
Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community? - tokenadult
Here's an open-ended question for all of you. I saw the recent thread on the main page about "honeypot" submissions, including a comment by pg, the site founder, that the quality of comments on Hacker News has declined. What can I do about that? What can we all do about that? What voluntary cooperation can we engage in as users of Hacker News to make HN a more useful, friendly, and informative online community? I invite open discussion of this issue here, with any and all suggestions welcome, including suggestions directed specifically to my own online behavior.<p>One suggestion I have made before is actively to upvote comments that either 1) ask for follow-ups with more details or facts to clarify or back-up a parent comment's statements, or 2) provide asked-for details or facts (especially with links to reliable online sources or citations to dead-tree reliable sources). I also like to silently upvote comments in which users are polite and say "please" or "thank you," as a measure to promote civility. What else is good to upvote? How else besides upvoting good comments and asking follow-up questions can each user here promote better comments?<p>Thank you for any ideas you share here. And many thanks, of course, to the dozens of users here whose posts and comments make HN a valuable community to me and to other users.
======
patio11
Not submit or upvote stories which are fundamentally about politics (even
politics within a thirty mile radius of a computer!), because they predictably
descend into value-free flame wars. That destroys the sense of community even
on good threads: after seeing "you're a fucking idiot" on some article about
how the TSA is cracking down on Wall Street music piracy, people often think
"Did you read the fucking post?" is acceptable discussing minutie about a
particular startup's use of Redis.

~~~
tokenadult
_Not submit or upvote stories which are fundamentally about politics_

Hi, patio11, I'm sure I'm one of many users who appreciates your comment here.
I'll definitely try, in light of your comment and other comments posted here,
to broaden my definition of "politics" to exclude more submissions and more
comments that I might otherwise make from HN. (I have a good group of Facebook
friends of diverse political opinions who civilly and thoughtfully discuss
politics with me there.) There seems to be quite a broad community sentiment,
which perhaps needs more reflection in the community guidelines,

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

that political posts and commments have no place on HN.

That said, looking at the guidelines, I see on the one hand a statement

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

I'll interpret that statement broadly and both reduce any tendency I have to
post political stories or make political comments, and also flag political
stories and both downvote and then flag political comments. I'm trying to
listen to community consensus here.

I see on the other hand in the guidelines the statement

"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."

I discovered this site by following links from Paul Graham (pg)'s personal
website, which links here and also hosts very interesting online essays,

<http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

which are the first way I became aware of pg's career. The first pg essay I
ever read was "Why Nerds are Unpopular,"

<http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html>

and in his later essays "What You'll Wish You'd Known"

<http://paulgraham.com/hs.html>

and

"Undergraduation"

<http://paulgraham.com/college.html>

and

"Is It Worth Being Wise?"

<http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html>

among others, I noticed that pg seems to have a certain interest in education
policy, which is one of my strongest reading interests. You too, patio11, tend
to make comments about education policy in HN threads, and those are
particularly valuable for American readers because they are informed by your
time abroad. Thus I hope it will still be considered fair game here to discuss
reform of education, whether in the private sector or the public sector, as
long as we are honor-bound to seek facts and verifiable information about the
subject of how education works and how it can be improved. I think education
reform can provide start-up opportunities for hackers and is also of interest
to anyone doing business in the modern world, especially anyone with a growing
business who wants to hire competent workers.

What do the rest of you think about leaving scope for the possibly politics-
connected subject of education reform here, as long as we take care to submit
good sources, make best efforts to post thoughtful and civil comments, and
don't gratuitously drag partisan politics into the discussion?

~~~
mechanical_fish
I agree with the politics ban, but the big problem is always going to be that,
well, politics and life are technically inseparable. We must try to factor
them into separate buckets, but it's not going to be possible in the general
case.

Consider, for example, the terrible problem of The Virtual Currency That Shall
Not Be Named, which until recently was like a plague here on HN. It's hard to
argue that it was off topic for hackers: It was a system built by a hacker and
employing fun cryptographic hacks. But it was also a sort of terrible wedge by
which absolute torrents of drivel arrived on the site.

IMHO the way to handle politics is to empower certain individuals to delete
political threads. Then the definition of _politics_ will be subjective.
That's fine. There is no other way. And an advantage of the subjective
boundary is that it will be naturally fuzzy, which is good. An absolute ban on
submissions about The Currency That Shall Not Be Named would be too extreme.
What we need is an occasional foray into that world, followed by corrective
action if the experiment starts going wrong.

In the meantime I flag things that I think go over the edge, as tptacek does.

------
apparatchik
Absolutly no politics, current mainstream news, or anything that comes near
them. No OWS crap that keeps getting submitted. There's a lot of pieces from
the Atlantic, Vanity, and other places that are being submitted and upvoted
that are essentially political in nature but seem to be viewed in a good light
simply because of their publisher. Cut out all that and the biggest problems
will go away.

Promote civil discourse and find a solution to all the pedantry. There's lots
of threads now where people are arguing for a long time essentially over
semantics. It's really bone-headed and doesn't reflect well on HN.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=555595>

~~~
kaybe
OWS as in Occupy Wall Street?

~~~
apparatchik
Yes.

------
adbge
I'd like to see more people on the "New" page. I'm not sure how much attention
it gets compared to the front page, but it seems like very few people are
taking the time to wade through all of the submissions and upvoting the gems.
Essentially, controversial topics are much more likely to garner the necessary
upvotes to make it to the front page, and thus receive a lot of attention,
while technical ones often fade into oblivion.

It's my understanding that HN's algorithm rewards articles that have lot of
comments and discussion. I've observed that I typically enjoy articles that
feature a high upvote to comment ratio, while I'm unlikely to enjoy articles
with more comments than upvotes. I would be interested in seeing what the
front page would look like if articles were penalized for having more comments
than upvotes. Maybe this is just a personal quirk, I don't know.

I'd also like to see the community flag more comments than just those that are
spam. Personally, I flag any very mean comments/ad hominems. I've been on the
receiving end of such often enough that I know that those kind of comments can
easily ruin somebody's day. I think, as a community, we should actively
discourage comments that are mean. All criticism ought to be constructive,
otherwise what value does it add to the discussion?

At day's end, though, the most effective way to influence the community is
going to be leading by example. Long-time members of the community need to
show newer members what is appropriate. pg needs to show the community "this
is good" and "this is bad" and he has to _participate_. The entire tone of a
community is decided by its most senior and most active members. The majority
of a community will follow the lead set by those few.

~~~
DanBC
I visit new and upvote good articles. I also visit
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories>) and flag a lot of submissions.

I agree about "Be the change you want to see".

------
kb101
Hacker News seems to be evolving and becoming many things to many users. Why
not leverage that instead of trying to restrict it? Regardless of whether
things are "on topic" or not, the site has two things going for it that other
communities often strive in vain to build: traffic and a definable culture.

My suggestion: a column down the left with a topic marker: startup advice,
network technology, programming tips, hacker culture, VC firm news, economics,
politics, military tech.... whatever the topics are that people are actually
posting and upvoting.

Classifying a topic could be done by a voting algorithm, weighted by karma...
the poster thinks the topic is economics, then it gets marked as economics. If
enough commenters feel that it falls under politics instead, then their clicks
on that topic classification (submitted as part of the comment form) will
reclassify it as such. Those users who want to see only certain topics can
filter as desired.

The spirit of respectful and collegial debate that pervades the site is a huge
draw and could just as easily be applied to the "off-topic" as the "on-
topic"... and there is a synergy in having both available. It keeps things
fresh and interesting and there is intellectual stimulation available here
that you can't get anywhere else, regardless of topic.

I guess I am saying that the pool can be bigger and still be clean, and it can
have a shallow and a deep end, fast and slow lanes, and serve a wide range of
swimmers... but still be known for its overall high quality.

~~~
mixmax
This is a great idea.

~~~
kb101
The other thoughts I had on this subject are a little more radical but I'll
say them anyway: why not get rid of downvoting entirely? I'm a new enough user
that downvoting isn't even an option for me and I can't say that I miss it.

This site is already radically different from other online communities, why
not go full-bore and just make it based purely on a the-cream-rises-to-the-top
model?

I would imagine the flag feature is enough to get rid of the spam or junk
topics. If someone really likes a topic or wants to see it stay on the front
page, they can burn up karma with upvote boosts (to a limit).

It seems the focus here is already on the community finding and upvoting
topics of intellectual value and fostering stimulating discussion. Why not
just bring that to a laser-like focus and drop all efforts at "punishing" or
otherwise disciplining members of the community.

There's a big difference in motivation between thinking "what can I add to the
discussion that will be appreciated and upvoted" versus "gee I sure hope I
don't get penalized for saying this"... and that thought loop feeds back into
the culture of the site. Right now I would (subjectively) say that 85-90% of
the effort people put into the site is positive, while maybe 10-15% of it is
negative (downvoting, indulging in a bit of flaming, etc.). If the
architecture of the site was further refined to reduce channels for negative
action, it would seem that positive effort component could get upped to 90-95%
and make this place even more of a standout than it already is. HN could be
one big proof-of-concept that a large, diverse, open community on the web can
still be a highly evolved and civil community.

~~~
Mz
_why not get rid of downvoting entirely?_

Dissenting opinion (from someone who generally believes in positive
reinforcement as the best policy): I tend to be a very controversial figure,
wherever I go. I have dropped out of a lot of communities in part due to the
degree to which I get attacked. Some of my comments here get upvoted,
downvoted, upvoted, downvoted. It can be entertaining to watch it. It usually
doesn't result in some pissing contest. I am content with having people who
don't like me/my opinions vent their spleen by viciously giving an entire
downvote to my comment and then moving on. I'm very cool with that. It beats
the hell out of anything else I've known so far.

~~~
zerostar07
Kinda similar here. I dislike "me too" responses, and tend to be the devil's
advocate because that's the point of debating vs "commenting". The funniest is
when my comments get downvoted, yet acquire tons of responses [1] [2]. It's
kind of interesting to see how the votes fluctuate until they reach their
final (usually low) score.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3116043> [2]
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3125017>

~~~
Mz
I wouldn't say I'm a devil's advocate sort. I just don't seem to fit anyone's
ready-made assumptions/categories/whatever. I say something like "I lost a lot
of weight and it's nice to feel better but I'm not entirely comfortable with
all the invasive attention from total strangers". Someone gives me advice on
how to avoid male attention. It hadn't occur to me initially to clearly state
that the majority of the discomfiting attention is from women who want to be
like me, not men who want to get with me.

I have a serious medical condition that is supposed to be killing me, and I do
still have bad days at times, but I'm getting well when doctor's (and everyone
else) says that can't be done (getting well is why I have slimmed down so
much). To me, that is an ordinary fact and I talk about it casually at times
online, the way I would to the two sons who live with me and know all the
details. For other people, that's a headfuck and most folks divide up between
being highly impressed or spitting in my face and accusing me of both making
up crap and being a danger to others to talk about it (which makes me want to
go "Okay, which is it? You can't have it both ways.").

In short, I guess I'm the anti-group-think wherever I go. AKA lightening rod
for controversy.

------
EwanG
IMNSHO there are two things that would help HN be a "better" place - of course
as with most folks who respond to this better will correspond to what THEY
would like to see. So you should take any comment in this discussion with the
requisite boulder of salt...

1) Hire a Benevolent Dictator/Community Manager. Usually the second title is
just a euphemism for the first. I will go ahead and state that said person
should have some history on HN, should be evaluated on a reasonably consistent
basis by both pg and the community, and should have a commitment to be here
more often than not. They should be able to cull some stories and promote
others not only based on their personal interests, but also to the betterment
of the community (even if the community doesn't always agree). I am also
willing to put myself up as an applicant for said position assuming pg is
willing to work with someone remotely - as much because I don't want to see
the argument that no one would be willing to do it as that having run a few
BBS and forums I have some reason to think I could actually do it.

2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have more
control over how much of HN they view and participate in. As any community
grows you get more diversity, and it becomes harder to ascertain a common
"always good". Instead give folks the ability (preferably through tools) to
modify how they participate in and view the community. If there's a subject
that always bothers you, perhaps it's best for everyone if you can avoid
having to even see it. If there's something you're particularly interested,
being able to see more of it is probably worthwhile.

My .02 worth for you :-)

~~~
DanBC
> _2) A full-featured API that would allow members of the community to have
> more control over how much of HN they view and participate in._

That's nice, but the problem is that those people then don't know just how bad
the stuff they're ignoring has got.

Maybe they'll start to notice some churn in users; they'll notice that a
favourite commenter is no longer around, or that there are many newer members
who are creating odd posts. And then _BAMN_ \- HN is suddenly worthless.

------
cromulent
For me, if there was a little text before the "add comment" button that said
something like:

Does this comment contribute something to the general discussion rather than
just trying to prove that someone else is wrong? If so, [add comment]

then it might stop me from making some of my more bone-headed and offensively
off-topic comments.

Imagining HN as a large round table discussion full of very smart strangers
that I was lucky enough to join in with seems to help. Only say something that
adds to the discussion, moves it along, or points out a seemingly missed but
valid and contrary point of view, and don't be so rude as to mention that
guy's stutter, the foreign guy's poor pronunciation, or be a boring pedant. If
it gets boring, go to the next round table.

I'm a little concerned by the "citation please" two-word comment below
someones long contribution for some reason. Not everything needs to be peer-
reviewed here, there's plenty of room for well-formed opinions based on one
experts own experience. I guess the problem is when they are crowded out by
the poorly-formed opinions or dogma. A balance, like most things, I guess.

------
smoyer
I think that the down-voting has gotten out of hand and have seen several
instances where participants seemed to have issues with each other or were
reacting to a dissenting opinion. Shouldn't we welcome dissenting opinions?
Doesn't that actually make the discussion more engaging and valuable?

I'd like to see down-votes used only in situations where the comment poster
entered the conversation in a manner that didn't further the conversation in
any way. Perhaps a trick could be borrowed from the StackExchange sites and a
down-voter would pay for the privilege with karma points?

~~~
tokenadult
_I'd like to see down-votes used only in situations where the comment poster
entered the conversation in a manner that didn't further the conversation in
any way._

Quite a few users agree with this general opinion, with differing values
assigned to "didn't further the conversation in any way." One problem is that
many users who are not furthering the conversation don't seem to notice that
about themselves, and then demand an individual explanation for each and every
downvote, which seems too much to ask for in response to comments that are, in
pg's words, "(a) mean and/or (b) dumb."

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

While many users share the opinion that downvotes should mean something mostly
about contribution to the community rather than disagreement with the point of
view expressed, the opinion that downvoting is okay when used for expressing
disagreement with the content of a comment has also been expressed by many
users over the years, including by pg, the site founder.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171>

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously
the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable
that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

If someone who disagrees with me on factual or policy matters has made a
thoughtful comment that introduces me or other HN participants to new
information, I am happy to upvote it. But if a comment indeed doesn't
contribute to the discussion, because it merely expresses one user's opinion
with no verifiable information, it's within the current site guidelines simply
to downvote the comment, so that the person who posted it is made aware that
he or she should try harder to make a substantive, evidenced comment next
time.

------
neutronicus
Downvote any post containing the word "fanboy" or any misspelling or synonym
thereof.

There's no value in identifying and shaming people who are overenthusiastic
about products. Just correct any hyperbole - and don't crow about the fact
that it's hyperbole! - and move on.

That's the most topical one, but "idiot", accusations of poor reading
comprehension, and mocking interrogatives are all things I'd encourage
downvoting as well.

~~~
Udo
> _Downvote any post containing the word "fanboy" or any misspelling or
> synonym thereof._

Seconded. I also believe, more generally, that the growing tendency to express
negativity towards people (instead of ideas) is just as much of a problem as
frequent offtopic threads. Luckily, this is somewhat easy to fix, because it
may be easier to remind participants to keep a respectful tone than to define
what actually constitutes a hacker-relevant topic.

------
staunch
$5 registration fee that goes to the EFF. Might slow growth to a more
manageable level -- give people more time as lurkers, so they learn the
culture.

~~~
jrockway
Why $5 and not $50?

MetaFilter is $5 and the comments there aren't very good either.

~~~
apparatchik
And why the EFF? Can we just have it go to rtm's "buy more ram fund" ?

------
DenisM
Actually all these problems have been solved in FIDO net about 20 years ago.
There's usually a set of rules, updated list of off-topic subjects, a
moderator, a set of co-moderators, public punishment, and ex-communication of
repeat offenders. It worked fairly well for as long as moderators stayed on
the ball.

I continue to be surprised that we have to re-learn all these things the hard
way on the web.

------
impendia
One idea -- don't display the user's own karma score in the top right. It
reminds me a little bit of an arcade game, and I confess it makes me want to
earn more points.

I still think you should be able to see your own karma of course (click on
your username), but that it should require two seconds of effort.

------
stuntgoat
It seems that comment contribution dissipates after a thread leaves the front
page. There are valuable comments hidden from weeks and years ago only in that
they are out of sight to us. The only way to check if someone has replied to a
thread you are interested in, is to check that thread for updates ( or
actively search for a topic ).

I propose thread subscription. If I want to watch a thread for new comments it
would be convenient to get a digit on my nav bar regarding how many threads I
am watching that have new comments.

I believe this would keep threads more active. Perhaps it would encourage
quality posts, rather than quantity ( people might submit often in attempts to
get on the front page ( even if for an hour ) ).

For instance, this is a great topic and I would like to subscribe to this
thread-

------
zerostar07
I think the frontpage is great. That's probably because it's heavily
moderated. I don't think there's a way to save the comments. Tragedy of the
commons is inevitable when forums grow beyond a certain threshold. I 've even
turned "showdead" to on as i 've found some great but controversial (read:
thought-provoking) comments get completely buried under the usual HN popstars.

Might i suggest a crazy idea though: For every submission, ask 2 random
members (who have a minimum but not high karma) to review it before it gets
posted. If they disagree, ask a third. It's something i am testing out on my
site, but i don't have sufficient user base.

------
DanBC
I recently submitted an article about lemonade stands. Most of the discussion
was political. I was disappointed - I thought people could talk about ways to
promote entrepreneurship or to teach basic concepts like added value. So, I
apologise.

I try hard not to respond to any political posts. Now I can downvote I might
consider downvoting those.

I avoid anything that mentions Apple, or MS, or often Linux, especially if
they're in the same thread. These threads could be great, but often they're
content free bickering. I upvote good information. I will consider downvoting
flaming.

I haven't submitted many articles. I notice some people submit very many
articles - 10 per day. I don't know if there's some way to nudge people into
only subbing good articles. Maybe once they've got over twenty submissions
they need an average score of X (for the subs) before they can sub any more??

I'd also welcome more power given to people with high karma scores (and maybe
high average scores (although I realise there are some problems with average
karma)) to have super downvotes, or downvotes for submissions, or some such.

~~~
mattblalock
I read and enjoyed your post. Like you, I too was disappointed the
conversation was political... I was hoping for more startup oriented
conversation.

------
sendos
I think one of the main problems with HN is the way comments are displayed on
the page.

Essentially, the way things are set up, every thread becomes ossified after
while. It becomes this stagnant, rigid, structure that doesn't change much
when new comments are added.

This is the opposite of what you want, if you want a vibrant, active
discussion on an interesting topic that lasts for longer than a few hours.

~~~
polyfractal
Adding the option to view comments linearly by date would help a lot. Or
highlight new comments since your last visit. Couple that with subscriptions
that someone else mentioned and you'd have a much easier time keeping
discussions going past the front page.

Effectively, HN needs some of the features that forums and bulletin boards
have had for ages. There is a reason forums work so well for discussions.

------
alexandros
Hacker news is near the optimum of what a site of this size and type can do.
By type I mean the slashdot/digg/reddit social news format. Pg got a lot of
things right to shore up the format. ui geared towards a certain community,
strong focus on community, seeded with essay readers, slow scaling, quasi-non-
profit so quality remains almost top priority. Its just that the format of
squeezing the subjective realities of more and more people into an objective
'top intellectually interesting articles right now' list cannot scale civilly
when everyone is subtly pulling in their own direction just that little bit.
The tension adds up. Maybe limiting max number of users (one joins as on
leaves) would do it but that is extremely drastic and probably defeats the
point of hn.

------
tokenadult
Thanks for everyone's thoughts on how each participant here can help all
participants enjoy a more useful, thoughtful, and informative online community
on Hacker News. I find it interesting that despite the thrust of the original
questions, many suggestions in replies are suggestions that can only be
implemented by forum management. Forum management may or may not make future
changes in the forum software or forum rules, but I was especially curious
about what everyday users of the forum (like me) can today and every day to
make the online community better, one user at a time, all for one and one for
all.

------
whyproblem
Ditch the politics / mainstream news and HN will be a very solid resource.

------
Detrus
Communities fall apart, especially large ones. Maintaining the same level of
quality would be unprecedented, even if you had the exact same people they
would change over time.

Also the minimalist computer science inspired upvote/downvote sorting system
is a bit of a mismatch to human communication. Someone has to try a more
complicated paradigm. I think tags on posts and comments would work better.
Have a menu/autocomplete thing for common tags like [agree, troll, disagree,
interesting, this, politics, hostile] and weigh submissions and comments
through them. Should also be able to combine multiple tags and have a rating
option for each tag. Label severity of disagreement, politics or suspected
trolling.

This way when you need to tune the knobs you have more data to work with than
just upvote/downvote, total karma and average karma. I don't expect pg to do
these kinds of experiments though, he has minimalist tastes and limited time.

Also many times when communities fall apart, we have limited data to work with
to see where things started to go wrong. Was it too many n00bs that chased
experts away? Was it hostility? Did too many new people start voting on new
submissions? I've seen some attempts at analysis of HN but don't remember them
making clear conclusions.

------
axefrog
Does PG listen to the StackExchange podcast? There's some great information on
there sprinkled throughout the various conversations they have. Jeff Attwood
is very passionate about online community management and he and Joel Spolsky
get into some interesting debates about some of the community-related problems
that they have to deal with on StackOverflow and the other StackExchange
sites.

------
orijing
The downvotes are horribly biased and uninformative. I think an interesting
experiment to try is to force downvoters to also give a comment, so the parent
knows why he/she is being downvoted, so as to discourage that behavior in the
future. This is a great way for newcomers to stop making rookie mistakes, and
to reduce the number of "Why was my post downvoted?" updates/comments that add
little value, but is a question that understandably vexes the parent.

I sometimes make a comment that I don't feel is controversial/wrong at all,
only to see it downvoted. Not only is it discouraging (and a great way to ruin
my day), but it's also low in signal--I don't know whether someone just had a
bad day and wanted to spread their hate, or whether I misperceived the
controversy of my comments. I always want to ask the downvoters to let me know
what I said wrong--I just hate the anonymous drive-by shooting, if that
analogy makes sense.

~~~
DanBC
Reasons for down voting would quickly end up in many arguments.

[downvote] [comment about reason] [what? you missed the point] [no, you said
this] [no, read it again] [you can't write] [you can't read] [your an idiot?]
[you're a bigger idiot]

~~~
Hyena
This could work rather well if it is asymmetric: comment required to downvote,
but downvote comments do not require additional comment before downvoting. It
would rapidly punish people who are downvoting because they're just really
passionate about their opinions, not so much understanding what others say.

------
patrickod
Content should be limited to items of technical or scientific merit. Putting a
political spin on stories has led to the degradation of quality in both
submissions and comments on HN. Leave your personal grudges/beliefs at the
door on your way in and stay on topic.

------
DanBC
I would like to see more people linking to the original source article, rather
than a blog about that article. (As per the guidelines.) Often the blog is
silly or inflammatory or pointless.

Some method of de-duping might be useful.

------
DenisM
Do what I do: whenever I see someone being rude, impolite, or inflammatory I
point it out and ask them to behave. Like so:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972222>

When you see that someone already pointed out misbehavior (but no more than
say 5 such opinions), add your own concurring opinion rather than upvoting -
the offender needs to see the public opinion and they no longer see the vote
count.

Also when I see a comment that does not add to discussion I downvote it.

------
mixmax
Well we could bring the points back so that it would be possible to scan a
long thread and find the good comments. The bad comments aren't gone, but
they'll be easier to avoid.

Also, your point about upvoting certain comments will probably be moot if
users can't see the result of their action. Without having seen the numbers
I'll make a bold statement and say that overall voting per user has gone down
significantly.

Many new users might not even know that the arrows are for voting since it
isn't explained anywhere.

~~~
abc3
Re: Bringing back points for individual comments

Pros:

* Saves the reader's time. This is incredibly important. I've been here pretty much since the beginning, mostly as a lurker. I've noticed that I used to look forward to the stories with the most comments, because the best comments in those threads were generally very good and generally easy to identify. Now I avoid stories that have received a lot of comments. I just don't have the time to read every comment, and the current ranking system seems too inexact.

* Simple, structural, code-based adjustment. Hacker News has a simple interface, simple rules, and a public code base. Bringing in a dedicated moderator might make some of us happier, but it would also be a tacit admission of defeat. I get the sense that PG would like to exhaust all simple, code-based solutions before getting to that point.

Cons:

* Unintended consequences: chasing after karma. IIRC, this is PG's primary concern about comment scores.

Solutions?

* Maybe it makes more sense to hide karma for individual users than to hide scores on comments. There would still be thresholds of positive karma that would enable users to have certain privileges, but users wouldn't have access to that information. Admittedly, I haven't given this much consideration, so I haven't thought through the consequences.

* Maybe there is another way to make comments easier to scan. This could be done visually, perhaps using color or s simple icon. It might also make sense to offer another sub-HN, kind of like /classic. Personally, I don't rely on HN for news; for me, the value is in the comments. So maybe a /comments sub-HN could feature submissions that generate the best discussions. Defining best might take some doing (highest value average score? highest value single comment?) and would probably require a check or two to prevent users from gaming the system. But for those of us who think HN's value is most closely associated with the value of its comments, it would be great to have an interface that offered a more efficient way to find the most interesting comments.

~~~
Someone
I do not think chasing after karma is a problem. If there are people who want
to do work (hunting for interesting information) in exchange for something
(karma) I can make out of thin air, what am I to complain about?

It may be however, that there are people who have found ways to chase the
karma they want by means that are detrimental to the community. For example,
users might post almost duplicate links with more enticing titles, or they
might (don't know whether this happens) up vote their own stories using fake
accounts.

If there are such users, rather than abolishing karma, I think we should try
and fix the rules.

If people are gaining karma, but harming the community, what are they doing,
and how can we prevent them from doing that?

------
sushrutbidwai
I think best thing we can ask pg to do is remove points altogether. Points are
great for optimizing and ranking, but just let them go from display and keep
them only in backend. May be keep average karma for comments but thats about
it. Also if removing points is not possible, then punish people, in some way,
who have less average karma for submissions. I think that will remove any
incentive from submitting non interesting posts.

------
hack_edu
Don't downvote comments that are already gray. Just one or two downvotes is
all you need to teach them a lesson. No need kicking someone when they're
down.

------
powertower
> including a comment by pg, the site founder, that the quality of comments on
> Hacker News has declined. What can I do about that?

That's just part of having a bigger community. It always becomes more general
over time as it grows.

You can't usually get around this as it's a natural part of the lifecycle of a
forum/group/site.

Site fail when they refuse to recognize this and start mucking around trying
to revive the past glory.

------
MarkHernandez
Who has time to read the comments when HN blasts us with so many uncategorized
articles. Perhaps you should consider what percentage of comments are even
read.

~~~
dchest
Actually, I read more comments than articles.

------
mfdoom
#1. Fix the fucking website. Seriously, what kind of half-assed aggregator
gives a 9 in 10 change of getting 'missing or unknown link' when clicking to
the next page?

~~~
jmitcheson
It's to stop crawlers. Just refresh before you go to the next page, or open
the second page straight away before the link expires.

~~~
mattblalock
What kind of crawler is it stopping?

Just makes our experience bad.

------
profitbaron
I think people need to re-read: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>
and really assess what Hacker News is.

Hacker News is a startup community which, and more recently users seem to be
forgetting this. .

Which is why, I believe that along with the ban on "fluff" as highlighted in
PG's Essay there should also be the same ban on Political Submissions. There
are several reasons for this but just going into one of the reasons as to why
there should be a ban on these type of submissions is because, if you go to
any political thread you will see that they all eventually turn into flame
wars and because there has been an uprise in the political submissions around
HN recently and as a result of these flame wars, they have been spreading out
into other areas of the site which have been reducing the comment quality.

Likewise, I think people should stop saying "This." - I'm not going to fully
go into this as it has previously been covered -
<http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3153377> but its really of annoying when
people just comment for the sake of commenting. I think that, if you are going
to comment, then you should be commenting because you want to add your 2 cents
and not because, you're commenting to say that you agree with someones comment
yet don't add any other value because, this is what the "up vote" button is
for. Maybe, some text could be added above the Add Comment button which says
"Does Your Comment Add Value? If So:"

I might not have enough karma to do this, or it might be not available to
users but like the down vote (which I do have access to) I think there should
be an option to flag comments which are deemed unnecessary by users (this
could be implemented via a certain amount of karma) to remove some of the
unnecessary comments in particular the "This." comments and the ones involving
flame wars between users.

Likewise, I also think there should be an "infraction" system used on Forums.
I think there is already a system like this in place, as I know if you get a
certain amount of downvotes then, the post will get deleted etc but, on Forums
the users are clear of their infraction points and it encourages "good
behaviour" on the site after they rack up infaction points - making them be
more considerate etc. The infraction system could work in the sense that - if
you submit something that is "fluff/banned on HN" then you would get +2
infaction points likewise, a bad comment would get +1 infraction points.

Infraction Points would last 30-45 days and if you get 10 infraction points
simultaneously then depending upon your karma you would receive a punishment
such as:

Under 200 Karma - 24 Hour Submission/Commenting Ban

Under 500 Karma - 24 Hour Submission/Commenting Ban + Loss Of Header Colour
Change

Under 750 Karma - 24 Hour Submission/Commenting Ban + Loss Of Header Colour
Change + Loss Of Downvote.

ETC

Users would be allowed to earn the ability to have the header colour change
and downvote button back via the Karma System.

Likewise, repeat offenders of Infractions would get more severe punishments.
Such as having a script which shows for certain users, where the site keeps
messing around whenever they try to do an action for a duration of time they
are on the website.

Whilst, there are other smaller aspects which could be improved around the
site, I think if these were tackled then Hacker News would have its strong
community over the long haul and we won't see, flame wars/poor comments off
users as often.

