

HN Idea: Hard limit 5 comments/day, 2/day for new users - lionhearted

As the site grows, you lose signal:noise ratio.<p>So, perhaps setting a maximum number of comments per day would help keep comment quality high.<p>Perhaps 2/day max for a new user, and a limit of 5/day total regardless of age or karma? You would give up some good points, including the occasional good back and forth. But it'd cut off arguments and I think people would be hesitant to write a silly quip, "good post" noise, or argue/flame if they know they're using up their limited breath by doing it.<p>Personally, I'm for quantity over quality - I'd rather learn five interesting points across fifteen good comments than ten interesting points across 70 comments, less than half of which are good. There'd have to be some testing on the numbers, but experimenting with some kind of comment limits might help hold back the tides of mediocrity.
======
tokenadult
Such limits are a HUGE source of annoyance to users who want to become deeply
involved in an online community. I've been in communities with such limits,
and in many communities without, and those without thrive better.

I will note that as long as karma is what the site rewards, and as long as it
takes submissions and comments to get karma, there are considerable incentives
here to submit and (especially) comment. Exactly how to adjust karma rules so
that quality is rewarded along with quantity (as for example by downvoting
comments) is an ongoing area of investigation here and on other sites with
karma systems.

~~~
lionhearted
Interesting - I guess a major issue is that any comment that's not terrible
won't get downvoted, which encourages people to make more comments than less
if they want karma.

------
russell
-1 I would rather not. Sometimes arguments or inane remarks are an annoyance, but I would not want a good post because someone hit an arbitrary limit.

~~~
lionhearted
I'm upvoting you and offering this scenario for thought: At some point,
there's 10x as many users here as now. How important is signal:noise? I really
enjoy the points I learn here, but after being present on the site for a touch
less than half a year (lurking before starting an account), I've seen how the
site growing is affecting the quality and it looks dangerously like something
that happened slowly somewhere else I used to enjoy greatly.

I think the end result is that you _will_ miss good comments, because they're
never made if the noise gets too loud.

That someplace else I used to greatly enjoy:

Compare "Facing Losses, German Billionaire Takes Own Life"
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422284> to "German mogul kills self over
financial meltdown"
[http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/7nrxi/german_mogul...](http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/7nrxi/german_mogul_kills_self_over_financial_meltdown/)

I picked that quickly as the first thread I saw on both Reddit and HN, but the
comments on that Reddit thread are actually many times better than average
Reddit comments, perhaps because of the serious subject matter.

And - Old Reddit was close to as good as current Hacker News. Really. If you
weren't there back then, it seems strange to imagine such a great place
becoming what it did, but that's the reality. I don't want it to happen here,
or we'll lose good comments - not to arbitrary thresholds, but to good posters
leaving.

Really, how many times do people write more than five excellent comments per
day? There's some cases of two people having intelligent discussion, or an
author replying to questions in a thread. Not sure how we'd address those
cases. But I'm theorizing if there was a limit, people would adjust to stop
making wisecracks, argue less, and make less "fluff" posts instead of not
making inspired points.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
So what's wrong with the existing rating system?

