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>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 th
by 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 agoI 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.