
Proposed HN Feature: The Cold Shoulder Button - mechanical_fish
So I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed a pattern on this site: Attached to many submissions is a one-sentence comment of the form "This is not for HN" with a certain number of upvotes. I confess to having posted a few such comments myself.<p>I'm wondering whether this pattern might be a site feature struggling to be born.<p>Perhaps every single article should come with a tiny button to press, with a label: "I believe this article is offtopic for HN".<p>I'm not talking about a downvote option, exactly. The downvote button on submissions has been suggested thousands of times by now, and a counter-argument -- a good one, IMHO -- is that enabling the downvoting of articles empowers gangs of organized downvoters to kill content from the site for arbitrary reasons. Everyone knows the kind of trouble that causes.<p>But that presumes that the downvote button is hooked up to something in the site's software. It doesn't need to be. Just display a tiny number that is the number of accumulated downvotes. Let the people who read each article, and decide whether to upvote it or not, choose whether or not to ignore that number.<p>In the absence of this feature, the users reinvent it for themselves, as we have seen again and again.<p>You may ask why the people who wish to express disapproval of an article can't just write a thoughtful post that explains why, instead of clicking a little DOWNVOTE button. The short answer is that to acknowledge a troll is to feed the troll. The longer answer is that some trolls are much more subtle than others: The ones who use rude one-liners are easy to spot, but there are others who will suck you into endlessly circling, long-winded, bad-faith arguments filled with chaff. You'll refute something, and they'll respond with a mixture of inaccurate and irrelevant bullet points; and you'll introduce good points of your own, and they'll be ignored in future posts; and if by some miracle you create a really compelling counter-argument, the troll will go away for two days and then come back, advancing the same argument that he did two days ago, as if the counter-argument had never existed. You can't avoid such people by engaging them -- engagement is what they want. You have to learn their reputations and politely but firmly avoid them.<p>Which I do. But that doesn't mean I want to sit idly by while effluvia overflows the front page of HN. The site could really use a "cold shoulder" button.
======
brk
In all honesty I've found that just ignoring the non-value-add stories seems
to work pretty well. Not upvoting them and not commenting on them seems to
allow gravity to take effect fairly quickly.

The solution is not any sort of downvote mechanism, by any name. The solution
is simply restraint :)

~~~
mechanical_fish
I'm generally inclined to agree with you. That's why I was never really in
favor of any downvoting schemes. But what I'm trying to suggest is not
downvoting; it's only slightly more than a _placebo_ for downvoting.

(An "irrelevant" flag that didn't even display a vote total would be _purely_
a placebo. If it weren't for the fact that the users here would immediately
figure out the trick, I'd semi-seriously propose the placebo idea. Restraint
is easy to preach, but sometimes difficult to practice, and one way to make it
easier is to offer a displacement behavior. Instead of getting angry, you can
forcefully click a button and depart. ;)

And I wouldn't have even brought up the idea of a formal Cold Shoulder system
if I hadn't seen so many users -- including myself -- doing it anyway, using
comments. Perhaps this _ad hoc_ comment method that we currently use is
actually better than a formal system for feedback. I'm not sure. But I figured
I'd at least discuss the idea for a minute.

Why don't people show more restraint and just have faith in the force of
gravity? I just discussed the irrational reason: they could use a better
displacement behavior. The rational reason is that, as the number of off-topic
submissions becomes a greater and greater percentage of the submitted stories,
one fears that new submitters are increasingly unable to tell the difference
between a story that dies because it is offtopic and a story that dies because
it's lost in a sea of other submissions. So, they keep trying. I'm not sure I
blame them. Why shouldn't users submit the kind of highly-crafted linkbait
that works so well on sites like Reddit and Digg? The answer is that many such
links don't work well with the culture we're trying to foster on HN, but users
aren't born knowing how HN culture works. Experienced folks have to teach
them. And one good way to teach people is to have a means of providing subtle
corrections: One that's more gentle than a stiff-arm to the face, more polite
than a cutting insult, and less work to create than a well-crafted post.

Anyway, perhaps you are right and I just needed further encouragement. I will
return to the "restraint" tactic, and we'll give the whole thing another three
months and see what transpires.

~~~
brk
Thanks for clarifying your argument/points.

One of the other things that I think HN has going for it is that pg seems to
pay active attention to the site and wants to cultivate it to a particular
end. Given some of his previous work in bayesian spam filtering techniques, I
am inclined to believe (hopefully not in vain) that the HN algorithm will
continue to be adjusted over time to weight down the useless stuff and add
buoyancy to the interesting stuff. Because it is still very hard for a program
to gauge the nature of comments, the best approach is likely to assume that
comments and active discussions == good, while lack of comments == bad.

So, I might have too much faith in "the system" (which is a rarity for me),
but for now I am trusting that this issue is being managed transparently, and
we can all do our part by acting intelligently. I'll also add for good
measure, that there are times I have to remind myself to take my own advice ;)

~~~
mechanical_fish
_One of the other things that I think HN has going for it is that pg seems to
pay active attention to the site and wants to cultivate it to a particular
end._

Yes, I agree that this is the secret advantage [1] of the site: It's being
gardened, using hoes and rakes built out of Lisp.

[1] Well, okay, technically it's a secret only in the Purloined Letter sense.

------
dhotson
My personal mantra on this is to focus on upvoting.

If you see something you like, upvote it! Also, if you're not happy with the
stuff you see.. by all means, submit some links that you think are
interesting.

A couple of times I've submitted stuff that was perhaps a little off topic or
not explained very well.

The frustrating thing was that when a submission got upvoted by other people
who obviously found it interesting as well, all the comments were from people
who just wanted to point out that the article was not interesting to them.

I'd much rather people just ignore stuff they don't like. Leave it for other
people who do find it interesting to discuss.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_all the comments were from people who just wanted to point out that the
article was not interesting to them._

That was the impulse for this suggestion of mine: I was trying to think of a
system that acknowledges the existence of these dissenters without encouraging
them to occupy too much space on the comments page.

~~~
dhotson
Oh I'm not saying your suggestion is a bad idea. Not at all.. The placebo idea
is actually kinda clever. :)

But I think in general it's better just to be mindful that different people
have different interests. I'm glad that I'm exposed to a broad range of topics
on this site, even if I don't find all of it interesting.

Although, that said.. the obvious link bait type articles "Top 10 ways to blah
blah" are pretty annoying. :P

~~~
stcredzero
I wonder if it would be possible for downvotes to count, not against karma,
but only for an individually calculated gravity? This way, you could
accelerate the fall of links you don't like, but only for yourself.

------
jcdreads
Back during the five-or-so years that I read slashdot regularly, I grew to
wish that Jon Katz stories weren't there, so I used slashdot's (simple)
filtering mechanism to make it so.[1]

Therefore, a feature request: If a large fraction of HN's users hit the "Not
Hacker News" button, then the site should use some clustering technique
(k-means or whatever) to identify groups of users who agreed[2] on what was
on- or off-topic and filter accordingly (for those users). The idea is that if
enough of the users to whom I'm similar decide that something is off-topic,
then HN auto-flags it for me. What I'd really like is these articles filtered
out automatically; then, if we wanted to get fancy, provide a "Show 4 probably
NHN articles" link that turns the feature off temporarily.

[edit:] In particular, people who didn't use the NHN button would see exactly
the normal set of stories.

But then HN becomes a baby recommendation engine, which could be a nasty path.
Just thinking out loud.

[1] I bear no particular ill will toward Mr. Katz; just thought most of his
stuff was neither news for nerds nor stuff that mattered.

[2] "Users mostly agreed" means the overlap between the sets of NHN-flagged
articles is similar.

------
alex_c
I like it. It could be the equivalent of those fake traffic light buttons.
Even if it doesn't have any direct effect on a submission, it could give
"doesn't belong" people an outlet for their frustration, without cluttering
the comments.

The problem is that there can't be any universal consensus on what stories
belong on News.YC. I've posted "doesn't belong" comments to some stories,
while simultaneously being annoyed by the same type of comment for other
stories. This inconsistency will never go away.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_I've posted "doesn't belong" comments to some stories, while simultaneously
being annoyed by the same type of comment for other stories. This
inconsistency will never go away._

Yes, "universal consensus" is way, way too much to expect of the universe. But
I'd claim that the current contents of the News.YC front page represents a
broad, fuzzy consensus, plus a few outliers, and that's what we're trying to
signal here.

I actually expect that, were we to implement this idea, the "X users have
pressed the Fake Traffic Light button" widget would always register a certain
number of clicks for the average front-page article. You're right -- the
median submission will always seem annoyingly offtopic to _somebody_. That's
why I think it's important that the "Cold Shoulder" widget be very small and
unobtrusive, since it will always be there, registering something.

And, of course, for the median submission the widget might well have no value,
since it will always register some background noise. But my hypothesis is that
the design might pay off by keeping the objections small and inconspicuous,
rather than having them eat up space on the main page the way curmudgeonly
comments currently do. Meanwhile, for the _non_ -median submission, the
feature will come into its own: If you submit a link that recruits people to
the Hare Krishnas, and it gets zero upvotes plus 75 "Cold Shoulders", you
can't pretend that your article has merely slipped through the cracks. Nope,
we're actively ignoring you and hoping you will go away.

Of course, perhaps my idea would just end up encouraging rebellious users to
compete to rack up the largest possible tally of Cold Shoulder clicks. If that
turns into the game of choice I might have to concede that my idea is
terrible. ;)

------
mattmaroon
I like it. There seems to be both widespread disagreement as to not only what
the guidelines should be, but what they actually are.

dhotson said: "My personal mantra on this is to focus on upvoting." Mine too,
but unfortunately it only takes a few people whose focus is instead being
community police to annoy the hell out of a lot of other people.

An "off-topic" button might go a little way toward solving this.

------
deathbyzen
Oh, I guess that's not what the flag button is for. _facepalm_

