
Commenting, community deterioration, and Hacker News - jseliger
http://jseliger.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deterioration-and-hacker-news/
======
pg
I hadn't looked at the comments on the story about the girl who died till now.
I am so embarrassed for this community. I feel like this is the worst I've
ever seen people behave on this site.

Here's some general advice: if you find yourself beginning a comment on a
thread about someone who has just died with a disclaimer of the form "I hate
to be that guy" or "I hate to write this," just don't say it.

~~~
SeanLuke
I'm really very sorry to hear this.

When I joined HN I decided to do an experiment. On reddit and slashdot, I go
under a pseudonym except when I need to make an announcement. But on HN I
always go by my own name. The result is dramatic: I'm much more careful and
considerate on HN. It's a clear verification of Penny Arcade's famous theory
(<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/>).

I think that the elimination of anonymity is ultimately the only thing which
can keep HN from the inevitable slide toward 4chan that all comment sites are
on.

~~~
dkarl
One thing a lack of anonymity forces you to do is to present your entire
feelings about a story, instead of the one point that you feel is missing or
needs correction. When people present points in isolation, it's easy to get
the wrong impression about how they feel.

I didn't comment in the thread under discussion, but if I felt there was one
_point_ that needed to be added to the original story, it was the one made by
many posters, roughly, "This smells like glurge, and when people are mourning
for an inspiring little girl, it's common sense not to take what they say
about her at face value." Of course that wouldn't reflect my whole reaction as
a human being.

And that's the difference between reacting as a non-anonymous human being,
where you are careful to present your _whole_ feelings about a topic, and
reacting as a member of a message board, where you're like to dismiss most of
what you think and feel as commonplace and not worth mentioning.

Like any problem in communication, it's a problem of readers as well as
writers. Reading a message from "asdf1234" or "prgrmrd00d4u" (not real names
AFAIK) and reading it as representative of a human being's feelings doesn't
make any sense, but it's irresistible for a lot of people. If the nerds on
Slashdot and HN can't resist parsing comments that way, I think it's time to
give up and accept that as human beings we can only see each other as whole
human beings and not merely as contributors to a conversation. So the burden
of solving this communication problem is on the writers to act like whole
human beings.

The primary psychological resistance -- and believe me, I do rebel against
being "human" on a discussion board with every bit of my being -- comes from
the fact that most of us would prefer to sound more like scientists than like
politicians. Scientists say, "Here is my tiny marginal contribution."
Politicians say, "This is who I am." Geeks roll their eyes when a politician
answering a question about tax policy in a debate spends all of his allotted
time talking about how much he loves his children and then caps it off with
half a sentence stating his position on the issue. We hate that and don't want
to be like that. We want to hear how he differs from his opponents. We don't
want to hear everything he has in common with everyone else. We want the
_diff_.

Our humanity is what we have in common, exactly what is excluded when we
present ourselves as a diff. If you read the original discussion and read
every comment as a diff, then you don't see comments by inhuman people. You
see whole human beings whose common humanity was redacted by the diff filter
running between their brains and their keyboards.

Maybe the need to relax that diff filter a little bit so we all sound like
human beings needs to be part of a FAQ somewhere....

------
drats
This is just the type of blog post that we don't need on HN. People said some
mean things in that thread, they basically all got downvoted and the top
comment is one admonishing them (so do we need it to be dug up again by this
article?). Isn't that the comment system working well? Isn't that the proof of
where the balance in the community lies? It's a forum open to anyone, not some
elite club; if it were a invite only real-name club the voting would hardly be
necessary. If it gets to the point of reddit, where ugly things (often
disguised as or put inside jokes) are _upvoted_ , then there'd be a point. But
it's not at that point and this article is just moral high horsing, performing
moral purity in front of an audience.

I see one annoying meme comment per HN session (so maybe 20 comment
threads/2-300 comments), and that's only when I choose to highlight the down-
voted text myself usually. In an open pseudonymous/anonymous forum that's a
pretty decent signal-to-noise ratio. Use the voting system, ban repeat
offenders, keep calm and carry on.

~~~
adgar
I think it's just a matter of numbers. HN links have, on average, always had
relatively few comments, so growth is more obvious, even if there were no
other difference but numbers. The comment counts number in the dozens to the
low hundreds - reading a typical full comment thread doesn't take long.

So if HN doubled in users over the last N months, then even if 95% of the
comments are non-abusive, that means the story that used to get 20 comments
and have 1 abusive comments now gets 40 comments and 2 abusive comments. And
when it comes to mean, shitty stuff like this, 2 seems like a lot more than 1.
And that's with 95% good-guys. When a bigger story happens and gets 240
comments, at 95% positive comments, that's 12 worthless or mean or needlessly
sarcastic comments. Ugh.

------
flipside
There is only one possible way to solve this problem that has a shot at
working and I'm developing/testing it as quickly as I can.

It requires a combination of crowdsourcing and machine learning (NLP is cool,
but optional).

It is part rating, voting, tagging, reputation, recommendation and more.

It sounds complicated, it isnt for users (~2 clicks from ~10% of readers) but
is for me to build (3rd week with rails, so relative).

It is mostly still theory at this point but the math checks out and user tests
have exceeded expectations but are very early stage.

If you've read this and think I'm crazy, you're right (best to accept it).

If you think I'm naive, it's a possibility that's kept me up many nights over
the past year.

If you are interested in learning more on the off chance I'm right, you can
reach me at (Mat . Tyndall at gmail).

I am in San Francisco working on this full time after dropping out from grad
school.

I will tell you in excruciating detail in person or via Skype how it works and
why.

I have not slept very much in the past week so I have no idea if posting this
is a good idea but I doubt I'll get even 5 votes or any takers but thanks for
reading.

~~~
oblique63
I must admit you've made me a bit curious, though I have a feeling that
whatever it is you're proposing will probably just go straight over my head
anyway.

Since you're in SF though, have you thought about holding a small group
discussion about it over at noisebridge sometime? People there are always so
insightful, friendly and willing to help, I'm thinking that holding a think-
tank at a place like that might help you get the sort of 'back-and-forth'
feedback it seems you're looking for.

~~~
flipside
As for the prototype going over your head, first order it looks pretty simple,
second, third and fourth, ... Hey, even I'm not sure I've mapped out all the
possible dynamics but the possibility is unquestionably there.

Noisebridge is cool, hung out there a few times. I'm super busy now but maybe
in a week or two though I am a sucker for coffee chats (hint hint). Basically
I suck at writing and would rather connect through any other medium.

Also to add a few details, I'm doing this as a startup (Tagbax, don't mind the
landing page, I'm really not trying to drive traffic yet). Community comment
moderation isn't necessarily my first choice to apply the tech $ wise (I
really ought to drop by disqus one of these days), but it was designed
specifically for user-generated content.

~~~
arnoldwh
Before you lose any more nights losing sleep about this idea you have and its
third or fourth iteration, maybe you should just release the idea in its
original form and see how people react. I'm sure your idea is great, but I
worry that it's a perfect solution to an imperfect userbase...meaning people
value worthless, soundbite comments more than well thought out responses.

It's kinda like how people complain about how politics are only about
soundbites. Sure, it's great to argue that among friends, but who really
spends the time understanding the facts about every issue a candidate debates?

~~~
flipside
The solution is to align the interest of the individual with the group. I've
run this past hundreds of people, it's pretty solid as theory but coefficients
matter so it's gotta be tested.

------
thebigshane
I have an unfounded theory that SOPA has acted as a tipping point in the
trickling in of redditors looking for answers. SOPA is a big deal for the
Internet and its communities but I find the discussions on those threads
particularly shallow (moreso I think than most political-leaning threads
here). Obviously the discussion in the mentioned thread above was far more
shallow and outright mean, but I think those are the new extremes in this new
environment.

I bring this up because I also have a theory on how to handle it. Temporarily
restrict the number of political and hot-topic stories in HN through
coordinated flagging. I realize this may be controversial (even borderline
xenophobic), but I think it would dissuade those looking for a home here who
don't want to adhere to the guidelines. If the hot-ness of the material on the
front page decreased for a while, I think it would sufficiently bore those
looking for spicy discussions until this SOPA topic fades.

[Disclaimer: I regularly comment on SOPA threads]

------
ChuckMcM
I believe the primary cause of comment degeneration is celebrity. Which is to
say the more 'popular' something is the more likely there will be people
saying things just to have said something that they are sure someone else has
read.

When I was competing on BattleBots I was amazed at how it magnified people's
immaturity in their efforts to 'be on TV'. That really made me stop and look
at the folks around me on the other teams, and at the show, and there was a
very large difference between people who didn't care that they were possibly
going to be on TV, and those who _mostly_ cared that they were possibly on TV.

I tend to think of it as the 'celebrity' effect where someone gets their
gratification from others noticing them. They troll popular newsgroups (back
in the day), they make outrageous comments on community web sites, they seem
to be trying desperately to prove somehow, someone, will know they exist.
There is a lot of anger there too.

So they come places like here at HN and they comment poorly. They are
particularly vocal around topics for which there are no definitive ways of
measuring correctness, topics that are more emotion than reason. They are
emboldened by anonymity.

Mostly they seem to want to be heard, to know that someone heard them, and
ideally to be acknowledged as being heard.

Keeping them isolated, in their brokenness, makes for a better experience the
community. But it also makes the broken ones more bitter and angry. I cannot
see a way, in an anonymous, or psuedo-anonymous community with little face to
face contact, to bring them through their insecurity and into a better place.

It is a problem worth solving though.

------
richardw
HN is still the only place where I'll often read the comments first, because
they're very likely more valuable than the article. I'd rather have it than my
RSS reader.

Having said that, there is some room for anti-jerk improvements. Maybe very
high-karma users can downvote further than the general minimum, or they get a
special "really, don't do this" double-down-arrow to use in special occasions.

Sadly, people can accumulate pretty high points just because they post
articles every hour or two. Therefore, maybe extra superpowers have to be
invite-only.

------
6ren
HN used to have a common response to one-liners, that was not a counter-attack
or put-down, but a gentle challenge that invites and guides:

    
    
      Can you elaborate?

~~~
ZenPsycho
Interesting- in spirit, though I suppose the danger in having a "standard"
response is that by using it consistently in that particular context you're
shifting its meaning over time to something like "You're being lame. Did you
know that?". Probably better than "standard response" as a phrase, would be a
standard response being calm socratic irony- a response that requires some
thought and substance on the part of the writer, rather than just a quick "can
you elaborate" boxed one liner that becomes a cargo cult.

------
jbm
This story really provoked poor reactions on Slashdot, Hacker News and other
supposedly "meritocracy"-oriented communities.

I don't have the evidence to support this, but my educated guess is that a
proportion of it is driven by the fact that it was a Pakistani (and presumably
Muslim) girl.

The meme pool for Pakistan and Muslims in general is driven by the terrorism /
fear narrative; masking one's prejudice and engage in a self-satisfactory
public bashing is easy when we also have a competing meme (Microsoft as borg)
that can be used to mask the ugly aspects of it.

The other alternative (that people really do hate Microsoft so much that they
would make these comments about a dead child) is so childish that I can't
bring myself to believe it. It would be morally equivalent to.. well, cheering
for people dying without health care. IE: A small group of people so wrapped
in a narrative that they can't bring themselves to see how abhorrent their
beliefs have become to the majority around them. Are those people us?

~~~
thebigshane
Pure speculation: I don't get the sense of racism at all. I think the age was
the provoking factor. A younger girl who was able to accomplish something
(Microsoft Certified Professional) and become noteworthy in a site filled with
people (and businesses) trying to become noteworthy. Jealousy.

~~~
ShardPhoenix
Don't label people "jealous" or some other negative label based on pure
speculation.

------
RandallBrown
Hacker News has its good days and bad days. It also is going to evolve as the
world of technology evolves. For some, that means it gets worse. For others,
it gets better.

There will always be people that think it used to be better, because it's
easier to remember the good feelings than the bad. This happens on every
online community all over the entire Internet and it's been happening since
the Internet started.

My only advice for solving the problem is to stop feeding the trolls.
Dextorious obviously is trying to get a rise out of people. Ignore it and it
goes away. Anything else is just adding fuel to the fire.

------
jonrob
One site that I think deals with this problem quite well is Metafilter. The
comments are full of thoughtful and well reasoned discussions between the
readers. Sure, there are problems: sometimes someone posts something that's
mean spirited, or there's a few too many one liners in the comments thread,
but, on the whole, these problems are rare.

In fact, the quality of the comments are so high that there's even an Ask
Metafilter sub-section, where readers post, often very personal, questions and
do so without fear of the kind of reaction they'll get.

What's most interesting about the Metafilter model is that there's no up- or
down-voting, only favouriting.

So how do they ensure the quality of the comments? Well, to become a member
you have to pay a one off $5 charge. It's not much, so almost everyone can
afford it, but it seems to be enough to discourage drive-by comments or anyone
who's not serious about contributing respectfully and substantively.

There's also the possibility for posts and comments to be deleted, and for an
account to be banned completely if someone fails to follow the guidelines. I
don't think this happens often.

<http://www.metafilter.com/about.mefi>
<http://www.metafilter.com/guidelines.mefi>
<http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi>

~~~
obtu
As a MeFite: even the favouriting isn't necessary. It can polarise discussions
and turn them into a back and forth where each side tries to get higher
scores. I'm hiding those, and idly wish they hadn't been introduced.

------
tansey
I'm jumping in a little late to this discussion, but I'm sort of required to
comment here.

First off, as of early last year, I noted [1] that there is in fact
quantitative evidence that HN is deteriorating in terms of positivity. I
really need to re-run that analysis and bring it up to date, because I believe
that we will see a sharp dip in the last 9 months. Between SOPA, Jobs' death,
and all the other calamity that's happened, I certainly imagine it is getting
darker here lately.

Secondly, I've put forward a few attempts to combat this. One approach is to
change the way the karma system works [2], so that it rewards people for
consistently being upvoted instead of the sort of lightning-bolt comments that
tend to yield an exponential or maybe even bimodal distribution.

Another approach is to detect and flag anyone who is frequently rewarding
malicious comments [3]. The system I put forth could be done either by manual
flagging or implicitly by looking at co-occurrences. It was originally
designed for articles, but as I noted in the post, it is trivial to adapt it
to comments.

Now, in all these cases, the articles were on the front page and a lively
discussion ensued. Yet nothing. Ever. Changes.

PG explicitly said he was "considering" the honeypot approach. I don't know if
he's actually implemented it, since it wouldn't be visible to non-admins. I
will guess that, since he's a busy guy and we still have these discussions
periodically, he has not. Fine.

Why would you expect things to change course then? Or if you didn't, why are
you all acting surprised now?

A site growing at super-linear speed is going to be very prone to these
affects. If you do not put forth an effort to combat the influx of lower-
quality comments, then you will see your site slip away.

[1] [http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/05/31/do-social-news-
sites-...](http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/05/31/do-social-news-sites-
deteriorate/)

[2] [http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/08/23/how-karma-should-be-
mea...](http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/08/23/how-karma-should-be-measured/)

[3] [http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/10/28/hackernews-needs-
honeyp...](http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/10/28/hackernews-needs-honeypots/)

~~~
vannevar
I think there may be a relatively simple solution to the problem: filter the
comments so that the comments of low-karma commenters initially only appear to
themselves and _high-karma readers._ As they get upvoted, they gradually
appear to lower and lower karma readers. Maybe make them initially visible to
the contributor of the post or comment they are responding to as well.

This would create a self-organizing system that would rob trolls of their
audience (high-karma readers would likely downvote them without response)
while still encouraging newbies to post.

------
colinm
I'll get buried for this, but I don't see HN as a community. To me reddit
seems to be able to foster a sense of community with meetups, fund raisers,
secret santa etc. HN is just a link aggregator with comments.

~~~
maxerickson
I think you are right that community is the core issue. I don't think reddit
is really a community though, there are certainly some communities that
communicate using reddit, and the site does engage in 'participation'
activities, but I would guess that the majority of the interaction they create
ends up being shallow (on the other hand, I'm sure at least some people have
made new friends and such...).

I don't really see how any reasonably open group of several thousand people
can ever interact as a community (and I wouldn't be surprised if the limit is
in the hundreds, e.g. Dunbar's number).

------
crcsmnky
I would call myself a long time lurker on HN and have recently started
commenting on stories. There's no real reason why I started, I think I just
finally felt like it.

That said, I have been reading the comments for some time and I think the
quality has changed when it comes to items that crack the front page. Beyond
the first 30-40 items I think the discussion has remained far more useful than
not. That's not to say that discussions worsen as stories move up, I think the
volume tends to increase which invariably brings less helpful comments. This
is not hard and fast, just my anecdotal observation.

------
kevinalexbrown
I want to be perfectly clear: I'm a relative newcomer here. If you want to
stop reading on account of that, go ahead. I won't accuse HN of being reddit
or digg. But I do want to give my perspective as someone on the fence about
staying "active."

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, because I had to make a decision
as to whether or not to be a part of this "community." Aside from some speech-
and-debate oriented forums in high school, I've stayed away from online
communities. They just don't seem to have high quality discussions, even at
places where tech thrives, like xkcd. I suppose I'm lucky to have a job where
I get to work with a lot of stimulating and highly intelligent people, with
whom I can have conversations that last several days, so maybe my perspective
is somewhat anomalous, but I doubt it. In any case, I stumbled upon
paulgraham.com a few months ago, and what I enjoyed most in his essays was the
reserved, focused quality, so I figured a forum/news site run by him might be
interesting. I've also had an interest in open/accessible science via web-
based applications, and becoming a good enough coder to write some of what I
do on a Cray machine at work [1]. I am not a hacker. I learned Visual Basic in
high school, and can get around basic web design/javascript/rails tutorials
and stat scripting languages we use at work like R and Matlab, install Ubuntu
and use Vim daily. This seemed like a good place to learn better techniques.

I've learned a lot, and I won't go on about that. Many of the comments have
been thoughtful and informative, particularly the ones that point to relevant
places to get more information (I've noticed user Joakal does this a lot [2]),
or the ones that disagree substantively.

But the most frustrating kind of comment I've encountered on this site isn't
meanness, or blatant stupidity, but the Hard-Not-To-UpVote kind. Most people
can tell a troll, and most trolls get down-voted to the point of white-out.
Most stupid one-line jokes get voted to the bottom of the page as well, or
just ignored. Today's discussion[3] was extremely embarrassing, so much so
that if I'd seen that discussion first I might never have joined the site, but
the meanness was not among the most up-voted comments, and even though there
were a some annoying individuals who felt the need to prove how unremarkable
someone was, most were rather positive. And the rest of the community rallied
around upvoting jaquesm's comment, and downvoting the inappropriate ones to
oblivion (though not soon enough).

One unfortunate thing I've noticed: a lot of the very popular comments are
sometimes of a "fluffy" quality. I'm a "scientist" and I get to sift through a
lot of hype on a daily basis; what I appreciate most are focused rational
arguments, even if I ultimately disagree; I don't like fluff, even if I've
used it from time to time, and certainly I've fallen for it. I remember
reading a few months ago a great passage in a PG essay:

 _The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to
upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to
decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with
a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even
reading it.

Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links
that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to
prevent it._[4]

I think this applies to some comments I see here (maybe some comments I've
made). Quickly shot off, and easy to judge, the ones that make you feel guilty
not upticking. I don't know what to do about it - I have upvoted some comments
of dubious quality because it's hard not to, but what I appreciate most is
substantive disagreement. My favorite things to upvote are comments that
disagree with me, even if my mind isn't ultimately changed. Comments I can't
stand (and feel guilty for making at times) are the ones that say "great
point!" or offer an emotionally charged appeal with nothing interesting or
unique. I can't say my perspective is unique here, but I do think it's an
unsolved problem.

PG actually submitted an Ask HN several months ago regarding what you
mention[5]. I'm curious if anything came of that. I don't know how to make it
work. In real life, when people I have discussions with consistently detract
from the value, they get left out to some extent, or if I'm in a group where
fluffy comments are prioritized, I leave, and eat lunch with other people. I
have no idea how to make this work on the internet. This would be sad, because
I don't know anywhere else on the internet that has this level of discussion.

[1] <http://beagle.ci.uchicago.edu/> [3]
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3466925> [2]
[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=joakal](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=joakal)
[4] <http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html> [5]
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

~~~
ww520
I've found similar thing. What surprised and frustrated me sometime is my
"shallow" one liner got a lot more upvotes than my longer, more thoughtful
comments. It seems people have extreme short attention span and won't bother
to read the longer ones.

~~~
redthrowaway
I've noticed this too. Unfortunately, my two most upvoted comments recently
have been of the "throwaway" variety. Not mean, not trollish, but a couple of
easy-to-agree with quickies that I banged off on the bus ride to work. One[1],
perhaps legitimately upvoted so that the response would be more visible, was a
simple statement that the submission was a couple years old and it would be
interesting to see some newer data. The other[2] was a cheap, throwaway anti-
SOPA line.

The danger here is that the easy-to-upvote throwaway comments become a self-
fulfilling prophecy. Like it or not, karma is social validation. A long,
thought-out reply that gets no upvotes is somewhat depressing; it makes you
think that, even at your most thoughtful, your thoughts are unappreciated.
Contrast that with a cheap and easy line that gets 40 points, and the social
feedback is clear: your considered opinion isn't valued, but your cheap lines
are.

It makes me think that the karma system itself might be fatally flawed for its
lack of scalability. What works for a small, mostly homogenous community
breaks when that community becomes larger and more diverse. We can deny it all
we like, but I'm sure most people feel pretty good when they log on and see
their karma significantly higher than it was the last time they checked. It's
an ego boost, and few people are immune to enjoying that. When playing to the
lowest common denominator gives you that fix of social validation, and a more
thoughtful comment doesn't, it's pretty strong positive reinforcement for the
less-desirable behaviour.

I'm not sure how to combat this in a scalable manner. It's difficult to think
of examples of community-moderated forums maintaining quality in the face of
rapid expansion. My previous suggestions of weighting the votes of those who
consistently upvote quality comments higher than those of people who upvote
fluff has met with little traction, and I can see some pretty big potential
weaknesses there, myself.

In reviewing this comment, however, I have had a thought of something that
seems ridiculously trivial, but might just work: pg has stated before his
belief that comment length is a relatively good indicator of quality. I
notice, however, that the comment box is relatively tiny. It makes a long,
thought-out post appear, _prima facie_ , no more substantive than a 3-liner. I
would be interested to see what the result of making the comment box
significantly larger would be. Would people, upon seeing that much empty space
surrounding a throwaway comment, be likely to reconsider posting it? Are there
easy cues like this that can be used to hack the behaviour of commenters? I'd
be interested in seeing the results of running an A/B test on a seemingly
simple change like this: Make half the users' comment boxes two or three times
as long. Leave it that way for a few months, then take a random sample of the
resulting comments and see if there's a difference in quality. I wouldn't be
surprised if there was.

[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458644>

[2]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462700>

~~~
m0nty
I don't know that this social problem has a technical solution, but you're
right that the "points" system encourages shallow comments. Unfortunately some
people will always see a number as a score, and start gaming the system to
increase it.

The problem with many submissions recently has been they are taken directly
from reddit, and have content that sits well with reddit but not HN. The
"Programming prodigy passes away at 16" story is a good example: it's tragic
news, but the fact that someone has died is not necessarily a good HN
submission. Although much of the discussion about Erlang and Haskell went
right over my head, I think this site did better when those stories were oft-
submitted, if only because it tends to push away the people who would prefer
fluffy "human interest" stories. I personally have no intention of creating a
startup but find pointers to useful technical ideas and tools here - more of
those, please

So I think we need to concentrate on the submissions, removing stories of
marginal interest to hackers, and being diligent in upvoting good stories and
comments, and downvoting crufty comments.

~~~
flipside
I didnt spell it out, but I'm working on a solution, see my comment lower on
this page.

------
phwd
Maybe there should be a comment rate limit based on your avg score. The higher
your avg score, the more comments within a certain time period you can make.

This depends on current data for avg karma vs rate of comments which is not
publicly available (to my knowledge). This also depends on whether users with
the highest avg score actually give great constructive comments but I have not
been able to find a way to list those users --
[http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20612/list-
users-...](http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20612/list-users-by-
average-points-on-hackernews)

~~~
tikhonj
I do not think this would work very well. I can't speak for others' habits,
but my posting comes in bursts. Usually I post rather infrequently--just
answering some comment or espousing my views on some moderately interesting
subject. However, when I find something _really_ interesting (like a Haskell
article :)), I am likely to post in rapid succession.

However, I think that my posts on such subjects are the most beneficial for
the site--they're the ones where I have a decent amount of knowledge and
direct experience; I am much more likely to contribute something insightful on
a CS article than on a sociology one, for example. Rate-limiting would make it
harder for me to post about my strongest subjects without changing how I post
about random articles.

~~~
boyter
Perhaps one that takes into account the categories you do post in and have a
high karma for?

~~~
tikhonj
Then you have the nontrivial problem of trying to categorize all the posts.

------
kghose
"Please don't feed the trolls"

I've always liked that motto. I feel the (well intentioned) linked post is
kind of doing that.

It's true that we want to develop a "mature" culture at HN. It's true that
there should be guidelines for that. It's true that new people should have
some way of "assimilating" into the etiquette (which is very simple and
straight forward etiquette).

But.

People who want to, learn by observing. So if we don't feed the trolls (ignore
them) and instead simply do our best to write good posts I think we can
preserve the culture.

People who just want attention, why, they LOVE whole blogposts dedicated to
them.

------
DanBC
Many people here mention comments. I'm interested in story submissions.

Please, which submissions have you made that you felt deserved more upvotes?
And which do you feel got too much attention?

I was surprised that "Invention of Waterloo (Canada tech triangle) got over
100 votes.

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3440469>)

I was gently surprised that some of my other stories got no up votes at all.
The Electronic Landscape in 1986 - while being really poorly formatted for HN,
would have been interesting to people born after that era; "Wait, what? You
had these online communities who were not part of the Internet? Who were
trying to compete with the Internet? And then they offer Internet access as a
bonus feature?"

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3087928>)

On topic: I comment too much, and I'm reigning it back. ANd I'm trying to
increase the signal.

------
petsos
I think you are being a bigger jerk than dextorious. You are just angry
because he called you a hipster.

I checked his history and he is far from being a troll. You on the other hand
wrote a content-free rant full of self-praise ("I try to comment when I have
useful, unique, original, or non-standard things to say") and then posted it
to HN too.

~~~
Tichy
My impression also - this was just somebody taking his grudge from a
discussion here to his blog, and then back here. Just couldn't let go.

------
zerostar07
\- Herding people seems to be a very difficult problem, but on the other hand
i am not aware of scientific approaches to it. There's only assumptions that
things like karma, upvotes, reputation increase the likelihood of a comment
being useful. Can anyone point to relevant literature?

\- In the end, i don't think it's possible to stop people from commenting,
people just feel the need add a comment when they have read an interesting
post (Just like this very comment in fact). Having a rule that says not to
means nothing. Having your comment under an interesting topic is a modern way
to say _"Hey that caught my interest and i think i should participate in the
group that discusses this topic, even though i don't have anything insightful
to say"_. It's mostly an emotional reaction.

\- As this is a threaded discussion, many people will post just to start a
conversation (because they want to spark that conversation), or even start an
argument.

\- IMHO, the quality of the comments is directly related to the quality of the
frontpage links. HN frontpage is heavily moderated that's why it's (for me at
least) the best internet frontpage for technically-minded people. Not having a
financial incentive is a big plus as administrators dont have to worry about
readership.

\- As a consequence of the frontpage quality, people who want to waste time
don't stay long enough to add comments. Otherwise, i don't think there's
anything special about the comment section here.

~~~
Too
True about the threaded discussions, i always felt threaded conversations lead
to worse quality discussions. Mostly because of the "argument"-thing. I don't
think people intentionally want to start an argument many times but since you
are always replying directly to someone it can easily be perceived as
offensive or defensive even if you are just adding another neutral fact into
the conversation.

Actually "conversation" sounds wrong, because there is no conversation or even
common red-line of discussion, just replies to individual comments changing
order several times per day based on some rating instead of time. Try
returning to a threaded conversation a day after you first read it, you will
have to reread almost everything again to get back into the loop again.

Flat comment system can also deteriorate quickly when you reach enough users
and everything is just lost into a stream of junk like on youtube. I think
stackoverflow has a good model with only one level of threading, not sure how
well it would work on a discussion forum without strictly right or wrong
answers though.

------
thaumaturgy
Hmm. There's a lot to unpack here.

First, I'm still on the fence in regards to the quality of discussion here. I
think there's a tendency for familiarity to breed contempt (the more familiar
you become with HN, the more aware you are of things like mean discussions,
and the more rose-colored your glasses will be when considering what it was
like "before"). There have been a few attempts to objectively measure any
degradation of the site, and so far they haven't found anything conclusive, as
far as I know. So, it might not be as bad as you think.

Second, you start out with a really general point, but then halfway-through
fall mostly into a single example. If that's the example that got you thinking
about this, then you've let yourself turn a wasted moment reading a pointless
comment into quite a large waste of your time. The friendliest way I can think
of to respond to that is that it is a very silly thing to do. :-)

What are you even doing online, anyway? I mean, for me, at least, being online
makes me feel pretty miserable afterward, especially compared to anything else
I could be doing. I'll look at my threads page sometimes and the older my most
recent comment is, the happier I am with myself. That means I've been spending
time on better things -- and anything other than commenting on a website is a
better thing. I don't want to chase you off, but at the same time, sometimes I
sit back and think about all the time wasted worldwide since the invention of
the online forum, and _how little real positive impact there has been from all
of that_ , and it kinda bums me out. I must've blown entire months on Slashdot
way back when, and all I remember from that now is ... uhm ... Hellmouth? ...
and ... hmm. I forget the second thing. I am literally a happier, better
person, for every moment that I'm not online.

Thirdly, although your intentions are good, you are criticizing behavior which
leads naturally from the design of the site. How much thoughtful discussion is
really possible on a site like this one, where most threads come and go after
just a few hours, never to be read again? Hell, I wrote about this 9 months
ago (<http://robsheldon.com/conversations-online>), submitted it to HN
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423975>), where it got a little bit of
discussion, and then that was it.

Forums like this one are _designed_ to be topical, not thoughtful. With the
invention of internet points -- yay, karma, and all that other nonsense --
people have had more incentive than ever to quickly bang out a single-line
joke, get a point for every chuckle, and move on. (One of the things which has
gotten me the most yummy internet points was a joke --
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102126> \-- and, although it was pretty
funny, it wasn't nearly as meaningful to me as, say,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132576>).

HN is _not_ a good place for thoughtful, meaningful discussion. It maybe says
it wants to be, but the most important things about its design say otherwise.
So at some point, you have to ask yourself, "What am I doing here?"

...Every time that I look at this comment for the next few days, I will be
ashamed of myself, because I will know that I wasted 15 minutes writing a
thing which would be read by a few people for a few hours and then never
again, and I could have played a good game of Go instead.

~~~
Jabbles
I don't think that forming part of an online discussion is a bad use of time
per se. In fact if done well it can be enlightening and stimulating to people
beside yourself. It is in pursuit of this standard of excellent conversation
that people join certain communities (like HN). If the standard falls they
will leave. Many comments are not worth making, but that does not mean that we
shouldn't strive to write comments that are.

------
clebio
Like crcsmnky [1], I've been reading HN for a while now but have contributed
little. The extant comments from domain adepts generally precludes my ability
to add anything constructive to these discussions.

I too have noticed a shift in the timbre here lately. The degradation of civil
and apropos discourse is marked. Criticism based on logic and rhetoric (ad
hominem, straw-man, etcetera) has lost some ground to internet-acronyms
(IANAL, IIRC, and such) Since culling sources takes work, this warrants
addressing for risk of losing this relevance.

I've been thinking about this problem recently in the face of web searches
that yield forum discussions. I'm begun to avoid forum results, due to endless
threads that lack a solution to the specific problem (even sometimes
incorrectly marked [Solved]).

Curated Q&A sites [2] address this successfully by putting the correct answer
above the fold. But community discussions don't have a correct answer, so the
problem here is not quite the same. I don't have a solution, but even revising
sort order might do. I'd hazard to suggest an additional degree of community-
based voting and editing should be added.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469618>

[2] <http://www.question2answer.org/>

[edit] formatting

------
DanielBMarkham
One of the things I've learned on HN is that if a comment can be
misunderstood, it will be. So if you post insightful, brief comment A, you can
count on getting replies B,C,E,E, and F that completely miss the point.

This leads me to believe that some -- perhaps not the majority, but some -- of
the comments here that we consider snarky or noise might actually be pretty
good comments, we just misread them. And then respond.

In my own experience I have found when I am tired or not mentally functioning
very well I tend to misread the intention of comments. Assuming this holds
true in the larger community, there may not be a way to fix the extra problem
I bring up. Or any of these related problems, for that matter.

I mention that to say this: _the community can only go so far talking about a
topic in any direction without a lot of emotional push-back starting up, and
emotions win over logic_. So if the subject is "businesses that sell to poor
people," at some point, somebody is going to start making a case that
businesses shouldn't be allowed to "exploit" poor people. Those folks are not
being snarky; to them they are simply making a stand that needs to be made
when the subject has gone off the rails. Likewise, if the subject is "writing
your own OS to make a fortune," at some point somebody is going to start
beating the F/OSS drums. If somebody posts yet another "Young inventor
conquers known universe" stories, somebody is going to point out the trope.

These folks are not trying to be snarky or trolling. They are simply trying to
provide useful feedback. But comments like this have a tendency to snowball.
Once you let one comment in that says something like "enough with the young
kid inventor stories that are overhyped!" then the next commenter feels like
he has to out-do the first. And a lousy thread is born. If you do not let
these comments in, then you are saying you want a board where people must
react to content in a completely non-emotional fashion. That's not going to
work either. In the terrible example of the deceased programmer, probably 2 or
3 percent of the audience did not feel sympathy for the story. Out of that
bunch, maybe only 2 or 3 percent felt the need (?) to express criticism. But
in a community the size of HN, that's enough. Once those comments were put
out, the rest of those folks who felt little sympathy were empowered to go
along with the thread, drawing in fence-sitters in the process. After all,
they were simply being dispassionate! That's what we ask for when we deride
most bad comments, right?

All abstractions are leaky, and language is very slippery. With tens of
thousands of readers, written comments and articles simply are too leaky to
scale.

So we have yet another terrible example of HNers performing poorly. I don't
have an answer. What we see is mob behavior at work, the human social animal.
Written communication is much different than vocal communication, but we
naturally try to use them both the same way. We are performing as designed.
It's probably a feature, not a bug. :)

EDIT: Please don't take this as an apologia for poor commenting or what
happened yesterday, just my attempt at explanation. One of the worst comments
I ever made was in reply to a long-time HN'er who was basically asking "Why
are you loading up my HN feed with this useless obituary crap?" when somebody
posted about a somewhat famous person passing away. I told them to shut their
pie-hole. And I'd write that comment again in a heartbeat.

------
gioele
The guidelines state that "HN is becoming reddit" is a subject that should be
avoided unless you have something really interesting to say. This article has
something interesting to say and, I suppose, there has been other similar
interesting threads in the past.

Aside from this article, what are the other past submissions that are worth
reading to see how _community deterioration_ has been felt through the years?

------
garethsprice
In the age before the Internet, the exact same thing happened to music
subcultures - hippies, punks, ravers etc started out as small groups of
pioneers, consciously trying to do something new. Over time those scenes
became flooded with posers and wannabes, most of whom had no idea that what
they were doing was counter to the original principles. The original pioneers
moved on to something new.

The same lifecycle seems to be a property of online communities, except at a
much faster rate. The phenomenon even has a name (Eternal September), named
for Usenet's annual flooding with college freshmen who did not understand the
rules or culture of the community. Eventually the irregular floods became a
torrent as Usenet opened up (via AOL and Google Groups), and the community
died.

Are online communities destined to have a limited lifecycle, either stagnating
or collapsing under the weight of their own popularity? What can (or should)
be done to maximize valuable conversations?

------
Tycho
The problem is simple: cynical, jaded, unemphatic disrespectful people _like
cool things just like the rest of us._

Hacker News is cool. It's full of enriching discussion and useful links and
insight into the industry. It's a great web page to surf to and it doesn't
bother you with adverts or anything like that. Unfortunately, this means it's
now attracting those users we'd rather not have to deal with.

I don't think there's a solution to this problem, except maybe somehow make
the sight less user-friendly and less familiar to users of SlashDot etc., so
that those people who don't value maturity get fed up and leave.

Hacker News used to stand out as being so much more mature than other sites on
the internet... that has definitely started to slip I think. Possibly the
endless climate of political contentiousness is also contributing to it (SOPA,
healthcare, the 1%, financial crisis etc).

------
steve8918
What HN is an ignore list.

Let the trollers post whatever they want, anonymously. But each HN reader can
have their own ignore list, and eventually no one will even read the troll's
comments. He can troll to his heart's content, but he will be ignored. The
problem with downvoting is that the troll gets the pleasure of knowing he
pissed off X number of people.

With an ignore list, it's passive, and the troll gets no feedback. A growing
number of people will stop reading his posts, and when the troll gets no more
responses, he'll leave. He can change pseudonyms, but the same effect will
occur, and he'll get bored. It's pretty much as simple as that. It's the
equivalent to the NYC subway system painting over graffiti as soon as it's
painted. After a while, the vandals get frustrated, and they stop doing it.

------
jconley
This seems to be an issue in every online community, whether news-oriented or
not.

I'd like to try an experiment with a less open online geek news community.
Social trust-based. Very hard to get an account that can write comments. Must
be invited or voted to have that privilege. Very easy to get perma-banned.
Though, to avoid appearing as Skull and Bones or some other private club, all
comments would still be public. Even as a lurker, the insightful comments are
often the most valuable thing on a site like this.

There are successful examples of these communities as simply forums in other
fields like video game programming, cars, medicine. I'm a member of one for
video game developers and one for car computer tuning. There ought to be a
good way to apply it to peer-voted news.

------
joshuahedlund
What if you disallowed people from upvoting until they had received X upvotes?
Would that force people to assimilate the culture before being allowed to
affect it?

Alternatively, or additionally, has any thought been given (maybe something
like it is already in place) to weighted voting? By which I mean more power is
given to the upvotes and downvotes of community members who have been upvoted
a large number of times. If a trusted member recommends something should it be
given more weight than a recommendation by a newcomer?

Just a couple thoughts by a relative newcomer who has nonetheless observed and
participated in online discussion for years and is interested in the problem
of scaling a valuable community...

------
cr4zy
I run a much less successful site than this and have dealt with and thought a
lot about comment issues. HN does a brilliant job, for the most part, in
handling comments. I would say that some people are unfairly hell banned (I
see dead people) or slow banned, but it's for the greater good of the
community and you can always get a new account.

My one possible suggestion would be to make HN more social. That way all the
people who like to be trolls can troll each other and people not interested
can unfollow, etc... Although, the Google+ Hacker News Circle has basically
done this for me, and I like it a lot.

------
Confusion
I don't understand this post at all. If I read the comments on the thread
about Arfa, I see mostly positive, interesting and insightful comments. A few
comments were bad and were downvoted.

In any thread, it would be surprising to get no bad comments at all. They'll
always be there and you can do nothing but ignore them, even when they get
upvoted. Just keeping adding your own insightful comments, ignore the other
ones and I wonder whether things will deteriorate much further.

------
indspenceable
Interesting post, and certainly a valid issue to discuss; however, although I
can see where you're coming from and needing examples to draw on, the way it
is written hard to read it without feeling like it's specifically bashing
certain users. That's not to say I don't agree with the point you're trying to
make, but maybe it would be more effective not to list user names specifically
in the post.

------
speleding
I agree with the problem analysis and I've read similar sentiments before here
on HN for a while. However, I have yet to find an article that methodically
explores the solution space, or even just suggests practically achievable
improvements.

It would be said if we start to sound like Karl Marx, who provided well
founded criticism of capitalism but was never able to come up with anything
better.

------
bryanlarsen
I read Hacker News on a delay so that the best comments have had time to be
posted and to be floated to the top. It used to work well -- mean comments
have generally floated to the bottom. But on this story the mean comments have
floated to the top: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469927>

------
elisee
Pratical approach: How about adding a link to the Guidelines from the "new
comment" page? And maybe putting the most important part right next to the
submit / reply button, like "Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to
face conversation" or "If you have nothing of value to say, don't say
anything"?

~~~
elisee
(making this into a separate comment since it's a different, related idea)

How about having a "flag" link for comments with a drop-down list of points
from the guidelines that the comment violates?

It would reduce the noise from other replying to the comment stating why they
think it's inappropriate, and would still let the commenter know what they did
wrong while burrying the comment.

~~~
gjulianm
There is a spanish Digg-like site, Menéame [1], which offers this same option.
I think it works pretty well as it keeps the site clean of news which don't
obey the rules. Despite that, people will still reply explaining why they
flagged the comment (and I think this is the correct way to behave: you should
explain why the comment is wrong and how to improve it in order to improve the
community)

[1] <http://www.meneame.net>

------
bane
One of the most powerful things that HN enjoys is a vital, continuous and
active meta-discussion about the quality of HN.

I'm going to take a different approach to this. If you look at the comments in
the thread in question, there's really only one person who's behavior is
lamentable, and it's clear by his continuous statements in the topic that he
isn't even aware of it...Dunning–Kruger is spot on. I was even so pissed I
took the bait and fed the troll when I probably should have thought better of
it.

However, looking back at the thread a day later, I see that the community
policing _worked_. That vast majority of the really despicable comments were
downvoted into negative territory. The poster's statements were tossed out
into the trash they were.

The truth is, we shouldn't extrapolate the behavior of one attention starved
malcontent to the entire community. I'm personally _impressed_ with the
community. To me at least, the community worked hard to keep the discussion
appropriate and positive, elbowing out the bad sort of folks who shouldn't be
participating in a forum like this.

Yeah sure, there were a few other questionable top level posts, but nothing
entirely inappropriate, most of the ugliness centered around one person (I'm
including myself regrettably as a participant in responding to this troll). So
it's no the community that necessarily behaved badly, in fact the community
behaved quite well.

 _edit_ Something I thought I'd add after reading through a few more comments
discussing how the quality of discussion here appears to be going down. I have
to disagree. I'd say that the comments and discussions here are extremely
strong, better than they were about a year ago (or whenever pg turned off
comment voting). At that time, HN seemed to be suffering from an outrageous
echo chamber where a select group of superstars were automatically the top
comment in every thread they participated in, the cult of Apple was going
through all kinds of absurd egocentric narcissism, a Haskell and a Daring
Fireball post was guaranteed to be on the front page, and any comments
pointing this out were mercilessly downvoted and their users flagged - and
comments supporting the echo chamber group think were guaranteed karma
earners.

Since the simple switch to turn off comment points, this trend seems to have
dissipated. Superstars no longer squat at the top of the mountain, Haskell no
longer dominates the front page, we still love Apple, but only as a product
company that makes cool stuff, not as a cult, and dissenting opinions and
reasonable debate seems to have returned. The front page is dominated by tech
tips and business ideas most days, even in the shadow of SOPA. In short HN has
returned with a vengeance.

------
irishcoffee
So.. person A annoyed person B. Person B made a blog post about it and tied it
into how the HN community is declining as a whole. Person A makes a few
comments in the thread, and makes own blog post about the initial blog post.

I thought high school was over.

------
freejoe76
Maybe a "report abuse" link next to each comment (with its attendant
functionality) would be useful.

------
billpatrianakos
You could have made an awesome point but you ruined it. I agree that there's
been a decline but the examples you pull out to support it don't help you
much. The comments on the young girl who died were deplorable but I think
that's a very rare case and I wouldn't say that happens often around here. But
even that doesn't hurt your point as much as going after Dextorious like you
did. You make a good case for him being a great example of the problem but
this article comes off as you being disgruntled by him and going off on a
personal attack. I don't think it's right to name names like that unless the
person being named has a certain degree of notoriety. You could have left his
name out of this, still used the quotes, maybe pull out some more quotes from
other users exhibiting the same pattern and then this article would look far
more like the commentary I'm sure you meant it to be rather than Mr. Siegler
getting pissed off at and attacking someone. I'm disappointed. I'm not
disappointed in your opinion, because there's a lot of truth to it but I'm
disappointed in the way you approached it. Hopefully most of us will see past
the flaws and really dig deeper into your real point. Other than that, I
thought you were right on.

------
georgieporgie
Which comes first, the troll, or the heavy-handed mod (or community downvote
waterfall, in the case of HN)? I've often found that the least moderated
forums yield the strongest communities, which is somewhat counterintuitive.

I think the author of this blog post was simply combative in his own responses
to the offensive commenter, and could have been far more engaging in a way
that builds community. This blog post strikes me as a sort of passive-
aggressive way to win a silly Internet argument and get validation.

(yes, I realize that the above paragraph itself seems combative, but really, I
think you could have done a better job handling the situation)

------
ZenPsycho
To throw a couple of ideas into the "tech solutions" pile, I wonder what would
happen to the quality of comments in a community if a mandatory 1 minute delay
was put in before the text area would appear. This would I think have two
benefits: 1. it would for commenters to think about what they were saying for
at least a minute. 2. It would raise the barrier of entry to the point that
posting a worthless one liner doesn't seem worthwhile or satisfying.

