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I really appreciate the sentiment here, but at the same time I don't want to see a thread with five hundred comments that say This. Or whatever trendy cat

I really appreciate the sentiment here, but at the same time I don't want to see a thread with five hundred comments that say This. Or whatever trendy catch phrase is floating around the mindspace that month. And this system differs from what you describe in that there will be no set group of moderators. The community itself will decide what it wants to see and encourage the type of contribution it deems valid.

king_magic 13y ago
Is this really a problem that HN has, though? I mean, yeah, occasionally, you'll see stuff like that. But anecdotally, I'd say it's definitely the exception. The type of comment you're talking about ("This.") feels like an invented boogeyman used to justify overly harsh censorship by the Party (the HN karma elite). I'm not saying HN is perfect as it is now - it's not - but personally, I feel the a greater problem lies with the quality of submissions rather than the quality of comments. Frankly, I'd rather see Pending Submissions instead of Pending Comments.
virtuabhi 13y ago
No offense but your argument is quite similar to UK's internet censorship law. Hey you don't want CP (in your case "trendy catch phrase"), so we should have a level of censorship (moderated comments). And in no time the system becomes the oppressor of free speech and flow of information. Also please note that the earlier system had upvotes/downvotes for comments. Through votes the community can decide the type of contribution it deems valid.
RogerL 13y ago
We don't have that problem here. Notice my argument was not for anarchy. Back to signal processing for a moment, I used 'noise' loosely. Signals of interest have noise and signal interspersed. It is often trivial to filter out pure noise, such as white noise. In forums, our white noise is 'this' comments, and we trivially filter those out with downvoting, and I suspect it is not particularly hard to write some lisp code to require endorsement for, say, one word or one sentence replies, and prevent the 'post' button from working if the text is 'this' in any variant. But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal. Sure, there may be snarkiness there, or not the most civil tone, but we have doing a good job of handling that on a personal level - in the form of replies such as "RogerL, your post, while interesting, is a bit negative. We strive for better here". I see that all the time (well, not addressed to me, but you know what I mean). That is wonderful. Regardless, there is still a lot of signal there. I have my settings set so that I can see hellbanned people. They are all posting things of value, even the one person with the religious content occasionally posts something worth reading. It is true that there will be no set group of moderators. I don't see how that changes the fundamental equation, but it might. As I said, I haven't formed any solid conclusion, but my gut reaction is that I don't think I feel like participating in endorsement. If we have a quality problem, it is one of submissions, of bad titles, not of 'this' comments.
- mbesto 13y ago
  I read your original well-thought post, really insightful. My counterpoint is that you perhaps failed to address if noise is even the problem. IMO noise is not the problem on HN, it's the dilution of signalling on HN. There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. In order for this to work, you need a (1) mechanism for the an individual to tell the community that a particular story or comment is worth it to the community (we have this, but it's partially broken on stories since you can't downvote, only flag) and (2) you need a community that is motivated to protect the community. The problem I see is number 2. The community is now full of people who don't want the community to succeed - they want themselves to succeed. Are there people who want to see the community as a whole progress, sure. But as the community grows it means more people trying to climb the ladder (karma) and gain more influence. Influence is powerful here, we can't simply pretend it doesn't exist. > But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal. It depends on what you're measuring. A paragraph of time doesn't mean the post isn't any higher value to someone. If I'm at a rock festival and the stage that Nickelback are on is louder than the one that Rolling stone is at, it doesn't mean I necessarily want to hear Nickelback. IMO, without curators, it's pretty much impossible for human beings to even discern their own signal-to-noise ratios. Maybe I might hear that one Nickelback song and fall in love, I don't know? EDIT: grammar
  - RogerL 13y ago
    I guess my main question is what is pg seeing that he doesn't like? He stated that comment quality was 'higher' after he turned this on briefly. I honestly have no idea what this means as it lacks specificity. From there I went with what the main complaints of posters in this thread and the other thread were complaining about. Vacuous comments, puns, and the like. I must admit to a high tolerance and enjoyment of witty zingers, so long as they don't dominate the discussion, so that colors my view re noise/signal.
  - 300bps 13y ago
    There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. There are actually three. Upvotes, downvotes and moderation. The moderators seem to be very active on HN. Turn on the "Show Dead" option on your account and you'll see a half dozen people every day that post comments, blissfully unaware that nobody is ever seeing them. Many of them are actually insightful comments, but because they posted something that rubbed someone the wrong way at some point in the past, they're hellbanned for eternity. This particular account of mine is about a year old, has almost 4,000 comment karma and it seems to have been slowbanned a few months ago. I have no idea what I might have done to get a slowban and honestly just suffer through the 10-12 second page loads when I'm logged in. If I'm not logged in, I get subsecond page load times. If I'm logged in with an alternate account, I get the same subsecond page load times. It's only when I'm logged in with this particular ID that I get 10-12 second page load times. From what I can see, moderation is the far bigger influence of identifying signals on HN than up/down voting.
genwin 13y ago
There is already a "downvote to gray-out" feature for that, that works fine for the few comments like that.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  "Downvote to grey-out" is lame IMO. Harming readability as an indication that a post doesn't contribute is very poor - it's hard to tell how much it's been downvoted, it's hard to read (some of us want to read what are often simply dissenting comments rather than non-contributing comments). Visible scores worked far better for me.
  - kaybe 13y ago
    I highlight to read the light grey comments, which works very well (when you have a mouse).
pbhjpbhj 13y ago
"This" posts here are different to those elsewhere. There is currently no way to indicate succinctly your support for a comment except to the commenter. With scores hidden how can I indicate my support for a position quickly in a way that is visible to all users "This.". Some comments of this form are very useful.

king_magic 13y ago

Is this really a problem that HN has, though? I mean, yeah, occasionally, you'll see stuff like that. But anecdotally, I'd say it's definitely the exception. The type of comment you're talking about ("This.") feels like an invented boogeyman used to justify overly harsh censorship by the Party (the HN karma elite). I'm not saying HN is perfect as it is now - it's not - but personally, I feel the a greater problem lies with the quality of submissions rather than the quality of comments. Frankly, I'd rather see Pending Submissions instead of Pending Comments.

virtuabhi 13y ago

No offense but your argument is quite similar to UK's internet censorship law. Hey you don't want CP (in your case "trendy catch phrase"), so we should have a level of censorship (moderated comments). And in no time the system becomes the oppressor of free speech and flow of information. Also please note that the earlier system had upvotes/downvotes for comments. Through votes the community can decide the type of contribution it deems valid.

RogerL 13y ago

We don't have that problem here. Notice my argument was not for anarchy. Back to signal processing for a moment, I used 'noise' loosely. Signals of interest have noise and signal interspersed. It is often trivial to filter out pure noise, such as white noise. In forums, our white noise is 'this' comments, and we trivially filter those out with downvoting, and I suspect it is not particularly hard to write some lisp code to require endorsement for, say, one word or one sentence replies, and prevent the 'post' button from working if the text is 'this' in any variant. But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal. Sure, there may be snarkiness there, or not the most civil tone, but we have doing a good job of handling that on a personal level - in the form of replies such as "RogerL, your post, while interesting, is a bit negative. We strive for better here". I see that all the time (well, not addressed to me, but you know what I mean). That is wonderful. Regardless, there is still a lot of signal there. I have my settings set so that I can see hellbanned people. They are all posting things of value, even the one person with the religious content occasionally posts something worth reading. It is true that there will be no set group of moderators. I don't see how that changes the fundamental equation, but it might. As I said, I haven't formed any solid conclusion, but my gut reaction is that I don't think I feel like participating in endorsement. If we have a quality problem, it is one of submissions, of bad titles, not of 'this' comments.

mbesto 13y ago
I read your original well-thought post, really insightful. My counterpoint is that you perhaps failed to address if noise is even the problem. IMO noise is not the problem on HN, it's the dilution of signalling on HN. There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. In order for this to work, you need a (1) mechanism for the an individual to tell the community that a particular story or comment is worth it to the community (we have this, but it's partially broken on stories since you can't downvote, only flag) and (2) you need a community that is motivated to protect the community. The problem I see is number 2. The community is now full of people who don't want the community to succeed - they want themselves to succeed. Are there people who want to see the community as a whole progress, sure. But as the community grows it means more people trying to climb the ladder (karma) and gain more influence. Influence is powerful here, we can't simply pretend it doesn't exist. > But if somebody puts a paragraph or more of time into a reply, well, that is not noise. It is signal. It depends on what you're measuring. A paragraph of time doesn't mean the post isn't any higher value to someone. If I'm at a rock festival and the stage that Nickelback are on is louder than the one that Rolling stone is at, it doesn't mean I necessarily want to hear Nickelback. IMO, without curators, it's pretty much impossible for human beings to even discern their own signal-to-noise ratios. Maybe I might hear that one Nickelback song and fall in love, I don't know? EDIT: grammar
- RogerL 13y ago
  I guess my main question is what is pg seeing that he doesn't like? He stated that comment quality was 'higher' after he turned this on briefly. I honestly have no idea what this means as it lacks specificity. From there I went with what the main complaints of posters in this thread and the other thread were complaining about. Vacuous comments, puns, and the like. I must admit to a high tolerance and enjoyment of witty zingers, so long as they don't dominate the discussion, so that colors my view re noise/signal.
- 300bps 13y ago
  There are two ways to identify signals on HN, upvote and downvote. There are actually three. Upvotes, downvotes and moderation. The moderators seem to be very active on HN. Turn on the "Show Dead" option on your account and you'll see a half dozen people every day that post comments, blissfully unaware that nobody is ever seeing them. Many of them are actually insightful comments, but because they posted something that rubbed someone the wrong way at some point in the past, they're hellbanned for eternity. This particular account of mine is about a year old, has almost 4,000 comment karma and it seems to have been slowbanned a few months ago. I have no idea what I might have done to get a slowban and honestly just suffer through the 10-12 second page loads when I'm logged in. If I'm not logged in, I get subsecond page load times. If I'm logged in with an alternate account, I get the same subsecond page load times. It's only when I'm logged in with this particular ID that I get 10-12 second page load times. From what I can see, moderation is the far bigger influence of identifying signals on HN than up/down voting.

genwin 13y ago

There is already a "downvote to gray-out" feature for that, that works fine for the few comments like that.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
"Downvote to grey-out" is lame IMO. Harming readability as an indication that a post doesn't contribute is very poor - it's hard to tell how much it's been downvoted, it's hard to read (some of us want to read what are often simply dissenting comments rather than non-contributing comments). Visible scores worked far better for me.
- kaybe 13y ago
  I highlight to read the light grey comments, which works very well (when you have a mouse).

pbhjpbhj 13y ago

"This" posts here are different to those elsewhere. There is currently no way to indicate succinctly your support for a comment except to the commenter. With scores hidden how can I indicate my support for a position quickly in a way that is visible to all users "This.". Some comments of this form are very useful.