

Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility? - nilsbunger

Reading someone call PG an "ass" spurred to me to ask the question, though it's far from the only example.<p>I switched from Slashdot to HN a few years ago to hear more insightful, interesting debate on tech news topics, as opposed to flamewars.<p>Is something happening to the quality of this community lately?  And if so, is there anything we can or should do about it?<p>(I'm a long time listener, first time poster)
======
pg
The quality of comments has been declining very gradually for years. There's a
lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet
undiscovered. This is somewhat uncharted territory. I'm medium hopeful.

~~~
diego
It's not just the comments, I'm more concerned about the submissions. Look at
the front page right now, and see how many items are not "Hacker News" even
with a very lax definition of "stuff that's interesting specifically to
hackers."

For example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497331>

~~~
tptacek
It's clear why this happens. The people interested in fuzzy, quasi-political
or "outrage" issues are passionately engaged with them. People are less
passionate about the debate over the worst-case complexity of hash table
lookups. At a step's remove, it's evident that the topics HN was intended to
cover are systemically disadvantaged compared to whatever the moment's
advocacy topics are --- and _every_ moment has at least one advocacy topic:
the TSA, SOPA, Occupy, Wikileaks, police misconduct, Asian manufacturing,
ebook licensing, DRM, &c &c &c.

More passion, less thought, less tolerance for conflicting views, worse
threads.

Paul Graham seems cautiously optimistic about comment quality. I think he's
being too generous. I suspect that advocacy energy is cumulative; it doesn't
go away when the topic fades, but sticks around and waits to bind to
subsequent advocacy topics, causing the site to steadily crud up with them.

~~~
rbanffy
There are geopolitical/economics issues that are as important to hackers as
algorithms. This past week, of SOPA, PIPA, OPEN, ACTA and other less beloved
acronyms are of at least some interest for hackers because they directly
impact our ability to hack things, to the point of having pg reminding us that
the long-entrenched entertainment industry is ripe for disruptive innovation.

Here we find people of diverse tastes. I am an engineer and, given the
possibility, I'd be designing processor architectures and instruction sets. I
also like programming - and do it for a living, but I have lost some of my
taste for algorithms and data structures and prefer to generate competitive
differentials elsewhere on the stack. But I am also very worried by the
political background, both here in South America, where I live, in Europe,
where my ancestors came from, and with the US, which is a very fine country
where a lot of dear friends live and that we shouldn't allow to be ruined by a
bunch of crazy people. When I was a teenager, I read 1984 and the idea
something like that could happen scared me a lot. It still does. Bad politics
is contagious.

I think all is fine, as long as we remain civilized and don't forget to
disagree in constructive ways. Community and relationships are important too -
I have only one nickname, after all, one which is easily identifiable. All my
friends know who I am, where I came from and what my opinions tend to be. I
like to think that, in the many times we disagreed about things, we never
ourselves a bad example.

------
tokenadult
_Is something happening to the quality of this community lately?_

I opened up my username account here 1161 days ago, after lurking once in a
while for at least several weeks beforehand. As far as I know, NO ONE has read
every Hacker News comment exhaustively for years, although some members of the
curating team and some of the high-karma participants may come pretty close to
reading most of the most active threads. My general impression is that there
have always been some instances of incivility here, and there has definitely
been an increase in just-plain-dumb comments since the participation on HN
greatly expanded, but on the whole HN still stays way ahead of most online
communities in civility and in level of information on the part of the regular
participants.

 _And if so, is there anything we can or should do about it?_

What I have seen as most helpful is users who observe breaches of civility
pointing that out to users who perform such gaffes. That reaffirms the forum
culture and identifies which overt behaviors are not helpful here. I have to
acknowledge that from time to time I have learned from other participants
pointing out my less-than-ideal comments, and I appreciate people taking the
effort to help me learn from my mistakes.

Here are some links to earlier discussion (initiated by pg) about efforts made
beginning in March 2010 to improve comment quality on Hacker News:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271>

One way to get a reality check on how HN is doing is to look at the
bestcomments view of the community

<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>

to see if all the most recently highly upvoted comments look like civil,
informative comments or not.

~~~
pg
We read all comments that get sufficiently negative scores. So I have a decent
handle on how bad that kind of bad comment is. What worries me more is bad (=
mean and/or stupid) comments that actually get upvoted.

~~~
redthrowaway
Are you most worried about snarky or rude comments occasionally getting
upvoted, or the seeming proliferation of content-free comments? I ask because
the rude/mean upvoted comments, though disturbing, are thankfully fairly rare.
The content-free comments, on the other hand, seem to be becoming more
frequent and less downvoted. Do you think the problems are distinct, or do
they both follow from some other change in the community?

------
vaksel
"ass" doesn't seem to be that extreme...rude yes...but not that "bad". Didn't
see that particular discussion, so might have been worse.

The whole deification of pg by some people on here is pretty weird if you ask
me.

~~~
mindcrime
_The whole deification of pg by some people on here is pretty weird if you ask
me._

I don't see any "deification" of pg, personally. I see people being very
respectful and grateful for him, for providing this site (which he certainly
does not owe us) and for being an active supporter of the startup scene and
promoting entrepreneurship. He also has established credentials as a sharp
technologist and all-around smart guy, so why wouldn't he be respected here.

That said, you are allowed to disagree with pg, and people do it from time to
time. It's not like you get auto-banned for not agreeing with everything the
man says or anything. But you can disagree with pg (or anybody else) in a
polite and respectful manner, without being rude or inflammatory.

 _"ass" doesn't seem to be that extreme...rude yes...but not that "bad"_

It was uncalled for and it goes outside of the norms this community tries to
maintain, IMO.

~~~
_delirium
There's a minor bit of deification imo, though it's not as bad as it could be.
It's not so much that disagreeing with him is suppressed, Soviet-style, as
that quoting the Paul Graham Essays is sometimes seen as a legitimate form of
argument (a form of argument-from-authority). Not pervasively to be sure, but
it's something I notice now and then.

------
moe
_Is something happening to the quality of this community lately?_

Personally I like the ass-comment (cue hackers fainting in the audience).

There's some passion and lifeblood in it that I'm missing on HN for a while.
And he's obviously making a point beyond name-calling (the point I disagree
with, just for the record).

What I'm growing tired of is quite the opposite. It's the politeness-police
that demands fluffy padding around everything that is said and jumps out the
woodwork at the slightest trace of "harsh tone" or (god forbid) humor that
doesn't directly add to the discussion.

It's a fine line obviously, but having this particular comment spawn this
particular Ask-HN is exactly what I mean. There's more than plenty echo-
chambering and mutual shoulder-patting on HN as it is. Do we really need to
throw a meta-tantrum every time someone opposes the hivemind with a strong,
alternate opinion that is not coated in the finest super-gloss politeness?

~~~
SapphireSun
I've been here for several years and one of the things that initially drew me
here was the way people were respectful, on topic, and focused on the issues
in a dispassionate way. If you want passion, there's plenty of it on the
internet. The people with self control and an analytical bent are hard to come
by and are thusly valued.

Calling pg an ass is crossing the line for this community. Not because he's
privileged, though we do owe him a bit of respect for hosting this community
in the first place, but because we shouldn't resort to name calling ever. The
appropriate response is to dissect his ideas and actions and demonstrate why
they would be ineffective in achieving his purpose, or showing why that
purpose is wrong. That's the only way you're going to convince anyone. Calling
people names won't get your message heard by the person it's directed at,
it'll just piss them off.

While I understand your problem with the fluffy padding, it's what allows for
a respectful conversation. Look at the rest of the internet, the comment
threads there are a terrible shouty mess filled with ignorance, with half the
participants yelling into the wind. HN has standards, they're there for a
reason, and they aren't respected, then in the immortal words of Chef Ramsay,
"I've _eaten_ here! You're going to kill somebody!"

That somebody is this site.

Edit: removed 'you' from next to last sentence to make it more impersonal.

~~~
moe
Everything you say is correct, but there's a middle-ground between "youtube
comments" and "lifeless group-think".

There's still interesting discussion on HN for me (otherwise I wouldn't be
here), but I'm finding it's drifting towards the latter. Now recently with a
monthly meta-discussion bemoaning its own demise.

Name-calling is obviously not the way to go. But the immortal words of Dr.
Strangelove aren't either: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the
War Room!"

~~~
SapphireSun
This is very true, but I feel that the group think isn't so much mediated by
style as it is by what people are actually saying; this is a harder problem to
solve. :-(

Respectful discussion prevents people from flying off the handle and getting
distracted from the main topic. Me-too'ers and yes-men are too agreeable, but
still on topic. I wonder if it's possible to analyze a paragraph for
agreeableness and automatically reduce its visibility if it's too extreme on
either end. That might force people to post a more balanced view (assuming
that the people gaming the system are down-voted by human moderators).

This actually seems like something a machine could reasonably do.
Agreeableness is vague enough that it wouldn't need domain knowledge of the
conversation, and there are probably enough key words and phrases to train it.

I wonder what effect that would have?

------
plasma
It may just be people need a reminder sometimes - like someone taking you
aside and saying "hey, did you realise how many interpreted your comment?".

Imagine logging in to HN one day and seeing a black screen or something with
your comment and a small note saying it wasn't appreciated by the community
because it was uncivil - then everything goes back to normal and you can
continue browsing.

A gentle reminder may be all that is needed?

------
uurayan
This is the unfortunate entropy of any online community. I've seen it in the
community I managed as well.

First you have the founder(s) of the community and the early adopters. These
people all are like minded, and all appreciate the mission or goal of the
community. They contribute great things which makes it an awesome place to
hang out all the time.

The next group of people who come in hear about how cool this small community
is. They for the most part have the right idea but sometimes they are too
enthusiastic and want to contribute right away instead of building cred
slowly. This causes them to do things that doesn't quite fit with the original
intent of the community. This annoys some early members and they leave.

The next wave are people the enthusiastic 2nd wave people bring in through
evangelizing the community. Unfortunately the 2nd wave choose to highlight not
the mission of the community but the benefits of it. This 3rd wave group are
often in it for self gain and promotion rather than to be contributing members
of the community. The original mission of the founder(s) is lost in the
shuffle as the number of people who "get it" are quickly being outnumbered by
those who are new and "don't get it". More of the early community members,
people who made the original community so great, leave leaving the 2nd
generation as the elder members. The remaining original members get into
confrontational debates about what the community is supposed to be with the
newer members.

After that, the community continues to degrade, eventually most of the
original community resort to just lurking instead of engaging with the
community which is now pretty much filled with self promotion and self
serving. The community from the outside looking in appears to be the same on
the surface but is a shell of its former greatness and actually quite sad for
the original members and the founder(s).

The sad thing is there are people who come in the new waves that do get it,
and have appreciation for the original mission and purpose of the founder, but
they are always outnumbered by the others.

------
DenisM
When I see someone being rude I always point it out and ask them to behave.
More often than not people get offended and start defending their "right to be
rude". I just hope that enough people do what I do, and the cumulative peer
pressure will calm everyone down.

~~~
DenisM
Same discussion 3 months ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3174952>

:)

------
ElliotH
Also seems to be a surge in people editing in complaints about downvotes and
baiting people for downvotes.

The pity with the ass comment was that a lot of its content was well written,
its just the first line spoiling it all.

I think a lot of people need to look at their comments before they post them,
take a breath and try and self moderate better.

------
moe
For those who missed it (like me), here's the Corpus Delicti:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3492889>

~~~
bhoung
Corpus Delicti, latin for body of crime...

I'm sympathetic to the discussion of promoting a civil and interesting
community, however, in this specific example, I believe the lack of
sensitivity towards the poster is actually worse than the crime itself.

Guidelines are exactly that, guidelines. When a long time contributor becomes
emotional about the brutally honest instruction of killing an industry, which
happens to be one he feels aligned to, I would figure the appropriate response
is to explain rather than admonish. There is a propensity to over-regulate
with respect to the guidelines, which I attribute to a lack of thought,
really.

------
maxklein
An easy fix would be to add a 'Rude' link beside the 'Flag' link, and just
make it do the exact same thing.

------
SquareWheel
I'm a new user, recently came over from Reddit. While I miss some science news
and obscure subreddits, the conversation is far better over here. I just
couldn't handle another meme.

I'm not sure I have much to add other than "I'll try not to get in the way".
Reddit was a drastic example of what happens when a system is inundated with
users, and so I'll try and step back and observe the way things are run.

------
DanBC
I am careful[1] with what I send and tolerant of what I receive. I downvote
incivility when I see it. I explain if the poster mistakes downvotes as an
attack on their message rather than an attack on rudeness.

[1] Careful with the words I use. Not careful as I want to be, and I post too
much. (I am managing to reduce the amount I post.)

------
zhwang
Incivility isn't just happening in relation to comments; I'm seeing thoughtful
(or somewhat naive, but _not_ inflammatory and certainly not with intent to
mislead) comments downvoted on a somewhat regular basis now, simply because
they may be wrong, or because many others don't agree with them.

------
ohyes
>Is something happening to the quality of this community lately? And if so, is
there anything we can or should do about it?

Yup. No way to collect data to back it up, however. I do see more comments
down-voted to the very bottom of threads lately.

I don't think calling PG an ass is indicative of a loss in quality, however.
It is indicative of abrasiveness. Is he an ass? What was the reason for
calling him an ass? Was there evidence given that could substantiate the
claim? I mean, maybe there is a good reason to call him an ass. The internet
is kind of abrasive, people are more opinionated and bigger jerks than they
are in real life. I don't think this is a bad thing, it helps to stimulate
discussion.

What we can do, as a community, is go through a checklist:

What is the claim made? Is it a ridiculous claim? If it isn't ridiculous, is
well substantiated? If it isn't substantiated, is it purposefully
inflammatory? (The difference between stupid and malicious).

Down-vote or up-vote accordingly.

Anecdotally, I just read an entire thread about whether 'nice guys' finish
first or last. No clue whether it would have happened 3 years ago, but it is a
very shallow topic.

I think the bigger issue is a proliferation of shallow discussions.

------
foxit
I'm a short time poster here, but longtime forum maven, so disregard as
needed:

\- Not saying this is what's happening here, but people tend to idealize the
time they personally first arrived at a new community as being the most
interesting, the most respectful, the most entertaining, the best of times.

\- Familiarity breeds contempt. The more time you spend communicating with the
same people, the less reverentially you view their thoughts.

\- Communities evolve, particularly if the thing through which the
participants got together evolves. This place is all about innovation.

I'd imagine the traffic's growing:

\- When new arrivals show up in sufficient numbers that they overrun the
environment in which they'd have been able to properly assimilate in fewer
numbers, the environment changes.

\- Anthropology 101 teaches us that larger numbers of humans interact with
each other differently than smaller numbers. Moderation and forum policies
have to evolve with the numbers to maintain civility and intelligent
discourse. Still, because larger groups communicate differently than smaller
groups, it'll never have the exact same _feel_ , no matter what. It can,
however, have the same intellectual value.

------
malandrew
I'm going to toss a totally crazy idea out there, but it may be crazy enough
to work long term.

Create an official Hacker News API where every Hacker News client has an API
key and plan on offering write access only through the API. This would permit
a diversity of interfaces, from browser based apps to terminal based apps.
Monitor quality level of the posts per developer API key. Revoke or throttle
write access of a client which doesn't maintain a high post quality count.

For example, I would imagine that a client built for vim or emacs would have a
high level of quality and that a browser based client would have a lower level
of quality. Developers of clients which contribute a lower level of quality
would have the burden of solving the quality problem. Basically "push" the
problem to the clients. After all that is the origin of of the word "problem"
(Old French probleme, via Latin from Greek problēma, from proballein ‘put
forth,’ from pro ‘before’ + ballein ‘to throw.’) "Throw" or "put forth" the
problem for other developers to solve.

Hacker News would be better off if you could only contribute to it via an
interface likely to be used only by hackers. This strategy is not unlike those
employed by companies when they require you to submit your resume via curl or
to hack into an unsecured server to upload your resume.

Will we lose access to some types of content, like design focused posts?
Maybe. Would it be worth it? Maybe. But that's a whole 'nother discussion.

Personally, I would rather see 25% percent as many contributions of extremely
high quality than as many contributions as we have today of lower quality.

It's not poor quality contribution overload. It's filter failure ;)

[http://blip.tv/web2expo/web-2-0-expo-ny-clay-shirky-
shirky-c...](http://blip.tv/web2expo/web-2-0-expo-ny-clay-shirky-shirky-com-
it-s-not-information-overload-it-s-filter-failure-1283699)

------
ahalan
Is this Hacker News or Institute for Noble Maidens?

That particular comment conveyed a valid point, it was done effectively and
added to the discussion. I'm rather concerned that this site becomes more and
more of an echo chamber as I see dozens of comments from different people that
could be easily compressed into one.

------
j_col
While it is essentially to be civil, too much agreement and mutual back-
patting can lead to chronic group think in a community, where anyone deemed to
be contrarian is instantly down-voted regardless of how civilly made their
arguement is. I see a lot of this on HN.

------
AndrewDucker
People on HN are frequently happy to support rudeness in their own interests.
I remember debates here over rudeness in code and in bug reporting (someone
was banned from Bugzilla over their language) and a lot of HN people seemed to
feel that was fine.

So I don't believe that the levels of civility are going down - but the level
of vapid pointless comments is definitely going up. Fortunately I mostly see
them being modded into oblivion.

------
resnamen
I wouldn't mind moving the articles whose discussions have completely gone to
seed into a separate subforum.

My favorite forums are ones that don't allow the discussion of politics or
religion. The same is true for real-life discussions with acquaintances that
you don't thoroughly know yet. There is nothing to be gained from a discussion
when everybody's emotions are fully inflamed.

~~~
artursapek
I used to frequent a forum that had a "Flame" section that would automatically
adopt threads that got out of hand. While I like the idea for a few reasons,
one my favorite aspects of HN is its simplicity.

------
tzs
Yes. A large part of it is size. It's hard to discuss this without sounding
like an elitist or a stuck up braggart, but that is not my intent. I'm also
going to use Reddit for comparison, and it might sound like I'm slamming
Reddit, but I am not. I've been there for over four years, and spend a lot of
time there (way too much time). If it helps, while I am typing this I'm kind
of watching and listening to "Finding Bigfoot" on Animal Planet. I think
admitting that should prove I have no illusion that I'm superior...

I'm a reasonably bright person. On objective tests that are usually considered
reasonably good indications of intelligence, I do reasonably well (99.6
percentile on the LSAT for instance). I managed to get a bachelor's degree in
mathematics from a tough school (Caltech).

I find I prefer spending time, in real life or in virtual life, in the company
of other bright people. In fact, I'm happiest when I'm generally outclassed by
the people around me, but they are not so far ahead of me that I cannot
understand what they are saying and make valuable contributions of my own. I
do not like to be one of the smartest people in the room (real or virtual).

Reddit, at least the technical groups I had frequented when I signed up there
over four years ago, was like that. But now those groups have 500k to 1
million or more readers. Just doing the math, you can't put together a group
on an open forum like Reddit that is that big and still has enough smart
people for me to be comfortably away from the top.

Such large groups tend to have many people who can't distinguish on their own
between someone advocating a repellant position, and someone disagreeing with
a flawed argument against a repellant position. It gets frustrating when
someone says something, especially when they are advocating a position you
actually agree with, that turns out to have some factual flaw, and then you
spend 20 or 30 minutes working on a reply, and then you are massively down
voted. On a lot of subreddits now I have stopped researching my comments--I
just go from memory. If someone wants more information, or citations, they can
use my comment for ideas to start their Google search.

HN when I signed up, a little under two years ago, was ideal. Nearly everyone
seemed at least as smart as me, and I started recognizing a lot of people
clearly my superior. It was like being back at Caltech. A down vote on HN
actually meant something--if a comment of mine got a down vote it invariably
meant I had done something really dumb and I'd learn from it.

And on HN you could post a devil's advocate argument without having to first
explain that you are playing devil's advocate. You could take a contrary
position just to get a good argument, and people would welcome it as long as
your point was well written and logical.

As HN grows, it invariable is going to become more Reddit-like, but that
behavior is more damaging here. Reddit has subreddits. You can skip the
cesspools of stupidity like /r/politics and /r/atheism (my vote for the most
disappointing subreddit) and at least get some good stuff in /r/programming
(one of the few reddits to stay mostly reasonable despite growth) or
/r/physics or /r/math.

HN doesn't separate things.

I'm using an add-on to inject custom CSS on the site, and I use that to
highlight down voted comments in bright red so they stand out. I up vote any
such comment if I can't see a good reason for the down vote. I've been finding
lately that I have been up voting 90% of these comments. I up vote these even
if I think the opinion in the comment is completely wrong, as long as it is
expressed well and respectfully.

I don't know if this decline can be stopped, or if it is inevitable fate of
every public discussion forum. One thing we can do is back off on things where
they are adequately covered on Reddit _AND_ the Reddit discussion is as good
as the HN discussion. I've taken to flagging most of the political submissions
unless something stands out to distinguish them. I've avoided this for a
while, but in almost all of the discussion I've not seen any sign that the
discussion here is better than that on Reddit.

Recall the advice from the HN guidelines:

\-------------------------------------

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic.

\-------------------------------------

Perhaps these could be tweaked a little. For the "Off-Topic", maybe "on TV
news" could be expanded to "on TV news or on a large subreddit".

Again, sorry if any of this sounds elitist.

PS: they did not find Bigfoot.

------
uptown
I think it'd be interesting to compare the current site with the site showing
only posts submitted by users that have been members for a certain number of
years.

------
tristan_louis
I think the only response to something like this ought to be:

"Hell no. You don't know what you're talking about"

;)

------
tkahn6
There should be a karma or seniority threshold for upmodding. And it should be
high.

~~~
sc00ter
Perhaps a weighting rather than a threshold?

However the "ass" comment came from a relatively "senior" member, so it would
be an imperfect solution, and may have other unforeseen (by me at least)
consequences.

------
derekja
sure seems civil as compared to reddit!

