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An Update on HN Comments

339 points by sama 13y ago

Several people have mentioned to me that the comments on Hacker News seem much better recently, and asked me what changed. As far as I can tell, two of our experiments are working. The first is posting feedback in the threads about what's good and bad for HN comments. Right now, dang is the only one doing this, but other moderators may in the future. We've learned some things about how to do it: 1) the feedback should be as neutral as possible; 2) it should be about the comment, not the commenter; and 3) where possible, it should say what would make the comment better. Other HN users have been pitching in with feedback too, which is great! If you'd like to help, please do. Just try to follow the three guidelines above. The second experiment is a change we made to the comment scoring and ranking algorithms. These algorithms do more than just counting and sorting because pg wrote a lot of code to address systemic issues as they came up over the years. But the community doesn't stay static, so the algorithms shouldn't either. After studying the data, dang and kogir tuned the algorithms to make some downvotes more powerful. We've been monitoring the effects of this change, and it appears to be reducing toxic comments. The majority of HN users are thoughtful and nice. It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls (and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this). What dang and kogir found was a way to turn the volume up on this kind of downvote. We believe this has made the comment scores and rankings better reflect the community. We will be trying a lot more experiments. We'll stop the ones that don't work and continue the ones that do. dang and kogir, great work so far. I'm enjoying reading HN much more.

codegeek 13y ago
"make some downvotes more powerful." Yes this will be great. Any comment that has personal attacks,abusive language, racial slurs, trolling, off-topic self-promotion/marketing etc. should allow downvotes to be more powerful. Usually, comments like these get a lot of downvotes pretty quickly but I am sure there are a few who upvote those comments as well for their own reasons. May be comments like those should not be allowed upvotes once it reaches a number of downvotes ? Also, not sure if you guys already do this but really bad comments should be killed automatically once downvoted a certain number of times within a short time span ? Now, when it comes to unpopular comments which are not necessarily outright bad, I am sure those are tough to program because how do you handle the sudden upvotes and downvotes at the same time ?
- nickff 13y ago
  I have noticed that some unpopular opinions get many up and down votes; how should we treat these controversial comments? I am of the opinion that downvotes on previously positive-scored comments should be regarded as suspect.
  - stcredzero 13y ago
    I have noticed that some unpopular opinions get many up and down votes; how should we treat these controversial comments? I too, tend to post comments that immediately get about 3 downvotes then many more upvotes. It seems like I frequently elicit knee-jerk reactions, but then get support from others. (Who I think of as the smarter readers.)
    - tokenadult 13y ago
      Once in a while I post a comment that starts out in negative number territory before those smarter readers come along. :) But I think most of those cases are cases I encountered before the most recent algorithm change.
      - ronaldx 13y ago
        I wanted to add that I believe this to have gotten worse, perhaps since downvoting for disagreement has been more actively encouraged.
    - ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
      I get that too. When your comment gets negative votes it turns grey and attracts a lot of attention. More people read it out of curiosity to see what's so bad about it. In turn it attracts upvotes.
- brudgers 13y ago
  I've experienced minority view comments being hit with downvotes, so I'm not a fan of creating permanent statuses...or rather creating coarse rules for applying permanent status. It is also the case that comments with poor tone can be rehabilitated and getting people to edit poorly presented thoughts to be presented more clearly and directly.
minimaxir 13y ago
While on the subject of HN comments, I have a request: could the "avg" score for a user be readdressed? The avg score is the average amount of points from the previous X comments a user has made. However, this disincentivizes user from posting in new threads which are unlikely to receive upvotes. I've lessened my own commenting in new threads because of this.
- chavesn 13y ago
  It also appears to be a trimmed mean, removing outliers. That one amazing comment I made didn't seem to matter at all! I agree, it would be nice to address this, although I have a feeling I really shouldn't care.
- scott_s 13y ago
  I'm surprised that you would consciously not post comments to keep your average score up. The goal here is not the score; the goal is civil and interesting discussion. Comment scores are a means to achieve that goal. Anytime there is a proxy metric, quirky incentives will crop up. (Such as lines-of-code as a metric of productivity; time spent in office as metric of work commitment; comment average score as metric of contribution to civil and interesting discussion.) My hope would be that when possible, people would realize that the metric used is not the real goal, and make conscious choices which get us closer to the real goal, but are irrational if we only value the metric itself. I will also point out that your username was not lost on me.
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    It is relevant, however, if the avg metric is being used for the new HN algorithms.
    - dang 13y ago
      None of our recent changes consider avg. I personally never look at it and forgot it was even a thing.
      - deleted 13y ago
maaaats 13y ago
I like the new openness.
jseliger 13y ago
dang and kogir tuned the algorithms to make some downvotes more powerful. We've been monitoring the effects of this change, and it appears to be reducing toxic comments. That's interesting to me because I find myself downvoting much more often than I used to. But the comments I downvote are not that often toxic in the sense of being nasty. They're more often low-content or low-value comments that don't add to the conversation. The jerks and trolls are out there but I'm not positive they're most pernicious problem.
- Siecje 13y ago
  When do you get the ability to downvote?
  - arjie 13y ago
    Once you get 500 karma, you are able to down-vote (with certain restrictions).
    - chavesn 13y ago
      Yes, the restrictions are interesting -- I've personally noticed (corrections/additions welcome): - Cannot downvote comments in threads older than 24 hours - Cannot downvote comments in response to you
  - dang 13y ago
    The threshold has been 500 karma for years. We've got some ideas for lowering that, actually.
    - ajiang 13y ago
      I wonder whether being able to downvote makes you a more thoughtful commentor. Perhaps run an analysis on quality of comments (maybe as simple as avg. karma per comment) 400 to 500 vs. 500 to 600?
      - 13y ago
brudgers 13y ago
It might make sense to increase the amount of time in which a negativemy scored comment can be edited or deleted.
borat4prez 13y ago
Can I use the new HN comments algorithm on my new website? :)
pearjuice 13y ago
Can anyone explain to me how this is not putting the common denominator in more power even further? At this point, unless you extensively agree with the majority of the echo circle, I doubt you will be able to have any impact on discussions. Every thread is a rehearsal with same opinions at the top over and over and non-fitting opinions float to the bottom. In which turn, they get less "downvote-power" so they will stay low and can't get their peers above. I am not saying that the current flow of discussion is bad, I am just saying that participation is flawed. We are simply in a system where you get awarded to fit to the masses and you get more power once you have been accepted into the hive-mind. A circular-reference at some point.
- bertil 13y ago
  Find a comment that was well articulated and didn’t match what you consider the hive-mind; find as many as you can, really: show how those got more downvotes than similar comments matching the majority opinion, and less visibility as a consequence.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - pearjuice 13y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7481111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7481111 Here's one of them. I could spit through dozens of comments and put a whole list of comments here to satisfy your request further - but would it make a difference? It's well known (and probably verified research can confirm) that vote-systems adhere to common denominator circle-jerking.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      There's "out of the echo chamber", and then there's "fully out of the scope of HN", and debating the merits of Turkey's suppression of the Internet vis a vis the Internet as a conduit for western propaganda is "fully out of the scope of HN". There are good places to have that debate, and HN just isn't one of them.
rdl 13y ago
I wish there were multiple kinds of downvotes. "This is actually bad" (spam, etc.) vs. merely useless, vs. factually incorrect but reasonably presented. I mostly only downvote spam or abuse; I try to ignore "no-op" comments, and would rather reply to someone with information about why they might be wrong vs. downvote, but I'm not sure if this is universal.
- ansible 13y ago
  I wish there were multiple kinds of downvotes. "This is actually bad" (spam, etc.) vs. merely useless, vs. factually incorrect but reasonably presented. There's arguments for and against that. On the one hand, we do want to minimize the mental effort put into making a valid vote by a good community member. Up/Down is the simplest, and it is mentally the easiest. When you ask someone to put that vote into a category, that person may or may not then choose to vote at all, and we've missed the opportunity to capture a bit of information. On the other hand, requiring a little bit more thinking effort may yield more information on average, and help better quality comments rise. We do kind of have a two-tier vote system now anyway. You can downvote a comment that is just crap. And you can flag a comment that is awful (spam, etc.).
  - rdl 13y ago
    Upvoting should be lightweight, but I'm ok with downvoting requiring slightly more effort (picking a reason). I probably upvote 20x more than I downvote, if not more. (this would be an interesting statistic to show the user on his own profile page, or even to make globally visible).
    - samstave 13y ago
      I have the same habit as you; almost exclusively upvote. But I do think that downvotes should require the downvoter to leave a comment-reply in order to downvote. As opposed to selecting from a menu of reasons; they need to actually type something.
      - 13y ago
Serow225 13y ago
Dang and friends, any chance of tweaking the layout so that it's not so easy to accidentally click the downvote button when using a mobile browser? This is commonly reported. Thanks!
- dang 13y ago
  We're going to release new markup that Kevin has designed that is more mobile-friendly. (Sorry, I don't have an ETA, but we're working on it.) When it comes out, please let us know if this is still a problem.
  - Serow225 13y ago
    Awesome, thanks!
  - Serow225 13y ago
    Dang, since this is already a meta/feedback-y topic, I'd like to add another request: consider giving YC employees /HN mods a distinctly colored username, similar to how the OP is shown in green. I'll probably lose all my cool points to admit this, but I didn't realize who 'sama' was that posted this thread :)
alain94040 13y ago
I'd love to able to fold a nested conversation once I think that particular branch is going nowhere. HN should treat the folding as a signal similar to a down vote on that particular sub-thread. I often don't think any particular comment warrants a down vote, so I have no way to tell HN that the thread should be pushed back. Plus everyone has been asking for a way to collapse sub-comments (and many plugins do it already).
- kijin 13y ago
  I would like the same feature, but for a different reason: The ability to collapse the top thread would help the next thread (and all subsequent threads) get some much needed visibility. Right now, the top comment and its replies often take up so much vertical space that I get tired before I ever get to the second thread.
- dang 13y ago
  Agreed. Something along these lines is very likely.
- krapp 13y ago
  Collapsible comments would be awesome, but having them count as a downvote wouldn't make sense to me. There are other reasons to want to fold a thread.
  - alain94040 13y ago
    Agreed, folding shouldn't count as a down vote. However, in aggregate, if 100 users all folded a thread around the same half-way point, it's telling you something.
    - krapp 13y ago
      Yes, but to me, it's still too ambiguous without correlating it to downvotes - there would be a lot of noise to sort through from people closing threads just because they've read them, or don't find them interesting but not necessarily objectionable, or whatever. Also, thread folding is reversible - maybe someone folds a thread but decides to periodically check it* if you count folded threads against it you have to recount every time someone reopens a thread as well. Downvotes, at least, are meant to be explicit and non-reversible, in that you can't directly un-downvote something (unless you can at some mystical karma level) I can see how in extreme cases it would be a signifier but I don't really see many of those cases which wouldn't also have a lot of downvotes anyway, so i'm thinking it would be repeated work. * a feature to let you peek at the last posted comment in a folded thread, btw, might be very handy...
lettergram 13y ago
"We believe this has made the comment scores and rankings better reflect the community." It would be interesting to see how you could actually change the community via comment filtering. For example, if some individuals are always posting negative comments and were previously not silenced. I wonder if now that they are being silenced if they would leave the community entirely, just keep posting and ignoring the results, or change their comments to fit the community.
bertil 13y ago
> specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this I would love to have more details about that: what do you define as minority, and how do you measure ‘silencing’.
Thrymr 13y ago
> posting feedback in the threads about what's good and bad for HN comments. Am I the only one who thinks that posting more meta-discussion directly in comments reduces the overall quality rather than increases it? Maybe a downvote should come with a chance to add an explanation that can be seen on a user's page or on a "meta" page, but not dilute the discussion itself.
- dang 13y ago
  Meta-comments do reduce quality—no question. They're almost always off-topic, and they have an insidious fascination that can easily take a thread into the weeds. All other things being equal, they're bad. These feedback comments are a special case, though. First, it's an experiment that we've always intended to be temporary. Second, there's reason to believe that what they destroy in local quality they more than make up for in systemic improvement. Third, I've noticed that—except when I've made a mistake—they almost always get no (or very few) replies.
mbillie1 13y ago
> The first is posting feedback in the threads about what's good and bad for HN comments. Right now, dang is the only one doing this, but other moderators may in the future. I've seen dang do this and I think it's actually quite effective. I'd love to see more of this.
- dang 13y ago
  Glad to hear it. What specifically makes you think it's effective?
  - mbillie1 13y ago
    I think HN is generally inhabited by intelligent but highly opinionated people. Sometimes an opinionated discussion can degenerate into a frivolous argument even between well-meaning parties. It's helpful to have input from someone whose aim is the furtherance of productive discussion. Often all it takes to turn a flamewar back into a reasonable debate is a prod in the right direction. Generally the argumentative parties (myself included, perhaps included foremost) were only carried away; many good conversations can be salvaged with a bit of third-party influence. Obviously this doesn't apply to trolling, etc., and I don't think heavy-handed modding is a solution, but at least in the threads I've seen you participate as a mediator, it has been beneficial.
robobro 13y ago
Thanks, guys - didn't come to say anything more
mfrommil 13y ago
I've always thought of upvote/downvote as a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" - do I like your comment? Sounds like the new algorithm penalizes disrespectful/spammy comments, rather than the "difference in opinion" comments (which is good). Could a 3rd option be added to differentiate this, though? Have option for upvote, downvote, and mark as spam (I'm thinking a "no" symbol).
kposehn 13y ago
I'm glad to hear that these changes seem to be working. One thing I am (slightly) concerned about is the occasional funny/witty/hilarious comment that will get downvoted into oblivion rapidly. It isn't necessarily that it is a troll posting, but maybe someone injecting a bit of humor. That said, I do understand if the mods/community do not feel that witticisms have as great an importance on HN - yes, seriously - so this is not a criticism, just an observation.
- chavesn 13y ago
  I've thought about this a little bit lately, and I've started to believe that it may be difficult to have both; if you let "funny" start to be valued, then it quickly overtakes the other values. Having spent quite a bit of time on both Reddit comment threads and HN threads, sometimes on the same topics, I find the earnestness and thoughfulness of HN extremely refreshing. At reddit, I feel momentarily amused but then I'm left empty from the total flippancy and lack of substance.
  - gus_massa 13y ago
    I think that most of the “funny” comments usually decrease the signal to noise ratio. But I have a personal rule of not downvoting them when they are already gray. I only downvote gray comments if they are very offensive.
- aaron987 13y ago
  One of the things I love about HN is the lack of people trying to be funny. Between Twitter, Facebook, G+, <insert social media outlet>, there are plenty of places I can go to laugh. But HN is one of the few places where I can get top-notch news with input from a lot of smart people, as well as intelligent, civil discussions even when people disagree. I'm happier without the witty comments.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  On HN, humour is almost only ever desired if it's in combination with other content. If someone injecting a bit of humour is not quickly downvoted, then others start throwing out their "witticisms" and things degrade rather quickly. Better to nip it in the bud and potentially upset someone making an innocent comment than to have things overrun.
biot 13y ago
Will there ever be the ability to upvote a story without it going into your "Saved stories" section? 99% of the time I upvote a story it's because I want to save it for future reference. I'd like the ability to upvote (and downvote) stories based on whether they're HN-worthy without it impacting the "Saved stories" section.
- gautambay 13y ago
  i inadvertently found a workaround when i installed the pocket chrome extension -- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pocket-formerly-read-it-l/niloccemoadcdkdjlinkgdfekeahmflj?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pocket-formerly-re... i now see an "add to pocket" link next to every HN story, so i am able to separate voting and saving for later (albeit on a different app).
- mindcrime 13y ago
  Yeah, I'd also love to see a separate "save" feature and split out "upvote" from "save". I upvote a lot of stories just to put them in the "read this later" list (which is how I view "saved stories") when I might not other upvote them and give them an explicit endorsement.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    "I think this is worth reading" seems like a high enough bar for endorsement. I guess it is at least a higher bar than is used for many of the votes for stories that already end up on the front page.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      Controversial topics create a problem. People should be reading more than one viewpoint on them. But submitting multiple stories creates duplication issues. A 'save' function would allow people to increase access to information without promoting the visibility of the topic on the front page.
- dang 13y ago
camus2 13y ago
In my opinion,just like SO, downvotes should actually cost Karma. Yes sometimes some messages are just bad and trolling but sometimes people get downvoted just because they dont "go with the flow",and they have unpopular ideas. So if a downvote cost 2 , the downvoter should lose 1 for instance. And please dont downvote me just because you disagree. EDIT: just proved my point,why am I being downvoted? it was a simple suggestion yet,someone downvoted me,just because he can and it's free. I was not trolling or anything... I just wanted to participate the debate.
- xanderstrike 13y ago
  I don't think I agree with this. Remember that downvotes on SO only have a cost when they're cast on answers, not questions, and that cost is a fraction of the gain from an upvote (1/2 for suggested edits to 1/10 answers). It makes sense for downvotes to be free on questions and expensive on answers because questions are low effort while answers are high effort, and the community wants to encourage more answers. On HN, everything is low effort, and everything is worth 1 point. Also, our problem with comments isn't that we don't have enough, it's that we have too many low effort/factually incorrect/abusive/spammy comments that we need to discourage. So it makes sense to keep downvotes free.
abdullahkhalids 13y ago
It would be interesting if you published stats for each user: how often they upvote and downvote compared to the average for starters. It would also be useful to know how often other people upvote (downvote) the comments I upvote (downvote). These stats should only be privately viewable.
bravura 13y ago
I appreciate the changes. But while we're on the topic, could I throw out a thought? It should be easier for a late-arriver on a post to add a useful comment, and have it be promoted. Have you considered using randomization to adjust the score of certain comments? HN comments seem to exhibit a rich-get-richer phenomenon. One early comment that is highly rated can dominate the top of the thread. (I will note that, qualitatively, this doesn't seem as bad as a few months ago.) The problem with this approach is that late commenters are less likely to be able to meaningfully contribute to a discussion, because their comment is likely to be buried. One thing interesting about the way FB feed appears to work is that they use randomization to test the signal strength of new posts. Have you considered using randomization in where to display a comment? By adding variation, you should be able to capture more information from voters about the proper eventual location for a comment. It also means more variation is presented to people who are monitoring a post's comments.
- dang 13y ago
  One new experiment we're currently working on is something like that for stories. If it works for stories, we may try a variation for comments.
  - argumentum 13y ago
    Maybe this is what you're thinking of, but instead of randomly altering the actual score, how about randomizing just the position on a per page view per user basis? I.e. a particular comment/story has it's normal score + X% chance of being promoted to somewhere near the top. You can vary X depending on age & actual score. This seems much easier to implement, and many more stories/comments would get exposure (each to fewer users).
  - dfc 13y ago
    So there is something that is different with the ranking/presentation of stories? Recently I have noticed that the front page will look dramatically different (story wise) than it did five minutes ago. By dramatically different I do not mean story #3 is #15 five minutes later, but that stories #2-12 will be completely different some of which I remember reading 8 hours before.
chimeracoder 13y ago
> The majority of HN users are thoughtful and nice. It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls I have to say, I'm a bit confused now. Aren't "trolls" the sorts of comments that are supposed to be flagged[0]? (I understand that spam is meant to be flagged, but HN gets very few true spam comments[1]). What is the difference between downvoting and flagging for comments specifically - and more importantly, what comments should be downvoted? I've read conflicting arguments (both sides quoting pg, incidentally) that disagree on whether or not downvotes should be used to signify disagreement, or whether one should downvote comments that are on-topic but have little substance (ie, most one-liners). [0] I guess this depends on your definition of "troll", but I think a well-executed troll is similar to Poe's law: the reader can't tell whether the commenter is being flippant/rude or sincere. In other words, it's just enough to bait someone into responding, without realizing immediately that it's a worthless comment. [1] eg, ads for substances one ingests to change the size of a particular masculine organ, or (less blatantly) direct promotions for off-topic products.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Do both, flag and downvote. Think of flagging as something used by data-mining that the moderators are doing offline; when you flag something, you're calling it to their attention. Not every bad comment needs to be brought to the mods attention, so be a little bit thoughtful. But not too much; my understanding is that not enough people are flagging.
  - chimeracoder 13y ago
    Out of curiosity, do you (personally) downvote either comments that you disagree with (e.g. "We should all be using DNSSEC for better security"), or comments that are factually incorrect (e.g. "Heartbleed was caused by incorrect use of null-terminated strings in C")? (I assume neither of these are inherently flag-worthy assuming they're made in earnest and not egregious).
    - tptacek 13y ago
      I try not to downvote disagreement, except when I feel like downvoting will keep me from writing a boring disagreeable comment.
larrys 13y ago
"It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls" Most people know what a jerk is. Perhaps though you (and others) could define what a troll is for the purpose of interpreting this statement. (Of course I know the online definition [1] but think that there seems to be much latitude in "extraneous, or off-topic messages" or "starting arguments".) Specifically also from [1]: "Application of the term troll is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial." While as mentioned I know what a jerk is, I can also see very easily someone throwing out "troll" to stifle someone else in more or less a parental way. That is to nominalize something as simply not important or worth even of discussion. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29
- dang 13y ago
  The more I think about it, the more it seems like a mistake to nail these terms down precisely. If we try to, then whenever a comment doesn't match the definition, people will argue that it must be ok because it doesn't technically break the guidelines. That's not what we want to encourage. We want HN to be motivated by the spirit of the law more more than its letter. It's true that "troll" is particularly ill-defined. Perhaps we can try not to use that word. I like the phrase "toxic comments" because, while imprecise, it conveys what those do to the ecosystem. In practice, I'm not sure this is as big a problem as it seems. As Sam pointed out, the bulk of the community has little trouble recognizing these things.
  - cbhl 13y ago
    I think some of the lessons from "Raising a Moral Child" from two days ago fit here. We tell people "don't be a jerk or troll", but when an individual makes a toxic comment, we tell them "you're a good person, even if you wrote a toxic comment, and we know you can do better".
  - Serow225 13y ago
    I like "toxic" too.
Bahamut 13y ago
I've seen plenty of downvotes around from people who didn't understand what was being said/wanting to exert opinions. To be honest, that partly gets me to just not want to contribute thoughts since they may be unpopular/do not jive with a hive mentality, and has gotten me to visit the site less for the comments, especially with the recent tweaks. It'd be nice if something could be figured out to discourage this behavior through reduction of the value of the downvotes of such, especially if a comment has not had a response to explain the downvote.
- doktrin 13y ago
  Expressing disagreement by down-voting is actively encouraged. I'm not a fan of it.
- illuminate 13y ago
  If you can phrase them interestingly and insightfully, they're not going to be downvoted into oblivion. Perhaps you should put in the effort to explain them to the uninitiated and you might change the dominant opinion? Otherwise it seems like a hit and run for many people, from the outside.
User8712 13y ago
Are comments ever deleted or hidden from view completely? I've been reading HN for a year or two, and I've never noticed an issue with comment quality. In topics with a larger number of comments, you get one or two heavily downvoted posts, but that's it. My question, is there an issue with comments I'm not seeing? Do the popular topics on the homepage have dozens of spam or troll comments that are pruned out constantly, so I don't notice the problem? Or is the issue those 1 or 2 downvoted comments I mentioned earlier? HN receives a small number of comments, so fine tuning algorithms isn't a big deal in my opinion. This isn't Reddit, where the number one post right now has 4,000 comments. That presents a lot of complications, since they need to try and cycle new comments so they all receive some visibility, allowing them a chance to rise if they're of high quality. On HN, you have 20 comments, or 50 comments, so regardless of the sorting, nearly everything gets read. As long as HN generally sorts comments, they're fine.
- dang 13y ago
  There are two ways for comments to be hidden from view. One is "dead" and the other "deleted". Comments can end up "dead" for a variety of reasons (such as if the commenter is banned), but they're not really hidden—you can turn "show dead" on in your profile to make them appear. "Deleted" comments are hidden, but much less common. If a comment is deleted it almost always means that the author removed it or (very rarely) asked us to remove it later for a compelling reason. When we talk about toxic and other low-quality comments, though, we're only concerned about comments that are live on the page. So yes, you are seeing them. I'm glad they haven't been spoiling HN for you! Personally I think the fading out of negatively scored comments is one of the best design choices PG ever made for the site. I once told him that, and he expressed surprise and said he never sees it. (The admin version of the software doesn't do any fading.)
  - amirmc 13y ago
    > "Personally I think the fading out of negatively scored comments is one of the best design choices PG ever made for the site. I once told him that, and he expressed surprise and said he never sees it. (The admin version of the software doesn't do any fading.)" I concur. It makes a big difference to how I read the site and react to comments, especially since comment scores are not visible. I'm kinda surprised that pg (as an admin) didn't experience this.
dkarapetyan 13y ago
Awesome. Keep up the good work. I am definitely enjoying the new HN much more. The quality of articles is way up and the comment noise is way down.
stormbrew 13y ago
Something that I've been finding lately is that replies to my posts have been downvoted when to me they're fairly reasonable disagreements with what I said. I've actually taken to upvoting replies to me that go grey a lot of the time, even though I don't particularly agree with what they're saying. To me it seems like a lot more stuff is getting downvoted than used to, and I'm not sure I see a meaningful pattern in the places I see it happening.
- dang 13y ago
  What you're seeing is a side-effect of the changes kogir and I made to the algorithms, and we share your concern about it. We're watching the negatively scored comments closely to see how much of a problem this is. The fact that this change has had the huge benefit of reducing toxic comments does not make it 100% salutary in every respect. My current sense is that about 1% of the negatively scored comments don't deserve it. In most cases, though, when users passing by see a slightly-faded-out comment, they identify unfairness and upvote it back to par. I do that a lot myself. If enough people do this, it's the ideal solution to the problem—community practice is better than intervention. If it isn't enough, we'll eventually do more.
  - personZ 13y ago
    >My current sense is that about 1% of the negatively scored comments don't deserve it. There is a profoundly strong confirmation bias going on in this whole thread. Not only from you and the other mods (have comments gotten better? Comments, in my opinion, have gotten significantly worse. Yes, they're "nice", but more often than not of absolutely zero information or value), but much of the feedback you get whenever you post is of the pandering, supportive, back-patting sort. Because really, what is the alternative? The likely hellbanning or slowbanning that is so often the resort of HN? For years the same "we're tuning algorithms" argument has been plied on HN. It is transparent, and I'm surprised anyone actually still buys that.
    - dang 13y ago
      I think I'll stick up for us a little bit here. I said "my current sense" because I like to be cautious. But I literally look at every single negatively scored comment on the site—a task akin to walking through slop—watching for cases where the downvoted comment was both substantive and civil. There aren't many of them, in my view. 1% is an overestimate. If you think I'm wrong, let's see some examples. They ought to be easy to find. Lame comments that aren't rude but just mediocre are also a problem, and one which has been growing for years. That's not really what Sam's post was about, though. We can't solve every problem at once; we don't even know yet what will help with that one. One thing that would not have helped, though, is allowing toxic comments to run rampant. HN already lost some good users because it was heading that way, and we weren't about to let that keep happening. Edit: By the way, since kogir and I made this scoring change, noticeably fewer accounts have been getting banned.
specialk 13y ago
I find the idea that commenters with higher karma having more powerful down-votes slightly disconcerting. My fear is that if people down-vote comments that are well meaning and relevant but they disagree content we will only ever see one train of thought rise to the top of comment threads. This could start a vicious cycle where voting cabals of power-users form. For example if Idea X becomes popular among some members of HN they will be able to always steer the discussion to talk about Idea X or down-vote a competing valid Idea Y into oblivion. Comment readers could be converted to Idea X, as it is always appearing at the top of relevant comment threads. So now the voting cabal as even more members. Growing the dislike of Idea Y. The cycle then repeats. The discussion is then steered over time by the thoughts of a select few power-users. Maybe this is just the natural order of things and I'm subconsciously afraid of change. Thoughts?
- ibejoeb 13y ago
  Do we know it's directly karma-driven? I'd hope it's more statistical, e.g., downvote to other activity ratio. I'd think that people who downvote very infrequently probably mean it. On that topic, I'd really love to see downvotes with an accompanying comment weighted somehow.
  - dang 13y ago
    It's not karma-driven at all, except insofar as downvoting itself requires a karma threshold—a restriction that has been the same for years. It's possible that we'll lower the threshold at some point.
    - specialk 13y ago
      Thanks so much for the response. Can you tell us more about the algorithmic changes, or is the HN source code public?
joshlegs 13y ago
Wow. I am overly happy that you guys have figured out a way to give commenting feedback. i had an account way back when shadowbanned for i never knew what reason. Still dont. I feel like if this system had have been implemented back then I would have had a better idea of what was wrong that I said. Also, I'm pretty sure you've found the secrets to good Internet moderatorship. So many forums went offcourse from ban-happy moderators that didnt want to actually take the time to moderate the community, instead just banhammering people. Kudos to you guys
onmydesk 13y ago
"We believe this has made the comment scores and rankings better reflect the community." Is that desirable? A better debate surely entails more than one opinion. I also don't know what a 'jerk' is, someone that disagrees with the group think? I just don't think its that big a problem. But thats just one opinion that might differ from the collective and therefore must have no merit? An odd place. Over engineering! To be expected I suppose.
- dang 13y ago
  The issue isn't community opinion. The community doesn't have an opinion. It's divided. What we're talking about here is the community's sense of basic good conduct: for example, that it's bad to be personally aggressive to other users. On this, fortunately, we're not nearly so divided. I don't think "groupthink" is the right word for that, because there are few views, if any, that cannot be expressed in a substantive and civil way. Minority opinion, reasonably and politely expressed, doesn't do too badly here. Some negatively scored comments do fall into this category—not much more than 1-2%, if that many. That's something we care about and watch for, and may try to do something systematic about, though in practice it's usually enough for a few fair-minded users to upvote those comments back to par. Far more common is that people post comments which aren't substantive and civil, and then, upon getting downvoted, complain that groupthink is suppressing them.
- onmydesk 13y ago
  Downvoted already! hilarious!
  - olivier1664 13y ago
    IMO, this downvote show you are right.
- cbhl 13y ago
  Users can turn on "showdead", which will allow them to see all comments (and upvote them, if necessary). In general, disagreeing is just fine; one can do so in a polite way. Being a 'jerk' usually entails disagreeing and being vitriolic about it. (An example of this is insulting the person rather than addressing why one disagrees with the arguments in the comment itself.)
aaronetz 13y ago
I have noticed that people oftentimes downvote because of disagreement, even when the comment seems to be okay (to my eyes at least). How about eliminating the downvote, leaving only the "flag" which makes it clearer that it should not be used for disagreement? It would also make comments more consistent with top-level stories (which I sometimes think of as "root-level comments".)
darkstar999 13y ago
When (if ever) do I get a downvote button?
- hashx 13y ago
  Karma threshold for downvoting is around 500
  - darkstar999 13y ago
    Thanks.
mck- 13y ago
May I also suggest an update to the flamewar trigger algorithm? Or at least this is what led me to believe it is a flamewar trigger [1] Oftentimes a post is doing really well [2], accumulating a dozen up votes within 30 minutes, jumping up the front-page, but then because of two comments, it gets penalized to the third page. I can see it being triggered when there are 40 comments, but there seems to be an awfully low first trigger? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204766 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578670
zatkin 13y ago
I recently joined Hacker News, and actually read through the guidelines before making an account. If there was one area where I feel that anything convinced me to be smart about what I post, it would be those guidelines.
- ballard 13y ago
  Signals FTW.
- dang 13y ago
  Well, fancy that: it worked! Sounds like you'll get on fine here.
- gargarplex 13y ago
  Just FYI, that first comma usage is erroneous. http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/03/david-foster-wallace-common-word-usage-mistakes/ http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/03/david-foster-wallace...
aspensmonster 13y ago
Edit: So this comment is already "autodead" ; This is exactly the kind of shit I'm talking about. >The majority of HN users are thoughtful and nice. It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls (and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this). What dang and kogir found was a way to turn the volume up on this kind of downvote. I suppose that explains why the effects of downvotes on my past comments are persisting for weeks, regardless of the content of comments that come after. Heck, it explains everything about my experience on HN for the past three weeks or so. Story time! I was recently met with a torrent of downvotes --nearly 100, might have actually crossed that-- for poking fun at HN's incessant we're-not-reddit-we're-much-more-sophisticated circlejerking (the irony is not lost). I'm specifically referring to this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491170 It was an announcement that Valve was open-sourcing its fork of Mesa. Someone made a HL3 confirmed chain: Mesa -> Black Mesa -> Half-Life -> Half-Life 3 CONFIRMED etc etc. That it was a story about Valve only helped, and so I cheerfully advised this commenter not to distract Gaben from Left 4 Dead 3. I was downvoted and I proceeded to taunt the hivemind. Indeed I felt quite gleeful that I managed to hit the floor of "-4" for each of the comments whilst my total karma counter continued to decrement. There were even others that saw fit to traverse my past comments and downvote those too. I'm sure those comments deserved it; they must have been off-topic or non-substantive or out-of-scope. Of course, the Rules of HN are such that you can't complain about downvoting. You cannot incite people to downvote you either. So yes, "shame on me" for not engaging in the proper circlejerking motions. Shame on me for continually pointing out this community's obsession over being the "glorious master race" of online discussion whilst poo-pooing the cesspools of "filthy casuals" like Reddit or, god forbid, Slashdot. "Shame on me" for partaking in the memes of any culture other than HN's. I should know better. Those are "low/no-content" things. They are "not substantive." Or my personal favorite: they are "outside the scope of HN." There's always some excuse that the hivemind will come to a consensus on. The net effect is thus: * I now get to wait several seconds for a page load, as if I were shadow banned. Who knows. Maybe I am :D Viewing the website without a logged-in session produces immediate page loads. * Any comment I submit, regardless of length, is lucky to make it more than a third of the way up from the bottom of the page to *start*. It seems my comments don't get to percolate from the top down any more. * My comments that do get upvotes never seem to rise past this point on the page. I'm sure someone will insist that I message the mods. I refuse. I'm not going to beg the censor to restore my speech privileges whilst he pulls a Putin and insists he's doing nothing of the sort. The mere suggestion is indicative of just how big a problem moderation of this sort really is. The algorithms and moderation behind HN are a black box and any suggestion to make it transparent is met with the resistance of an open circuit. I find it hard to believe that the Gods of HN are merely "silencing" the "jerks and trolls" whilst leaving the pure and unadulterated essence of HN to flourish. Perhaps this is all just a consequence of a single, massive downvote spike that torched my 5.0+ rating down to 1.14 (do I see 0.* yet?). I don't believe that. Between "pending" comments and the "downvote threshold" and the "flagging threshold" and the "we'll revoke your privileges if we please" attitude, I'd say things are exactly the way they want them to be. At this point, I really don't think I'm interested in continuing to be a part of HN. I don't want to continue to be a data point in some Big Data Miner's grand experiment to see just how organically he can manufacture consent. And I'm sure the hivemind will have no problem with that state of affairs. I'm just a perfect example of the system working as intended. It's not a bug. It's a feature. I'm the problem they're trying to solve. Etc etc etc... HN isn't trying to stave off an Eternal September. It's doing everything it can to never reach October.
Igglyboo 13y ago
Could we please get collapsible comments?
ballard 13y ago
Definitely gotta give you guys a standing ovation for yeomen's work.
gautambay 13y ago
>> and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this curious to learn how this analysis was conducted. e.g. how does HN determine which users belong to a minority groups?
darksim905 13y ago
Wait, you can downvote?
tedks 13y ago
>(and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this) How have you looked into this, and what have the results been? What efforts are you going to take to ensure it stays true in the future? There are other comments asking these questions that have so far not been answered; it would be good to answer them. It's very unsettling when people (primarily from a privileged/majority standpoint) proclaim that things "don't silence minority groups" and handwave the justification. In general I've found HN to be much more positive towards feminism in particular than similar communities like Reddit or others that I won't name, but the tech industry has large issues in this area and it's surprising to me that this would be the case. In particular, it seems likely to me that HN will selectively not-silence minority voices that tend to agree with the status quo or pander to majority voices. I'd be surprised if your analysis accounted for that, but I'd be very, very happy to be wrong.
olalonde 13y ago
I know it would be a pretty big experiment both technically and conceptually, but I will propose it just in case. I have noticed that usernames might influence the way I vote. What if usernames were not displayed in comments? Now this leads to two problems: 1) it makes it hard to follow who replied to what in threads 2) it makes it more tempting to post bad comments given the lack of accountability. I think the first problem could be solved by assigning users a per-submission temporary username picked at random from a name/word list. The second problem could be solved by linking those random usernames to the actual profile page of who posted (just like HN currently does). It wouldn't stop deliberate attempts at up/down voting specific users, but it would remove the unintentional bias.
chrisBob 13y ago
The biggest problem I see is that the combination of a threaded discussion and the strong ranking provides an incentive for replying to a another comment even if a new comment would be more appropriate. This, for example, is much more likely to be buried than if I replied a few comments down on the thread from bravura.
rickr 13y ago
Is there a template or example post for the first item? I've thought about doing this in the past but I didn't want to seem too elitist.
raverbashing 13y ago
I had a moderator intervention happen in one thread, however, I think the moderators, when speaking "on behalf of HN" should have a way to indicate that (like an indication on their username, or something similar) Otherwise it looks like anyone just decided to intervene.

339 points by sama 13y ago

codegeek 13y ago

"make some downvotes more powerful." Yes this will be great. Any comment that has personal attacks,abusive language, racial slurs, trolling, off-topic self-promotion/marketing etc. should allow downvotes to be more powerful. Usually, comments like these get a lot of downvotes pretty quickly but I am sure there are a few who upvote those comments as well for their own reasons. May be comments like those should not be allowed upvotes once it reaches a number of downvotes ? Also, not sure if you guys already do this but really bad comments should be killed automatically once downvoted a certain number of times within a short time span ? Now, when it comes to unpopular comments which are not necessarily outright bad, I am sure those are tough to program because how do you handle the sudden upvotes and downvotes at the same time ?

nickff 13y ago
I have noticed that some unpopular opinions get many up and down votes; how should we treat these controversial comments? I am of the opinion that downvotes on previously positive-scored comments should be regarded as suspect.
- stcredzero 13y ago
  I have noticed that some unpopular opinions get many up and down votes; how should we treat these controversial comments? I too, tend to post comments that immediately get about 3 downvotes then many more upvotes. It seems like I frequently elicit knee-jerk reactions, but then get support from others. (Who I think of as the smarter readers.)
  - tokenadult 13y ago
    Once in a while I post a comment that starts out in negative number territory before those smarter readers come along. :) But I think most of those cases are cases I encountered before the most recent algorithm change.
    - ronaldx 13y ago
      I wanted to add that I believe this to have gotten worse, perhaps since downvoting for disagreement has been more actively encouraged.
  - ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
    I get that too. When your comment gets negative votes it turns grey and attracts a lot of attention. More people read it out of curiosity to see what's so bad about it. In turn it attracts upvotes.
brudgers 13y ago
I've experienced minority view comments being hit with downvotes, so I'm not a fan of creating permanent statuses...or rather creating coarse rules for applying permanent status. It is also the case that comments with poor tone can be rehabilitated and getting people to edit poorly presented thoughts to be presented more clearly and directly.

minimaxir 13y ago

While on the subject of HN comments, I have a request: could the "avg" score for a user be readdressed? The avg score is the average amount of points from the previous X comments a user has made. However, this disincentivizes user from posting in new threads which are unlikely to receive upvotes. I've lessened my own commenting in new threads because of this.

chavesn 13y ago
It also appears to be a trimmed mean, removing outliers. That one amazing comment I made didn't seem to matter at all! I agree, it would be nice to address this, although I have a feeling I really shouldn't care.
scott_s 13y ago
I'm surprised that you would consciously not post comments to keep your average score up. The goal here is not the score; the goal is civil and interesting discussion. Comment scores are a means to achieve that goal. Anytime there is a proxy metric, quirky incentives will crop up. (Such as lines-of-code as a metric of productivity; time spent in office as metric of work commitment; comment average score as metric of contribution to civil and interesting discussion.) My hope would be that when possible, people would realize that the metric used is not the real goal, and make conscious choices which get us closer to the real goal, but are irrational if we only value the metric itself. I will also point out that your username was not lost on me.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  It is relevant, however, if the avg metric is being used for the new HN algorithms.
  - dang 13y ago
    None of our recent changes consider avg. I personally never look at it and forgot it was even a thing.
    - deleted 13y ago

maaaats 13y ago

I like the new openness.

jseliger 13y ago

dang and kogir tuned the algorithms to make some downvotes more powerful. We've been monitoring the effects of this change, and it appears to be reducing toxic comments. That's interesting to me because I find myself downvoting much more often than I used to. But the comments I downvote are not that often toxic in the sense of being nasty. They're more often low-content or low-value comments that don't add to the conversation. The jerks and trolls are out there but I'm not positive they're most pernicious problem.

Siecje 13y ago
When do you get the ability to downvote?
- arjie 13y ago
  Once you get 500 karma, you are able to down-vote (with certain restrictions).
  - chavesn 13y ago
    Yes, the restrictions are interesting -- I've personally noticed (corrections/additions welcome): - Cannot downvote comments in threads older than 24 hours - Cannot downvote comments in response to you
- dang 13y ago
  The threshold has been 500 karma for years. We've got some ideas for lowering that, actually.
  - ajiang 13y ago
    I wonder whether being able to downvote makes you a more thoughtful commentor. Perhaps run an analysis on quality of comments (maybe as simple as avg. karma per comment) 400 to 500 vs. 500 to 600?
    - 13y ago

brudgers 13y ago

It might make sense to increase the amount of time in which a negativemy scored comment can be edited or deleted.

borat4prez 13y ago

Can I use the new HN comments algorithm on my new website? :)

pearjuice 13y ago

Can anyone explain to me how this is not putting the common denominator in more power even further? At this point, unless you extensively agree with the majority of the echo circle, I doubt you will be able to have any impact on discussions. Every thread is a rehearsal with same opinions at the top over and over and non-fitting opinions float to the bottom. In which turn, they get less "downvote-power" so they will stay low and can't get their peers above. I am not saying that the current flow of discussion is bad, I am just saying that participation is flawed. We are simply in a system where you get awarded to fit to the masses and you get more power once you have been accepted into the hive-mind. A circular-reference at some point.

bertil 13y ago
Find a comment that was well articulated and didn’t match what you consider the hive-mind; find as many as you can, really: show how those got more downvotes than similar comments matching the majority opinion, and less visibility as a consequence.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- pearjuice 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7481111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7481111 Here's one of them. I could spit through dozens of comments and put a whole list of comments here to satisfy your request further - but would it make a difference? It's well known (and probably verified research can confirm) that vote-systems adhere to common denominator circle-jerking.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    There's "out of the echo chamber", and then there's "fully out of the scope of HN", and debating the merits of Turkey's suppression of the Internet vis a vis the Internet as a conduit for western propaganda is "fully out of the scope of HN". There are good places to have that debate, and HN just isn't one of them.

rdl 13y ago

I wish there were multiple kinds of downvotes. "This is actually bad" (spam, etc.) vs. merely useless, vs. factually incorrect but reasonably presented. I mostly only downvote spam or abuse; I try to ignore "no-op" comments, and would rather reply to someone with information about why they might be wrong vs. downvote, but I'm not sure if this is universal.

ansible 13y ago
I wish there were multiple kinds of downvotes. "This is actually bad" (spam, etc.) vs. merely useless, vs. factually incorrect but reasonably presented. There's arguments for and against that. On the one hand, we do want to minimize the mental effort put into making a valid vote by a good community member. Up/Down is the simplest, and it is mentally the easiest. When you ask someone to put that vote into a category, that person may or may not then choose to vote at all, and we've missed the opportunity to capture a bit of information. On the other hand, requiring a little bit more thinking effort may yield more information on average, and help better quality comments rise. We do kind of have a two-tier vote system now anyway. You can downvote a comment that is just crap. And you can flag a comment that is awful (spam, etc.).
- rdl 13y ago
  Upvoting should be lightweight, but I'm ok with downvoting requiring slightly more effort (picking a reason). I probably upvote 20x more than I downvote, if not more. (this would be an interesting statistic to show the user on his own profile page, or even to make globally visible).
  - samstave 13y ago
    I have the same habit as you; almost exclusively upvote. But I do think that downvotes should require the downvoter to leave a comment-reply in order to downvote. As opposed to selecting from a menu of reasons; they need to actually type something.
    - 13y ago

Serow225 13y ago

Dang and friends, any chance of tweaking the layout so that it's not so easy to accidentally click the downvote button when using a mobile browser? This is commonly reported. Thanks!

dang 13y ago
We're going to release new markup that Kevin has designed that is more mobile-friendly. (Sorry, I don't have an ETA, but we're working on it.) When it comes out, please let us know if this is still a problem.
- Serow225 13y ago
  Awesome, thanks!
- Serow225 13y ago
  Dang, since this is already a meta/feedback-y topic, I'd like to add another request: consider giving YC employees /HN mods a distinctly colored username, similar to how the OP is shown in green. I'll probably lose all my cool points to admit this, but I didn't realize who 'sama' was that posted this thread :)

alain94040 13y ago

I'd love to able to fold a nested conversation once I think that particular branch is going nowhere. HN should treat the folding as a signal similar to a down vote on that particular sub-thread. I often don't think any particular comment warrants a down vote, so I have no way to tell HN that the thread should be pushed back. Plus everyone has been asking for a way to collapse sub-comments (and many plugins do it already).

kijin 13y ago
I would like the same feature, but for a different reason: The ability to collapse the top thread would help the next thread (and all subsequent threads) get some much needed visibility. Right now, the top comment and its replies often take up so much vertical space that I get tired before I ever get to the second thread.
dang 13y ago
Agreed. Something along these lines is very likely.
krapp 13y ago
Collapsible comments would be awesome, but having them count as a downvote wouldn't make sense to me. There are other reasons to want to fold a thread.
- alain94040 13y ago
  Agreed, folding shouldn't count as a down vote. However, in aggregate, if 100 users all folded a thread around the same half-way point, it's telling you something.
  - krapp 13y ago
    Yes, but to me, it's still too ambiguous without correlating it to downvotes - there would be a lot of noise to sort through from people closing threads just because they've read them, or don't find them interesting but not necessarily objectionable, or whatever. Also, thread folding is reversible - maybe someone folds a thread but decides to periodically check it* if you count folded threads against it you have to recount every time someone reopens a thread as well. Downvotes, at least, are meant to be explicit and non-reversible, in that you can't directly un-downvote something (unless you can at some mystical karma level) I can see how in extreme cases it would be a signifier but I don't really see many of those cases which wouldn't also have a lot of downvotes anyway, so i'm thinking it would be repeated work. * a feature to let you peek at the last posted comment in a folded thread, btw, might be very handy...

lettergram 13y ago

"We believe this has made the comment scores and rankings better reflect the community." It would be interesting to see how you could actually change the community via comment filtering. For example, if some individuals are always posting negative comments and were previously not silenced. I wonder if now that they are being silenced if they would leave the community entirely, just keep posting and ignoring the results, or change their comments to fit the community.

bertil 13y ago

> specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this I would love to have more details about that: what do you define as minority, and how do you measure ‘silencing’.

Thrymr 13y ago

> posting feedback in the threads about what's good and bad for HN comments. Am I the only one who thinks that posting more meta-discussion directly in comments reduces the overall quality rather than increases it? Maybe a downvote should come with a chance to add an explanation that can be seen on a user's page or on a "meta" page, but not dilute the discussion itself.

dang 13y ago
Meta-comments do reduce quality—no question. They're almost always off-topic, and they have an insidious fascination that can easily take a thread into the weeds. All other things being equal, they're bad. These feedback comments are a special case, though. First, it's an experiment that we've always intended to be temporary. Second, there's reason to believe that what they destroy in local quality they more than make up for in systemic improvement. Third, I've noticed that—except when I've made a mistake—they almost always get no (or very few) replies.

mbillie1 13y ago

> The first is posting feedback in the threads about what's good and bad for HN comments. Right now, dang is the only one doing this, but other moderators may in the future. I've seen dang do this and I think it's actually quite effective. I'd love to see more of this.

dang 13y ago
Glad to hear it. What specifically makes you think it's effective?
- mbillie1 13y ago
  I think HN is generally inhabited by intelligent but highly opinionated people. Sometimes an opinionated discussion can degenerate into a frivolous argument even between well-meaning parties. It's helpful to have input from someone whose aim is the furtherance of productive discussion. Often all it takes to turn a flamewar back into a reasonable debate is a prod in the right direction. Generally the argumentative parties (myself included, perhaps included foremost) were only carried away; many good conversations can be salvaged with a bit of third-party influence. Obviously this doesn't apply to trolling, etc., and I don't think heavy-handed modding is a solution, but at least in the threads I've seen you participate as a mediator, it has been beneficial.

robobro 13y ago

Thanks, guys - didn't come to say anything more

mfrommil 13y ago

I've always thought of upvote/downvote as a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" - do I like your comment? Sounds like the new algorithm penalizes disrespectful/spammy comments, rather than the "difference in opinion" comments (which is good). Could a 3rd option be added to differentiate this, though? Have option for upvote, downvote, and mark as spam (I'm thinking a "no" symbol).

kposehn 13y ago

I'm glad to hear that these changes seem to be working. One thing I am (slightly) concerned about is the occasional funny/witty/hilarious comment that will get downvoted into oblivion rapidly. It isn't necessarily that it is a troll posting, but maybe someone injecting a bit of humor. That said, I do understand if the mods/community do not feel that witticisms have as great an importance on HN - yes, seriously - so this is not a criticism, just an observation.

chavesn 13y ago
I've thought about this a little bit lately, and I've started to believe that it may be difficult to have both; if you let "funny" start to be valued, then it quickly overtakes the other values. Having spent quite a bit of time on both Reddit comment threads and HN threads, sometimes on the same topics, I find the earnestness and thoughfulness of HN extremely refreshing. At reddit, I feel momentarily amused but then I'm left empty from the total flippancy and lack of substance.
- gus_massa 13y ago
  I think that most of the “funny” comments usually decrease the signal to noise ratio. But I have a personal rule of not downvoting them when they are already gray. I only downvote gray comments if they are very offensive.
aaron987 13y ago
One of the things I love about HN is the lack of people trying to be funny. Between Twitter, Facebook, G+, <insert social media outlet>, there are plenty of places I can go to laugh. But HN is one of the few places where I can get top-notch news with input from a lot of smart people, as well as intelligent, civil discussions even when people disagree. I'm happier without the witty comments.
MichaelGG 13y ago
On HN, humour is almost only ever desired if it's in combination with other content. If someone injecting a bit of humour is not quickly downvoted, then others start throwing out their "witticisms" and things degrade rather quickly. Better to nip it in the bud and potentially upset someone making an innocent comment than to have things overrun.

biot 13y ago

Will there ever be the ability to upvote a story without it going into your "Saved stories" section? 99% of the time I upvote a story it's because I want to save it for future reference. I'd like the ability to upvote (and downvote) stories based on whether they're HN-worthy without it impacting the "Saved stories" section.

gautambay 13y ago
i inadvertently found a workaround when i installed the pocket chrome extension -- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pocket-formerly-read-it-l/niloccemoadcdkdjlinkgdfekeahmflj?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pocket-formerly-re... i now see an "add to pocket" link next to every HN story, so i am able to separate voting and saving for later (albeit on a different app).
mindcrime 13y ago
Yeah, I'd also love to see a separate "save" feature and split out "upvote" from "save". I upvote a lot of stories just to put them in the "read this later" list (which is how I view "saved stories") when I might not other upvote them and give them an explicit endorsement.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  "I think this is worth reading" seems like a high enough bar for endorsement. I guess it is at least a higher bar than is used for many of the votes for stories that already end up on the front page.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    Controversial topics create a problem. People should be reading more than one viewpoint on them. But submitting multiple stories creates duplication issues. A 'save' function would allow people to increase access to information without promoting the visibility of the topic on the front page.
dang 13y ago

camus2 13y ago

In my opinion,just like SO, downvotes should actually cost Karma. Yes sometimes some messages are just bad and trolling but sometimes people get downvoted just because they dont "go with the flow",and they have unpopular ideas. So if a downvote cost 2 , the downvoter should lose 1 for instance. And please dont downvote me just because you disagree. EDIT: just proved my point,why am I being downvoted? it was a simple suggestion yet,someone downvoted me,just because he can and it's free. I was not trolling or anything... I just wanted to participate the debate.

xanderstrike 13y ago
I don't think I agree with this. Remember that downvotes on SO only have a cost when they're cast on answers, not questions, and that cost is a fraction of the gain from an upvote (1/2 for suggested edits to 1/10 answers). It makes sense for downvotes to be free on questions and expensive on answers because questions are low effort while answers are high effort, and the community wants to encourage more answers. On HN, everything is low effort, and everything is worth 1 point. Also, our problem with comments isn't that we don't have enough, it's that we have too many low effort/factually incorrect/abusive/spammy comments that we need to discourage. So it makes sense to keep downvotes free.

abdullahkhalids 13y ago

It would be interesting if you published stats for each user: how often they upvote and downvote compared to the average for starters. It would also be useful to know how often other people upvote (downvote) the comments I upvote (downvote). These stats should only be privately viewable.

bravura 13y ago

I appreciate the changes. But while we're on the topic, could I throw out a thought? It should be easier for a late-arriver on a post to add a useful comment, and have it be promoted. Have you considered using randomization to adjust the score of certain comments? HN comments seem to exhibit a rich-get-richer phenomenon. One early comment that is highly rated can dominate the top of the thread. (I will note that, qualitatively, this doesn't seem as bad as a few months ago.) The problem with this approach is that late commenters are less likely to be able to meaningfully contribute to a discussion, because their comment is likely to be buried. One thing interesting about the way FB feed appears to work is that they use randomization to test the signal strength of new posts. Have you considered using randomization in where to display a comment? By adding variation, you should be able to capture more information from voters about the proper eventual location for a comment. It also means more variation is presented to people who are monitoring a post's comments.

dang 13y ago
One new experiment we're currently working on is something like that for stories. If it works for stories, we may try a variation for comments.
- argumentum 13y ago
  Maybe this is what you're thinking of, but instead of randomly altering the actual score, how about randomizing just the position on a per page view per user basis? I.e. a particular comment/story has it's normal score + X% chance of being promoted to somewhere near the top. You can vary X depending on age & actual score. This seems much easier to implement, and many more stories/comments would get exposure (each to fewer users).
- dfc 13y ago
  So there is something that is different with the ranking/presentation of stories? Recently I have noticed that the front page will look dramatically different (story wise) than it did five minutes ago. By dramatically different I do not mean story #3 is #15 five minutes later, but that stories #2-12 will be completely different some of which I remember reading 8 hours before.

chimeracoder 13y ago

> The majority of HN users are thoughtful and nice. It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls I have to say, I'm a bit confused now. Aren't "trolls" the sorts of comments that are supposed to be flagged[0]? (I understand that spam is meant to be flagged, but HN gets very few true spam comments[1]). What is the difference between downvoting and flagging for comments specifically - and more importantly, what comments should be downvoted? I've read conflicting arguments (both sides quoting pg, incidentally) that disagree on whether or not downvotes should be used to signify disagreement, or whether one should downvote comments that are on-topic but have little substance (ie, most one-liners). [0] I guess this depends on your definition of "troll", but I think a well-executed troll is similar to Poe's law: the reader can't tell whether the commenter is being flippant/rude or sincere. In other words, it's just enough to bait someone into responding, without realizing immediately that it's a worthless comment. [1] eg, ads for substances one ingests to change the size of a particular masculine organ, or (less blatantly) direct promotions for off-topic products.

tptacek 13y ago
Do both, flag and downvote. Think of flagging as something used by data-mining that the moderators are doing offline; when you flag something, you're calling it to their attention. Not every bad comment needs to be brought to the mods attention, so be a little bit thoughtful. But not too much; my understanding is that not enough people are flagging.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you (personally) downvote either comments that you disagree with (e.g. "We should all be using DNSSEC for better security"), or comments that are factually incorrect (e.g. "Heartbleed was caused by incorrect use of null-terminated strings in C")? (I assume neither of these are inherently flag-worthy assuming they're made in earnest and not egregious).
  - tptacek 13y ago
    I try not to downvote disagreement, except when I feel like downvoting will keep me from writing a boring disagreeable comment.

larrys 13y ago

"It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls" Most people know what a jerk is. Perhaps though you (and others) could define what a troll is for the purpose of interpreting this statement. (Of course I know the online definition [1] but think that there seems to be much latitude in "extraneous, or off-topic messages" or "starting arguments".) Specifically also from [1]: "Application of the term troll is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial." While as mentioned I know what a jerk is, I can also see very easily someone throwing out "troll" to stifle someone else in more or less a parental way. That is to nominalize something as simply not important or worth even of discussion. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29

dang 13y ago
The more I think about it, the more it seems like a mistake to nail these terms down precisely. If we try to, then whenever a comment doesn't match the definition, people will argue that it must be ok because it doesn't technically break the guidelines. That's not what we want to encourage. We want HN to be motivated by the spirit of the law more more than its letter. It's true that "troll" is particularly ill-defined. Perhaps we can try not to use that word. I like the phrase "toxic comments" because, while imprecise, it conveys what those do to the ecosystem. In practice, I'm not sure this is as big a problem as it seems. As Sam pointed out, the bulk of the community has little trouble recognizing these things.
- cbhl 13y ago
  I think some of the lessons from "Raising a Moral Child" from two days ago fit here. We tell people "don't be a jerk or troll", but when an individual makes a toxic comment, we tell them "you're a good person, even if you wrote a toxic comment, and we know you can do better".
- Serow225 13y ago
  I like "toxic" too.

Bahamut 13y ago

I've seen plenty of downvotes around from people who didn't understand what was being said/wanting to exert opinions. To be honest, that partly gets me to just not want to contribute thoughts since they may be unpopular/do not jive with a hive mentality, and has gotten me to visit the site less for the comments, especially with the recent tweaks. It'd be nice if something could be figured out to discourage this behavior through reduction of the value of the downvotes of such, especially if a comment has not had a response to explain the downvote.

doktrin 13y ago
Expressing disagreement by down-voting is actively encouraged. I'm not a fan of it.
illuminate 13y ago
If you can phrase them interestingly and insightfully, they're not going to be downvoted into oblivion. Perhaps you should put in the effort to explain them to the uninitiated and you might change the dominant opinion? Otherwise it seems like a hit and run for many people, from the outside.

User8712 13y ago

Are comments ever deleted or hidden from view completely? I've been reading HN for a year or two, and I've never noticed an issue with comment quality. In topics with a larger number of comments, you get one or two heavily downvoted posts, but that's it. My question, is there an issue with comments I'm not seeing? Do the popular topics on the homepage have dozens of spam or troll comments that are pruned out constantly, so I don't notice the problem? Or is the issue those 1 or 2 downvoted comments I mentioned earlier? HN receives a small number of comments, so fine tuning algorithms isn't a big deal in my opinion. This isn't Reddit, where the number one post right now has 4,000 comments. That presents a lot of complications, since they need to try and cycle new comments so they all receive some visibility, allowing them a chance to rise if they're of high quality. On HN, you have 20 comments, or 50 comments, so regardless of the sorting, nearly everything gets read. As long as HN generally sorts comments, they're fine.

dang 13y ago
There are two ways for comments to be hidden from view. One is "dead" and the other "deleted". Comments can end up "dead" for a variety of reasons (such as if the commenter is banned), but they're not really hidden—you can turn "show dead" on in your profile to make them appear. "Deleted" comments are hidden, but much less common. If a comment is deleted it almost always means that the author removed it or (very rarely) asked us to remove it later for a compelling reason. When we talk about toxic and other low-quality comments, though, we're only concerned about comments that are live on the page. So yes, you are seeing them. I'm glad they haven't been spoiling HN for you! Personally I think the fading out of negatively scored comments is one of the best design choices PG ever made for the site. I once told him that, and he expressed surprise and said he never sees it. (The admin version of the software doesn't do any fading.)
- amirmc 13y ago
  > "Personally I think the fading out of negatively scored comments is one of the best design choices PG ever made for the site. I once told him that, and he expressed surprise and said he never sees it. (The admin version of the software doesn't do any fading.)" I concur. It makes a big difference to how I read the site and react to comments, especially since comment scores are not visible. I'm kinda surprised that pg (as an admin) didn't experience this.

dkarapetyan 13y ago

Awesome. Keep up the good work. I am definitely enjoying the new HN much more. The quality of articles is way up and the comment noise is way down.

stormbrew 13y ago

Something that I've been finding lately is that replies to my posts have been downvoted when to me they're fairly reasonable disagreements with what I said. I've actually taken to upvoting replies to me that go grey a lot of the time, even though I don't particularly agree with what they're saying. To me it seems like a lot more stuff is getting downvoted than used to, and I'm not sure I see a meaningful pattern in the places I see it happening.

dang 13y ago
What you're seeing is a side-effect of the changes kogir and I made to the algorithms, and we share your concern about it. We're watching the negatively scored comments closely to see how much of a problem this is. The fact that this change has had the huge benefit of reducing toxic comments does not make it 100% salutary in every respect. My current sense is that about 1% of the negatively scored comments don't deserve it. In most cases, though, when users passing by see a slightly-faded-out comment, they identify unfairness and upvote it back to par. I do that a lot myself. If enough people do this, it's the ideal solution to the problem—community practice is better than intervention. If it isn't enough, we'll eventually do more.
- personZ 13y ago
  >My current sense is that about 1% of the negatively scored comments don't deserve it. There is a profoundly strong confirmation bias going on in this whole thread. Not only from you and the other mods (have comments gotten better? Comments, in my opinion, have gotten significantly worse. Yes, they're "nice", but more often than not of absolutely zero information or value), but much of the feedback you get whenever you post is of the pandering, supportive, back-patting sort. Because really, what is the alternative? The likely hellbanning or slowbanning that is so often the resort of HN? For years the same "we're tuning algorithms" argument has been plied on HN. It is transparent, and I'm surprised anyone actually still buys that.
  - dang 13y ago
    I think I'll stick up for us a little bit here. I said "my current sense" because I like to be cautious. But I literally look at every single negatively scored comment on the site—a task akin to walking through slop—watching for cases where the downvoted comment was both substantive and civil. There aren't many of them, in my view. 1% is an overestimate. If you think I'm wrong, let's see some examples. They ought to be easy to find. Lame comments that aren't rude but just mediocre are also a problem, and one which has been growing for years. That's not really what Sam's post was about, though. We can't solve every problem at once; we don't even know yet what will help with that one. One thing that would not have helped, though, is allowing toxic comments to run rampant. HN already lost some good users because it was heading that way, and we weren't about to let that keep happening. Edit: By the way, since kogir and I made this scoring change, noticeably fewer accounts have been getting banned.

specialk 13y ago

I find the idea that commenters with higher karma having more powerful down-votes slightly disconcerting. My fear is that if people down-vote comments that are well meaning and relevant but they disagree content we will only ever see one train of thought rise to the top of comment threads. This could start a vicious cycle where voting cabals of power-users form. For example if Idea X becomes popular among some members of HN they will be able to always steer the discussion to talk about Idea X or down-vote a competing valid Idea Y into oblivion. Comment readers could be converted to Idea X, as it is always appearing at the top of relevant comment threads. So now the voting cabal as even more members. Growing the dislike of Idea Y. The cycle then repeats. The discussion is then steered over time by the thoughts of a select few power-users. Maybe this is just the natural order of things and I'm subconsciously afraid of change. Thoughts?

ibejoeb 13y ago
Do we know it's directly karma-driven? I'd hope it's more statistical, e.g., downvote to other activity ratio. I'd think that people who downvote very infrequently probably mean it. On that topic, I'd really love to see downvotes with an accompanying comment weighted somehow.
- dang 13y ago
  It's not karma-driven at all, except insofar as downvoting itself requires a karma threshold—a restriction that has been the same for years. It's possible that we'll lower the threshold at some point.
  - specialk 13y ago
    Thanks so much for the response. Can you tell us more about the algorithmic changes, or is the HN source code public?

joshlegs 13y ago

Wow. I am overly happy that you guys have figured out a way to give commenting feedback. i had an account way back when shadowbanned for i never knew what reason. Still dont. I feel like if this system had have been implemented back then I would have had a better idea of what was wrong that I said. Also, I'm pretty sure you've found the secrets to good Internet moderatorship. So many forums went offcourse from ban-happy moderators that didnt want to actually take the time to moderate the community, instead just banhammering people. Kudos to you guys

onmydesk 13y ago

"We believe this has made the comment scores and rankings better reflect the community." Is that desirable? A better debate surely entails more than one opinion. I also don't know what a 'jerk' is, someone that disagrees with the group think? I just don't think its that big a problem. But thats just one opinion that might differ from the collective and therefore must have no merit? An odd place. Over engineering! To be expected I suppose.

dang 13y ago
The issue isn't community opinion. The community doesn't have an opinion. It's divided. What we're talking about here is the community's sense of basic good conduct: for example, that it's bad to be personally aggressive to other users. On this, fortunately, we're not nearly so divided. I don't think "groupthink" is the right word for that, because there are few views, if any, that cannot be expressed in a substantive and civil way. Minority opinion, reasonably and politely expressed, doesn't do too badly here. Some negatively scored comments do fall into this category—not much more than 1-2%, if that many. That's something we care about and watch for, and may try to do something systematic about, though in practice it's usually enough for a few fair-minded users to upvote those comments back to par. Far more common is that people post comments which aren't substantive and civil, and then, upon getting downvoted, complain that groupthink is suppressing them.
onmydesk 13y ago
Downvoted already! hilarious!
- olivier1664 13y ago
  IMO, this downvote show you are right.
cbhl 13y ago
Users can turn on "showdead", which will allow them to see all comments (and upvote them, if necessary). In general, disagreeing is just fine; one can do so in a polite way. Being a 'jerk' usually entails disagreeing and being vitriolic about it. (An example of this is insulting the person rather than addressing why one disagrees with the arguments in the comment itself.)

aaronetz 13y ago

I have noticed that people oftentimes downvote because of disagreement, even when the comment seems to be okay (to my eyes at least). How about eliminating the downvote, leaving only the "flag" which makes it clearer that it should not be used for disagreement? It would also make comments more consistent with top-level stories (which I sometimes think of as "root-level comments".)

darkstar999 13y ago

When (if ever) do I get a downvote button?

hashx 13y ago
Karma threshold for downvoting is around 500
- darkstar999 13y ago
  Thanks.

mck- 13y ago

May I also suggest an update to the flamewar trigger algorithm? Or at least this is what led me to believe it is a flamewar trigger [1] Oftentimes a post is doing really well [2], accumulating a dozen up votes within 30 minutes, jumping up the front-page, but then because of two comments, it gets penalized to the third page. I can see it being triggered when there are 40 comments, but there seems to be an awfully low first trigger? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204766 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204766 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578670

zatkin 13y ago

I recently joined Hacker News, and actually read through the guidelines before making an account. If there was one area where I feel that anything convinced me to be smart about what I post, it would be those guidelines.

ballard 13y ago
Signals FTW.
dang 13y ago
Well, fancy that: it worked! Sounds like you'll get on fine here.
gargarplex 13y ago
Just FYI, that first comma usage is erroneous. http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/03/david-foster-wallace-common-word-usage-mistakes/ http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/03/david-foster-wallace...

aspensmonster 13y ago

Edit: So this comment is already "autodead" ; This is exactly the kind of shit I'm talking about. >The majority of HN users are thoughtful and nice. It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls (and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this). What dang and kogir found was a way to turn the volume up on this kind of downvote. I suppose that explains why the effects of downvotes on my past comments are persisting for weeks, regardless of the content of comments that come after. Heck, it explains everything about my experience on HN for the past three weeks or so. Story time! I was recently met with a torrent of downvotes --nearly 100, might have actually crossed that-- for poking fun at HN's incessant we're-not-reddit-we're-much-more-sophisticated circlejerking (the irony is not lost). I'm specifically referring to this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491170 It was an announcement that Valve was open-sourcing its fork of Mesa. Someone made a HL3 confirmed chain: Mesa -> Black Mesa -> Half-Life -> Half-Life 3 CONFIRMED etc etc. That it was a story about Valve only helped, and so I cheerfully advised this commenter not to distract Gaben from Left 4 Dead 3. I was downvoted and I proceeded to taunt the hivemind. Indeed I felt quite gleeful that I managed to hit the floor of "-4" for each of the comments whilst my total karma counter continued to decrement. There were even others that saw fit to traverse my past comments and downvote those too. I'm sure those comments deserved it; they must have been off-topic or non-substantive or out-of-scope. Of course, the Rules of HN are such that you can't complain about downvoting. You cannot incite people to downvote you either. So yes, "shame on me" for not engaging in the proper circlejerking motions. Shame on me for continually pointing out this community's obsession over being the "glorious master race" of online discussion whilst poo-pooing the cesspools of "filthy casuals" like Reddit or, god forbid, Slashdot. "Shame on me" for partaking in the memes of any culture other than HN's. I should know better. Those are "low/no-content" things. They are "not substantive." Or my personal favorite: they are "outside the scope of HN." There's always some excuse that the hivemind will come to a consensus on. The net effect is thus: * I now get to wait several seconds for a page load, as if I were shadow banned. Who knows. Maybe I am :D Viewing the website without a logged-in session produces immediate page loads. * Any comment I submit, regardless of length, is lucky to make it more than a third of the way up from the bottom of the page to *start*. It seems my comments don't get to percolate from the top down any more. * My comments that do get upvotes never seem to rise past this point on the page. I'm sure someone will insist that I message the mods. I refuse. I'm not going to beg the censor to restore my speech privileges whilst he pulls a Putin and insists he's doing nothing of the sort. The mere suggestion is indicative of just how big a problem moderation of this sort really is. The algorithms and moderation behind HN are a black box and any suggestion to make it transparent is met with the resistance of an open circuit. I find it hard to believe that the Gods of HN are merely "silencing" the "jerks and trolls" whilst leaving the pure and unadulterated essence of HN to flourish. Perhaps this is all just a consequence of a single, massive downvote spike that torched my 5.0+ rating down to 1.14 (do I see 0.* yet?). I don't believe that. Between "pending" comments and the "downvote threshold" and the "flagging threshold" and the "we'll revoke your privileges if we please" attitude, I'd say things are exactly the way they want them to be. At this point, I really don't think I'm interested in continuing to be a part of HN. I don't want to continue to be a data point in some Big Data Miner's grand experiment to see just how organically he can manufacture consent. And I'm sure the hivemind will have no problem with that state of affairs. I'm just a perfect example of the system working as intended. It's not a bug. It's a feature. I'm the problem they're trying to solve. Etc etc etc... HN isn't trying to stave off an Eternal September. It's doing everything it can to never reach October.

Igglyboo 13y ago

Could we please get collapsible comments?

ballard 13y ago

Definitely gotta give you guys a standing ovation for yeomen's work.

gautambay 13y ago

>> and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this curious to learn how this analysis was conducted. e.g. how does HN determine which users belong to a minority groups?

darksim905 13y ago

Wait, you can downvote?

tedks 13y ago

>(and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this) How have you looked into this, and what have the results been? What efforts are you going to take to ensure it stays true in the future? There are other comments asking these questions that have so far not been answered; it would be good to answer them. It's very unsettling when people (primarily from a privileged/majority standpoint) proclaim that things "don't silence minority groups" and handwave the justification. In general I've found HN to be much more positive towards feminism in particular than similar communities like Reddit or others that I won't name, but the tech industry has large issues in this area and it's surprising to me that this would be the case. In particular, it seems likely to me that HN will selectively not-silence minority voices that tend to agree with the status quo or pander to majority voices. I'd be surprised if your analysis accounted for that, but I'd be very, very happy to be wrong.

olalonde 13y ago

I know it would be a pretty big experiment both technically and conceptually, but I will propose it just in case. I have noticed that usernames might influence the way I vote. What if usernames were not displayed in comments? Now this leads to two problems: 1) it makes it hard to follow who replied to what in threads 2) it makes it more tempting to post bad comments given the lack of accountability. I think the first problem could be solved by assigning users a per-submission temporary username picked at random from a name/word list. The second problem could be solved by linking those random usernames to the actual profile page of who posted (just like HN currently does). It wouldn't stop deliberate attempts at up/down voting specific users, but it would remove the unintentional bias.

chrisBob 13y ago

The biggest problem I see is that the combination of a threaded discussion and the strong ranking provides an incentive for replying to a another comment even if a new comment would be more appropriate. This, for example, is much more likely to be buried than if I replied a few comments down on the thread from bravura.

rickr 13y ago

Is there a template or example post for the first item? I've thought about doing this in the past but I didn't want to seem too elitist.

raverbashing 13y ago

I had a moderator intervention happen in one thread, however, I think the moderators, when speaking "on behalf of HN" should have a way to indicate that (like an indication on their username, or something similar) Otherwise it looks like anyone just decided to intervene.