "extpertise-es." Personally, I have degrees in biology and env. science but I've been a software dev for 15 years. I'm not really sure where I fit in. Does that mean I can't have an opinion on environmental science topics because I'm "not in practice?" I can't speak for the medical advice topics (because I'm largely ignorant), but I always take the opinions on this site with a grain of salt. Just because we may not be "credentialed" doesn't mean our opinions are worthless or detrimental. Most of us are simply happy to contribute where we can, and we spend most of our time learning things that are beyond our comfort zone. After having been here for almost 5 years, I can suss out the wheat from the chafe, and I like hearing the variety of opinions regardless of their credentials. And most of the time I take the position of "student" trying to learn something from others. The breadth of expertise here is astounding, and I'm continually in awe of what people are doing. Could you be taking this too seriously? Ninja edit: softened my tone about taking things seriously (one of my personal shortcomings).
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- andrewljohnson 13y agoI find that my comment scores are higher and my comments more civil if I delete some of the comments I make. These days, I tend to write it, read it, then half the time delete it. What you might want to do is give the commenter themselves a signal, more explicit than just a bad score or being grayed out. A message could pop up by the comment saying "likely to be downvoted, you are advised to delete this" - and see if more self-policing helps. Also, if you have some signal that occurs before votes or other comments show up (like a lot of eyeballs on a comment with no upvotes), then maybe you can use that to give users an early signal to delete their comment.
- onan_barbarian 13y agoFirst, you are responding to a point the original poster didn't make. He didn't claim that he wanted to shut discussion down to "officially credentialed experts". He claimed that people involved were "unqualified to discuss them in any detail" ie. a polite (perhaps qualified and tentative) way of saying "they don't know what they are talking about and are just making stuff up". Second, much of the truly offensive stuff I've seen on HN has been phrased in "qualified" and "tentative" fashion. Sometimes the ideas expressed here are, well, shit, and putting a gloss of civility on it doesn't change that it's a shitty idea, it just adds passive voice and some extra syllables. One is reminded of the myriad of polite and civil arguments advanced in the drawing rooms of the nicest people in favour of slavery or against voting rights.