
Ask HN: Is it just me, or are HN comments becoming more and more negative? - ncarlson
In the early days of HN, there seemed to be a tight-knit group of entrepreneurs that offered support and advice to each other. Now when I read comments, there seems to be a race to see who can write the first criticism or who can pick out the first inconsistency.<p>Don't get me wrong, constructive criticism is essential for growth. But I feel like the atmosphere of the comments dialogue is becoming more and more negative each day. Am I the only one feeling this?<p>Maybe I'm just overly sensitive.
======
edw519

                     Quality of HN Comments Over Time
       |                   . .
       |                  .   . 
      q| . .             .     .
      u|    .           .       .               . . .
      a|     .         .          .           .       .
      l|      .       .              .      .           .
      i|       .     .                  . .               .    
      t|        . . .                       you are here -->. .
      y|                                      (that's all)
       |________________________________________________________
        S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D
                     '08                     '09

~~~
jurjenh
Looks very seasonal to me... probably indicative that most of the readers are
in the same hemisphere.

I know that when winter approaches for me, I tend to get a little disheartened
with whatever I'm doing, want to quit and do something inspiring and new...
Then when spring rolls around, things are so much better and I have a new
lease on life.

I'd suggest comments reflect people's internal barometer, and there probably
have been studies on this...

~~~
NikkiA
The majority of the english speaking net is in the northern hemisphere anyway
- with notable examples of southern hemisphere mostly being limited to
australia and brasil, sure there are other net users south of the equator, but
those are the two countries with the most presence online...

The reason why brasil's huge online population doesn't really count in these
kind of things is because they largely keep to their own communities, often
portugese-speaking.

So it being seasonal in appearance isn't really much of a surprise.

I'd also argue that geek-types (which most of us are) seem to be more prone to
SAD.

------
pg
A little, probably. There are good days and bad days. I was particularly
struck by the harshness of this one:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925034>

and also that such a huge number of people piled on to vote it up.

In fact, that makes me wonder: could it be the voting that makes the tone of
the site seem more negative? There are often nasty comments lurking at the
bottom of a thread with 1 point or less, but they're not very noticeable.
Whereas this one + 49 points (currently) = an angry mob.

~~~
pchristensen
I think one problem is that there are two different ways people can vote. One
is to cast a vote for or against a comment, expressing your opinion. This
works well when there the point total is low.

The other way is to vote towards how many points you think is should have. So
if something has 15 points, if I agree with it but think it's not that good to
have 15 points, I sometimes downvote it. Likewise, I'll upvote some heavily
downvoted comments because they weren't _that_ bad. I figure no comment should
be below -1 unless it's overtly belligerent or trollish.

~~~
3dFlatLander
I've thought the same thing. But, I think that to say that a comment has X
number of upvotes so it's good or bad doesn't really work since there's no max
points a comment can have, or knowledge of how many people voted on it, I'm
sure there are some other variables that would make it work.

My idea to solve the problem you're talking about is to have 3 ways to vote.
The usual up/down (which in this case can be agree/disagree) and a third for
good comments that the user doesn't particularly agree with. It's a rough
idea, but I think it could help solve the problem.

Something else I've been toying with that's along similar lines involves
removing any up/down/other voting and instead uses a small area of say, 50x50
pixels. The X axis would be the quality of the comment, the the Y would be
personal agreement with the comment. And the user could just click anywhere
within that area to express their opinion. It's not as easily quantifiable as
regular voting, but allows for more expression.

Just some thoughts. :)

~~~
elblanco
This is a good idea. I've certainly seen great comments (that I may have
disagreed with) at some negative score, and terrible comments with scores of
like 23.

A "I think this is a good comment" or "I think this is a poor comment" is
certainly different from "I agree with this" or "I disagree with this". The
later seems to be how the voting system ends up degenerating into sadly.

------
DanielBMarkham
There are a lot of complicated and interesting things going on here. I just
wish I had more time and data to dig into them.

One thing I have noticed is a consistent desire for the community to "meta
discuss" how the board is doing -- much to the annoyance of others. (yes, this
is a comment about meta comments, which makes it a meta meta) I'm not sure any
of these conversations have kept the board from getting worse quicker or not
-- it's impossible to measure something that didn't happen.

There seems to be common "games" you can play on boards like this, whether
you're into game-playing or not. Edw519 has a tendency to come up with pithy
quips that the majority of readers would like, thereby gaining his comments a
lot upvotes. People who comment early get the "pile on" effect.

I know PG has tweaked the algorithm some to combat this, but all it's really
done for me is to put rather worthless comments up above more interesting
ones, so for me it makes the board less valuable.

At the end of the day, I think 3 things: 1)karma matters, whether you like it
or not, 2) people play games with karma, and 3) you can only play so many
quality-enhancing games: as the crowd grows outlying players are left with
"cheap and dirty" games which work every so often.

~~~
notaddicted
What does Karma matter for?

I notice that people care about it and experience consternation about
downvotes, I don't yet understand why. In my experience with the site, every
comment speaks for itself, and getting downvoted just means a lot of people
disagree with you. When it happens in real life it doesn't bother me, I don't
see why it would on here.

The thing I'm really looking out for when I browse are the topical mega-
comments that appear sometime, usually when someone understands the topic at
hand better than the original author. There are only so many of those to go
around, so the rest is chatter, it has to be. Everyone wants to talk, only a
few people have relavant insight... still true to life :S.

~~~
Freebytes
The down side is that people rate up and down based on whether they agree with
a comment instead of whether or not the comment was well crafted, high
quality, and respectfully argued. If I make an off-topic post about how
Watchmen was the best comic book movie of all time, that should not result in
positive or negative ratings based on the opinion of the readers. Instead, it
should be based on the quality of the input.

~~~
jshen
i'm convinced that direct voting is a bad approach. I've made one social site
without them (it uses implicit signals to "rate" posts, comments are just
comments) and it helped a bit. People are still assholes when they feel
anonymous, but at least you don't get 10 down votes for expressing an opinion
about something like politics. That has a strong psychological effect which
some people have a hard time understanding or admitting.

~~~
Freebytes
What do you mean by direct voting, and what are the implicit signals to "rate"
posts? It sounds very interesting, and I would like to hear more. I am going
to be creating a rating system soon, and any suggestions to prevent abuse or
to accurately increase quality would be appreciated.

~~~
jshen
direct voting: having an up and down arrow, or a "digg" button. one of my
favorite old community sites (half-empty.org) had a buttons for + = -. This
was before the term blog even existed, and that site suffered the same
problems, and had endless meta discussions about it.

I wish there were a way to send someone a private message, cause I'd give you
more specific details. Anyway, the site I built, which gets about 10k uniques
a day and has around 200 active users, uses the ratings of posts to sort the
homepage and the tag pages. It uses a few different signals like the number of
distinct commentors, click throughs, and the reputation of the poster (this is
mainly to break ties). It has a decay so that new posts come up, and it also
has some safeguards for abuse. For example, users with no or very low
reputation don't count in the distinct commentors number so that it can't be
spammed, and there are similar safe guards for the click throughs.

Building community sites has been a hobby of mine for years, and I have a
bajillion ideas on the subject. Right now I'm working on some bayesian filters
for collapsing insulting comments, porn, etc. Fun stuff :)

------
techiferous
I'm a refugee from Reddit. That place has become too immature and ignorant.
It's hard to have a courteous, intelligent discussion there; it very easily
degenerates into name-calling, arrogance and dogmatism. It feels like middle
school all over again.

Hacker News' voting system is very Reddit-like, so it will also become Reddit.
Expect Hacker News to become more immature as it grows in popularity.

Here are two changes that can be made to Hacker News to keep it from becoming
Reddit:

* Discourage controversial or dramatic posts. For example, the latest brouhaha about American Airlines and Dustin Curtis was very dramatic, but its educational value was lower than some other less-dramatic posts on Hacker News. I think it's okay to have content like that on Hacker News, but there should be some damping effects to keep the controversial stories lower on the list. Otherwise, Hacker News will be taken over by knee-jerk, reactionary thinking instead of deeper, more nuanced, intelligent discussion. Technical gossip will supplant technical news.

* Provide two ways to vote: vote up if you agree, and vote up if you think the content is valuable. It's important not to conflate the two into one vote up button.

------
dcurtis
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924943>

It is because of this thread that I probably won't participate in discussions
here anymore. The extreme negativity and personal attacks make me feel as
though I'm not a welcome voice here.

I miss the hacker news from two years ago, when I doubt wmeredith would have
been supported so highly for a nasty personal attack.

On the other hand, I understand Michael Arrington a lot better now.

~~~
unalone
While I sympathize with you, you're a part of the blogosphere and you're
acclaimed. With that comes the criticism you deserve.

Would you claim to be perfect in skill and intent? Are your writings brilliant
and your designs unilaterally breathtaking? No? Then you should not only
accept intensive criticism or embrace it. The simple fact is that if you were
flawless, wmeredith wouldn't have felt the need to call you an ass; that he
chose to, and that others agreed with his sentiment, implies a fault of your
own, and one that you can fix and mature in the process. Pressure makes
diamonds and suchlike.

I learned when I was thirteen that the Internet existed to call me out for my
bullshit. I have it to thank that I've become as shitless as I am, and I
welcome the future negativity that I'm sure will shape me in the future. You
can either sulk that people think you're an asshole, or you can figure out why
and become better in the future.

The contrast between this controversy with you and the Fake Steve controversy
last month is striking. You get called out for bullshit and reply by being
smug. You don't even drop the smug in private email conversation, as I found
out last night. Then, when people get irritated and slap you, your reaction
isn't to lose the insincerity but to get mad at the people who'll call you out
for shit. Meanwhile, last month Dan Lyons decided he was pissed off at John
Gruber, and Gruber utterly ignored him except when he had a crushing rebuttal.
That's maturity. You'd do well to learn it before you try grandstanding the
way you did with your American Airlines series.

EDIT: Can whoever's started downvoting Dustin please not? He made an earnest
argument, and he's contributing to the conversation.

~~~
dcurtis
I have been trying to resist responding to you.

At least ten of your comments in that thread contained petty negative personal
attacks as well. You do not know me, yet you have created a very negative
image of me in your head after reading an angry rant I posted to my personal
website. Come on.

~~~
unalone
I really don't have that negative an image in my head of you. You're talented
at what you do, but you don't do much in terms of functionality, and the way
you style your articles constantly strikes me as sensationalist rather than
logical. You go for things that are striking even when your selections don't
enhance what you're writing, in other words.

Further, the way that you present yourself, both here and there, suggest to me
that the things you write are neither sincere nor passionate, even when you
design them to look like you care about them. I come from a writing
background, and your writings strike me as dishonest. But that's the only
dislike I have for you, and all the comments I posted were to that effect.

As I wrote in reply to somebody else in that thread: I was glad people were
calling you out, not because I dislike you, but because in most threads
talking about your stuff I felt that were I to interject by saying "Dustin's
writings seem insincere", I'd come across as either needlessly negative or
outright douchey, and it's something I'd have felt awkward emailing you about.
So I like that I can say what's been on my mind for a while. But it's not like
I hold a grudge: If you ever start writing earnestly, I'm sure I'll love to
see what you have to say. Until then, I'll keep judging you by the insincerity
you put out for me to read.

~~~
dcurtis
What do you mean by insincerity?

~~~
unalone
The way you write make me feel that you're writing more for the publicity your
writing will get than you are because you have a personal itch to write. It
feels very corporate. Your first few articles occasionally really interested
me, but sometimes you'd write a shallow article and cover it up with a design,
and your last half-dozen or so have seemed either empty or deliberately
attempting controversy. I really liked your article on sleep, for instance,
because the design fitted what you were saying, ones like your article on your
brain were overwrought and made me feel that you didn't really find the
subject interesting, you were just writing for page views and Twitter follows.

I have to think about how to better phrase it—that's just my top-of-the-head
reaction—but I had the same feeling last night when we talked, like you cared
more about the image I had of you than you did about what I had to say. We
didn't have a conversation last night so much as we had a PR session, and that
rubs me the wrong way.

~~~
dcurtis
Because this is more of a private conversation -- and because you've
negatively referenced our previous interaction without context -- I've sent
you an email.

------
tptacek
Quick caution: there's selection bias here bigtime. If you read the comments
on this thread, Hacker News is clearly in urgent danger of becoming Reddit. Of
course, this post is designed to attract people worried about Hacker News
becoming Reddit.

~~~
clistctrl
I find this phenomenon to be most interesting. Digg is constantly worried
about becoming 4chan, reddit is paranoid towards becoming digg, and HN is
speculates about becoming reddit. The question i'm ultimately asking is where
is this place that fears degradation into HN? finally which social media
portal is so elite, so stealthy that they have no fears at all?

~~~
jackchristopher
>where is this place that fears degradation into HN?

It may not be on the web at all. Could be mailing lists.

------
tsestrich
Eh, I get the sense that sometimes people will just grab any news story that
hasn't been posted yet and post it hoping to get voted up points. I haven't
been around all that long, but it seems like the signal to noise ratio is
getting a lot higher even during the short time span that I've been on here.

Not only that, but you get twenty blog articles submitted pretty much all
talking about the same thing every time, and it can just get draining. I think
people get aggravated when they start reading the same thing over and over.
"Release early/iterate often" has been the subject of no fewer than one top-
page article nearly every day, and though it's good advice, I think by this
point we get the message. Once the main point of an article is understood,
people start to pick apart and criticize the smaller points I guess.

~~~
stanleydrew
I assume you meant to say it seems like the signal to noise ratio is getting
lower? i.e. more noise.

~~~
tsestrich
Yes indeed I did, lol. Thanks

------
mrshoe
Oh shut your dirty trap, you whiny moron.

</sarcasm>

I still find HN to be a friendly, positive environment. Let's keep it that
way!

Edit: Wow. Either starting your comment with a joke is somehow no longer OK,
or nobody else agrees with me that HN is still friendly and positive. I've
been reading HN everyday for a very long time. I think these negative trends
are mostly just an illusion due to the novelty wearing off for newer users.
_"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying
that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"_
(<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>)

~~~
unalone
I'm at a year and a half. Hacker News _is_ turning into Reddit. It's following
the exact same path, albeit thankfully slower, and the causes behind that
path—influx of users, need for attention, karma lust—aren't causes that Paul
is looking to fix.

Reddit's not the worst thing in the world, but make no mistake, we're headed
there.

~~~
thenduks
Every online community is naturally inclined to become 4chan. It happened to
4chan, it happened to digg, it's definitely on the cusp at reddit and I expect
it will eventually happen to HN.

I'm not happy about this :/

~~~
unalone
Every open, unfettered online community, anyway. Hacker News could save itself
with harsher mods and possibly restraints on registration. I think it'll
happen if we slide too far, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.

~~~
thenduks
Agreed.

------
elblanco
It's perhaps not helpful that HN is also full of pedantic know-it-alls (I
count myself among that group).

A community of self-made people tends to self-select for a certain personality
type.

------
WesleyJohnson
I haven't been around HN long enough to really notice a shift in the
negativity of comments, but I have been around long to realize I could very
easily become part of the probably that a lot of you talk about: signal to
noise.

I keep coming back to HN because of the caliber of minds that offer up advice,
criticism or personal thoughts on a daily basis for little in return. I envy
the amount of collective intellect that HN users have, and yet therein lies
the problem - I envy it, so I want to be part of it.

I'm considered the most intelligent person in my family and in my previous job
I was the "goto" guy for the tougher questions, the hard assignments or just
general advice on your random everyday things. I'm sure a lot of you are
familiar with this sense of worth. You're admired, needed even, and feel like
you have something to offer.

On HN, however, I often feel like I have something to SAY, not necessarily
something to contribute. This realization has made me very cautious about
posting unless I really feel like I can add value to the conversation.
Commenting, as I understand it, should really be about just that - adding
value.

Having said that however, I also think there is room to embrace newer users
who don't really understand this mechanic. Down voting a comment to oblivion
doesn't help with educating those who really don't understand why they're
being down voted, whether or not it's a troll or just a misguided newbie.
Repeat offenders are a different matter and I can't really offer up
suggestions on how to handle them, but for the newer members of HN who just
happen to confuse something to add with something to say - hopefully giving
them a casual nudge in the right direction will really with keeping HN on
track.

------
vaksel
I think we need more erlang threads to drive the quality up

~~~
_pius
Don't even joke about that!

------
logicalmind
The Law of Hacker News Comments: Any sufficiently long comment thread will
converge on a semantic argument.

Prediction, the comments in this post will converge on the semantics of the
word "negative".

------
hernan7
I don't know... comments here have always had a dose of healthy skepticism.
Now, if I never again read a comment starting with "meh", "yawn" or "shrug", I
will die a happy man.

------
_pius
You're definitely right. Worse, I can feel the increase in negativity and
trolling influencing _me_ to become a more negative contributor myself.

------
ErrantX
I think part of it is the extra traffic too: 10 comments pointing out the same
criticism within a few minutes of each other. And you can see the rush in
posting it.

Personally I have a few names I like to read commentary from and so keep an
eye out for - then skim the rest.

------
nkohari
I agree entirely. I rarely do more than skim the comments anymore, because too
often it just turns into a contest for one-upsmanship and ego stroking. There
are people on here that will take any opportunity to argue about any topic.

------
crystalis
It had to happen- there's relatively fewer pg, patio11, raganwald, wheels,
tptacek, swombat, etc., and more of this:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903880>

~~~
tptacek
Crap. I just upvoted edw519 for his pithy comment!

~~~
crystalis
Would it be petty to edit you out of my original comment? :)

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how his asserted graph deserves the points
it has now.

~~~
crystalis
Well, I guess maybe an explanation would help, too.

When I see a post about education, I expect tokenadult to have a well sourced
and reasonable comment on the topic. When I see a post about security, I
expect some intelligent and experienced discourse from you, cperciva, or
dfranke. patio11 is consistently arguing from experience about things he
knows, like uISV, Rails, and A/B testing, with real-world examples to back it
up. These are really valuable posts.

Something like <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924045> isn't entirely
valuable, but it's not a bad thing.

However, something like <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876726> misses
the point entirely and becomes harmful in its Ludditism. To go straw: Do we
really need a "product" like plumbing to replace our evolved mutually
beneficial practice of shitting wherever we happen to be? Do we really need
any of this so-called "medicine" to "hack" nature without consequences?

It's a shy step from vaccine frenzy and represents a titanic reputational blow
that- in the absence of proven, public results or credentials- limits the
ability to take people seriously. When the quack-science spouting is utterly
indistinguishable from what might actually be an experienced person talking
from an educated viewpoint, the whole signal is poisoned. No one ever wants to
ask the random oracle more than one question.

~~~
tptacek
edw519 is a pretty reasonable guy. You could just mail him that comment, and
he'd probably give you a thoughtful response. I've never tried doing that with
him, but I have with other people and other people mail me.

------
bjclark
I've noticed it. Especially the anti-37signals comments. I got -4 for saying I
agreed with DHH about something.

~~~
utku_karatas2
Was your post only saying that? That you agree with DHH? In that case you got
those downvotes for adding a useless comment to the discussion where a simple
upvote would cut. Your agreement or disagreement without a story backing you
up means nothing to the reader. Don't take it the wrong way.

~~~
Poiesis
Wait--wasn't an upvote supposed to be based on post quality, and not on
agreement?

~~~
jacquesm
The temptation to write 'you must be new here' was resisted (for the most
part), but it was tough (and mostly because I think I'm 'new here' myself).

As for upvotes being on post quality, that may have been once the intention
but it seems that has long gone out the window. Imo that degrades the quality
of HN quite a bit but since you can't really check why someone got modded down
I guess it does not matter much.

People that mod down because of disagreeing with you would have done so anyway
even if that would not have been policy.

And those that mod up/down based on post quality would probably do so too.

Any change you perceive is probably more related to how the numbers of those
groups develop.

------
chasingsparks
_If_ the proportion of negative comments is growing and _if_ this is a symptom
of karma lust, it's a pretty interesting event. The assertion being that as
karma wealth grew, the system has became more volatile. There are some
complaints about swarming in up-votes, but this thread deals with increasing
down-votes. The question now becomes will a higher frequency of down-votes
bring about smarter comments so as to avoid down-votes, or will the system
become unhinged?

..I wonder if any systems act similarly? ;)

------
hyperbovine
HN should charge people for the right to post. Even $1 a month would go a long
way towards separating out the yokels from those who actually have something
to contribute. I'd pay it.

~~~
tptacek
So, the people here that annoy you most here can pay $1 to be _entitled_ to
annoy you, and meanwhile we make sure that people like David Heinemier Hanson
and Nate Lawson and Joel Spolsky and the UX guy from Zappos and all the other
interesting people who drop in to comment once or twice... never do.

------
raintrees
I do not post very often, as I frequently seem to have little to add to the
already proliferate content. But it seems somewhat telling to me that my
biggest recent gain in karma was directly related to a comment on Dell that
seemed a bit of a zinger.

Most of my other sparse comments were questioning a premise, offering my
.00002 cents worth, and typically neutral to positive in tone. I think. (Or at
least that was my intention).

------
richardw
While quality may have been varying, it's still fantastic compared to the mire
that exists outside. We're lucky.

~~~
Luyt
I also like the frugal and simplistic layout. It's easy on the eyes and
doesn't distract. Luckily there are no sidebars, blinking flash ads, 'next
page' links, etc.

------
ramchip
I agree. I had a submission killed recently, even though it was getting voted
up very quickly and (IMHO at least) completely relevant; a few people flagged
and said it was 'garbage' without bothering to open the PDF referenced in the
article. Doesn't make me feel like posting again.

~~~
kaitnieks
what was this submission in question?

~~~
ramchip
You can click on a username then on submissions to see it (if you see dead
submissions; you can change this in your profile). Otherwise, it was this
story about Gödel, Einstein, and Morgenstern (not my blog):
<http://blog.plover.com//law/Godel-dictatorship-3.html>

I don't really want to bring this into the discussion though; just saying I
thought the way it was shot down was rather rude compared to what I was used
to from HN, and I've seen similar posts in other people's threads.

~~~
jacquesm
What bothers me more than your post being killed is some of the outright spam
and drivel that passes unchecked.

------
spudlyo
I've noticed it as well. I'm not sure if this is due to an increased amount of
criticism or if the quality of the articles posted has gone down, warranting
more criticism.

~~~
tonystubblebine
I've noticed it also. When I first joined people really took care that their
comments were thoughtful and respectful, even if they were disagreeing. Is
there anything to do other than to personally try harder to be thoughtful
contributors?

~~~
ErrantX
Those comments are still there, just a bit less obvious.

I figure it is because the "original" members were of a certain level of
contributor. "hand picked" in a sense (classic early adopters). A these move
on to pastures new and a large numbers of new people come in you start to get
a range of commentary style rather than _just_ top class stuff.

(not that all newcomers are bad - or indeed not that many of us are - just
that you get a range of attitude).

And of course almost outright trolling is less obvious once the general range
of commentary style is expanded; so it passes off as serious discussion.

------
jeromec
I think there are certainly times when things may go a bit far, but that's to
be expected with such a volume of people - largely independent thinkers. A few
might even be overtly negative or bellicose. I try to call it like I see it
whether endorsing or critical, with no regard for being ingratiating for much
the reasons PG points out here: <http://www.paulgraham.com/discover.html>

------
messel
Times are tight, so while more unemployed folks are desparately tearing
revenue out of their businesses, the business growth is seeing less of the
capital fired back in as growth.

Suspect YC comments will be more optimistic with perceived wealth increasing
and folks spending more of their hard earned $$

I'm optimistic, but I have food in my belly at this moment, and a warm place
to sleep tonight. That combination falls under the "rich" category at the
moment.

------
fauigerzigerk
I'm going to look through my comments to see if I'm contributing to that.
Admittedly, it's tempting to react when I see something I disagree with.

------
fjabre
Agreed. This is kind of the reason PG did away with numbers on comments a
little while ago but brought them back after a lot of criticism.

------
jsz0
I haven't noticed it myself but I like seeing inconsistencies picked apart.
It's constructive. If I disagree with someone they might get some value out of
understanding why their idea/argument doesn't jive with me. I think it's only
negative if you approach it with an accusatory or condescending tone.
Otherwise it's exactly what a lively discussion should be.

------
Mz
As a place grows in size, it changes in structure. There are always growing
pains. Some places handle the transition better than others. Small, close-knit
communities where people know each other well function very different from
large communities where most people don't know each other well.

------
techiferous
Another idea is to hide the karma number beside posts and comments. You still
position the higher-ranked ones near the top, but no number is displayed so
that it doesn't influence your vote as much (the bandwagon effect).

~~~
Pistos2
"Experiment: No Comment Scores" <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979>

------
kingkawn
If you're convinced that the world is getting worse and less civilized, it
means you're getting old.

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amichail
Could this have something to do with startup failures?

Multiple failures might put people in a bad mood.

~~~
tptacek
Do you really think there are that many actual startup people here, relative
to the commenters as a whole? Also, with few exceptions (myself clearly
included), the people here who actually have companies tend to be very
positive.

~~~
unalone
Are you actually that negative? I hold my grudges against haters, but you
always seem more snarky than actually hostile.

~~~
elblanco
No, tptacek and I have openly quarreled before.

But, it was a good discussion _I_ thought, sometimes conflict can flesh out
ideas and make them stronger or make bad ideas more eligible to be discarded.
I certainly took a lot away from it.

I actually appreciated the debate, it's something I encourage in my company
and helps us get to the good ideas faster.

------
louislouis
Comments get upvoted for different reasons. Split the karma into sections like
funny, insightful, cool, whatever.. then u can weed out the crap.

~~~
tptacek
I mean, look how well that worked for Slashdot!

~~~
potatolicious
Actually, Slashdot's quality of moderation and posts is _very, very_ good, not
to mention having maintained a consistent quality over the years. In
comparison, every other "upvote/downvote" system has succumbed to the Digg
phenomena sooner or later.

It's still one of the rare sites where, years later, I go back and see the
same quality of posts (which honestly isn't that bad), and the caliber is kept
high enough that my brain doesn't bleed internally.

~~~
allenp
While I agree the moderation is better than Digg and Reddit, etc I think
Slashdot can be a pretty harsh/negative environment because the culture
accepts (and even likes to see) gladiatorial intellectual commenting. Things
like, "Actually, if you had ever even seen the abc variation of blah blah
expression you would know that it isn't nearly the same, there is a full
.00002 measurable difference" etc.

I'd like to see HN get past this sort of bullying and trend more towards
helpful/intelligent.

~~~
inerte
Maybe only let the person who's being replied moderate a comment.

And up-arrow means "This is insightful and I'm glad you took the time to talk
to me, you've made me a better person and I would like to continue having this
conversation with you" while down-arrow could mean "I wish to stop talking
right now, you're boring and I wouldn't have a beer with you".

I mean, when everyone has the chance to judge what everybody says, you're
favoring group-thinking. It's a meritocracy. Which isn't something bad, but if
it's not your objective, then drop it. It's a pipe dream to still deny
comments are up/down votted based on quality instead of agreement or agenda.
It's written on the rules, yet it's simply not followed. I wish people could
simply accept that this has been tried, many many times, on a lot of websites,
and the reality is that it doesn't work. There are the rules and there is how
people actually act.

It's like how project management with Scrum is done. Or rather, what it is up
against. Like the person who gave me the course on Scrum said: You can make
the client write his requirements with the blood of his first born male, he'll
still want to change. It's just how things work. Instead of trying to swim
against the tide, fighting its force, we should accept and work with it.

I think designing a system where "helpful" is the ultimate goal might be
worthy pursuing. Or maybe Yahoo Answers or Stack Overflow -like systems are
the best we can do.

------
zackattack
The reason that now it is a race to see who can write the first criticism or
who can pick out the first inconsistency, is because people think that they
will be upvoted for that.

So, we just have to start changing what people get upvoted for.

I think we should create a small group of supermoderators who have 10x voting
power.

------
drhowarddrfine
It's just you....twit.

------
Freebytes
I was going to leave a rude comment in response to this as a joke, but someone
beat me to it. What a jerk.

(By the way, me saying "What a jerk." is a joke. (To prevent more
downratings.))

