3 ms·

I think pg is wrong here. We're all fans of brevity here but a simple thank you far too often simply lacks substance or insight to upvote. Reiterating that str

by s_dev 11y ago

I think pg is wrong here. We're all fans of brevity here but a simple thank you far too often simply lacks substance or insight to upvote. Reiterating that strong effort needs to be made to resist the possibly inevitable decline in quality - simply getting rid of one or two word comments is actually good general rule even if it results in some otherwise courteous people getting downvoted. An upvote should mean "Thanks" - saying it is redundant.

philh 11y ago
When I've had people explicitly say "thanks", that's meant more to me than upvotes. There's a danger of arms races, and I wouldn't want an explicit thanks to be the default way to express approval, but it does seem valuable to have both available. (Downvoting thank-you posts is one way to keep them available without losing their value, but I'm not sure it's the best way.)
- philh 11y ago
  Throwing an idea out there - I haven't received many thank-you comments, but my favourite along those lines came through my anonymous feedback form, http://sayat.me/philh http://sayat.me/philh. If there was a community norm of people having those, then people could easily make thank-you comments that didn't clutter the page. (I wouldn't usually want someone using email for that, because then I'd feel obliged to respond.) (This is kind of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but I'd like them to be a norm for other reasons too. Unfortunately they can also be used for bullying, so I don't know how realistic that is.)
  - krapp 11y ago
    Maybe Hacker News could have public and private comments. Private comments would essentially be dead comments that could only be visible and active for the person being replied to.
  - thaumaturgy 11y ago
    Taking the time to write a slightly more thoughtful "thank you" comment usually does the job just fine. "Thank you." vs. "Thank you for taking the time to write this, this topic has been on my mind recently and you really helped me figure this out." The latter doesn't usually get downvoted, and sometimes even gets promoted a bit.
DanBC 11y ago
PG doesn't seem to say "upvote 'thanks!' posts", but "don't downvote 'thanks!' posts".
krapp 11y ago
Which does more damage to the community, brief thank you comments or the tangential discussions that inevitably break out around them, when a single such comment is downvoted then the downvote is explained? I think some allowance needs to be made for the fact that most comments lack much substance or insight, since most commenters are having conversations with one another, not engaging in formal debate or rhetoric. I personally suspect the threaded nature of the forums encourages this behavior, whether pg intended it to or not. Perhaps a word limit could be added to the comments, but guaranteeing comments are more verbose doesn't really guarantee higher intellectual quality. If the noise caused by short comments is an issue then perhaps /newcomments could be filtered so that it only displays replies to the root post (which are most likely to be focused on the subject at hand) or doesn't display very short comments. Given the assumption the site makes by increasing the posting timeout in deep threads (which i've come to grudgingly agree with) that incivility tends to increase the more deeply into a thread you go, this might also reduce the visibility of and engagement with toxic comments.

by s_dev 11y ago

philh 11y ago

When I've had people explicitly say "thanks", that's meant more to me than upvotes. There's a danger of arms races, and I wouldn't want an explicit thanks to be the default way to express approval, but it does seem valuable to have both available. (Downvoting thank-you posts is one way to keep them available without losing their value, but I'm not sure it's the best way.)

philh 11y ago
Throwing an idea out there - I haven't received many thank-you comments, but my favourite along those lines came through my anonymous feedback form, http://sayat.me/philh http://sayat.me/philh. If there was a community norm of people having those, then people could easily make thank-you comments that didn't clutter the page. (I wouldn't usually want someone using email for that, because then I'd feel obliged to respond.) (This is kind of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but I'd like them to be a norm for other reasons too. Unfortunately they can also be used for bullying, so I don't know how realistic that is.)
- krapp 11y ago
  Maybe Hacker News could have public and private comments. Private comments would essentially be dead comments that could only be visible and active for the person being replied to.
- thaumaturgy 11y ago
  Taking the time to write a slightly more thoughtful "thank you" comment usually does the job just fine. "Thank you." vs. "Thank you for taking the time to write this, this topic has been on my mind recently and you really helped me figure this out." The latter doesn't usually get downvoted, and sometimes even gets promoted a bit.

DanBC 11y ago

PG doesn't seem to say "upvote 'thanks!' posts", but "don't downvote 'thanks!' posts".

krapp 11y ago

Which does more damage to the community, brief thank you comments or the tangential discussions that inevitably break out around them, when a single such comment is downvoted then the downvote is explained? I think some allowance needs to be made for the fact that most comments lack much substance or insight, since most commenters are having conversations with one another, not engaging in formal debate or rhetoric. I personally suspect the threaded nature of the forums encourages this behavior, whether pg intended it to or not. Perhaps a word limit could be added to the comments, but guaranteeing comments are more verbose doesn't really guarantee higher intellectual quality. If the noise caused by short comments is an issue then perhaps /newcomments could be filtered so that it only displays replies to the root post (which are most likely to be focused on the subject at hand) or doesn't display very short comments. Given the assumption the site makes by increasing the posting timeout in deep threads (which i've come to grudgingly agree with) that incivility tends to increase the more deeply into a thread you go, this might also reduce the visibility of and engagement with toxic comments.