

Ask PG: Implementing checkboxes to improve comment quality - kyro

I'm curious about how the overall quality of comments would be affected if you put 3 checkboxes, laid horizontally under the comment box, that must all be checked before submitting a comment. They'd be something like "My comment is: -civil -well thought-out -sincere". In addition to the psychology at play, maybe just having to check 3 boxes would curb some of the more trollish and emotional comments. Laying them out horizontally would also require a bit more focus than having them stacked vertically.<p>Of course, this might not work at all.
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zoltarburger
I think someone would develop a browser plugin to auto-check those boxes.

You could classify the text using a machine learning algorithm using a
training set of downvoted comments, and if the comment is classified as likely
impolite- then you could ask the user to make sure their comment is
appropriate.

You could have a line of text which said "Thanks for being civil and
courteous"

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krapp
Some users would fill them in believing their comments to be civil, well
thought out and sincere, regardless of their actual content. Trolls would be
perfectly happy to fill them out and then troll anyway. Then a few will just
have a script bind to the select button that auto-ticks the checkboxes before
submitting.

I don't think this is a problem that can be engineered away so easily.

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nicholassmith
It'd make it even _worse_ to use HackerNews and comment from a mobile device
at that stage, so it might curb some of the trolling but at the risk of
annoying a subset of users.

Plus the community is fairly good at downvoting and flagging bad and unhelpful
comments.

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notahacker
I can think of sites that need such a feature more.

Reminding _new_ users that "I agree", memes and other comments are frowned on
each time they comment might be a good idea though.

