
Ask HN: More types of flagging?  - pg
Right now to flag something is to recommend that it be killed. I'm thinking of adding additional types of flags that are more specific, and less draconian.  The goal is to create things
between a flag and a downvote, or maybe even to replace downvotes
in some cases.  The two most obvious options are to allow          
comments to be flagged as uncivil, and frivolous.  The numbers of these flags (but not who issued them) would be displayed to 
whoever posted the comment in question.  So this would be a 
way to tell someone to stop being a jerk, or posting dumb stuff,
without having to write a comment to say so.<p>Any opinions about the types of flags there should be, and how
they should work?
======
thorax
The only oddity for a feature like that is that it's a bit like "judging"
their comment.

I don't know how to explain it, but I'd almost rather the flag options be
worded as "Sorry, this comment seems: uncivil" or "Sorry, this comment seems:
off-topic" to lighten it a bit. If they were a friend in real life, I'd take
them aside and say "hey man, that comment was great, but you might want to
soften the tone. It kind of came across as rude."

Downvotes end up being seen as judgments of your ideas, and I would love to be
able to provide better feedback. This would be great if this could somehow
give the user a nudge that they wouldn't feel defensive about.

It may seem like a minor point, but I feel a little guidance would go a long
way in helping users get the sort of social cues they already get in a real-
life conversation.

Edit: Instead of calling it out as flagging, I'd be okay with a downvote
system that simply/optionally let you specify a reason to provide (with 3-4
common nicely-worded options). I don't care about upvote reasons at all.

~~~
pg
What if the incivility flag actually included a message, so you could
literally say what you're suggesting? What if it was, in effect, an anonymous
comment that had no reply link and was only visible to the submitter of the
parent comment?

~~~
mechanical_fish
I don't mind having the option to click one of a small number of specific tiny
phrases describing my downvote: "spam", "offtopic", "bad title", "dupe". But
free-form responses? I want to subtly (or unsubtly) correct people, not start
up a relationship with them. Indeed, given that a lot of bad posts are made by
trolls, a relationship longer than one mouse click is the one thing you
_don't_ want to start.

I don't want to waste valuable time figuring out exactly how sure I am that a
particular title is bad, or how polite I should be, or whether or not I should
take advantage of this high-bandwidth feedback mechanism to start some kind of
conversation.

Learn the design lesson of Twitter: More degrees of freedom doesn't
necessarily help.

~~~
BRadmin
I think free-form response might be a bad idea as well. One of the main
problems is people being mean-spirited - now we're going to give these same
people the option to anonymously write whatever they want to someone, without
even the (modest) fear of being down-voted for their comment?

I think this is a GREAT idea if it uses pre-selected phrases to convey
specific / useful info to the author.

------
jmonegro
Replacing downvotes with a flagging system or similar might be a good idea:
I've been noticing that people tend to downvote other users not because their
comments are "uncivil" or "frivolous", but because they express an opinion
different from theirs.

I've seen many perfectly-civilized comments being downvoted, presumably,
because they are controversial, though I have seen others that deserve
downvotes because of their nature.

The way I see it, replacing downvotes with a comment flagging system would
probably reduce the amount rude comments because they'd probably be killed
soon enough. However, it eliminates the penalty of being rude (a drop in
karma), and some visible way of penalization must be put in place for it to be
effective in deterring users from being rude. A work around might be that for
every killed comment (due to numerous flags) a user gets -5 or -10 karma.

Things would behave differently with posts, but these are just my first
thoughts (when it comes to commenting).

~~~
tokenadult
_I've been noticing that people tend to downvote other users not because their
comments are "uncivil" or "frivolous", but because they express an opinion
different from theirs._

I bookmarked this HN comment

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

a while ago, because it expressed the view of pg in an earlier era of HN that
"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."

But it's interesting to see pg opening up today's discussion of new, more
nuanced, flags, and that would change the core meaning of a downvote. I'm all
for learning a new system of flagging and voting if that helps encourage a
thoughtful community.

~~~
pg
I sometimes downvote things that seem mistaken. I think most users do. This
didn't use to be a problem when there were only a couple thousand users who
often knew one another personally. The problem is voting to agree/disagree
combined with a larger and probably less thoughtful audience. That's when it
starts to feel like a mob.

~~~
jmonegro
Using downvotes as a way of expressing disagreement is, I believe, unfair to a
commenter if he/she is courteously stating his/her point of view or idea,
mainly because downvoting inflicts a penalty on the user's karma - which many
users, I surmise, care about.

I don't think users should be penalized for siding with one aspect of an
discussion just because other users disagree and proceed to downvote based on
their own personal opinion. It's not even the best way of determining majority
(which I believe is, partly, the purpose of the system), since not every user
makes use of the feature.

Some sort of hybrid might be the most comprehensive solution. Probably
something along the lines of upvotes raise karma (compensating good input),
downvotes don't affect karma (their purpose becomes, then, to provide insight
on the general opinion of a subject), and flags affect karma negatively for
rude or uncivilized comments.

~~~
pg
Strictly speaking a vote does affect someone's karma. But it doesn't cause
their karma to be net decreased as a result of posting a comment unless you
downvote the comment below 1, which most people don't do lightly. I think of
the up and downvoting as a collaboration to determine how much _additional_
karma someone should get for posting a new comment.

~~~
mmt
_which most people don't do lightly_

Perhaps this is no longer true?

Regardless, the fact the downvoting is just as easy as upvoting (and has no
undo) strikes me as odd.

I suggest downvoting cost the voter something, not just the votee. 1:1 seems
simple enough. It would also give greater pause to newer users than veterans.
However, an undo (perhaps timed like comment editing) would be more desirable
in this case.

~~~
brlewis
I agree, it should cost the voter 1:1 to downvote a comment, but only one
that's already below 0.

------
m0th87
How about having tags, and then letting the community dynamically decide which
ones are standard? I think this would work because the community is fairly
observant of the rules. Plus you could shape behavior by suggesting certain
tags when the user wants to add a new tag to a submission. On top of covering
the use cases you detail, it would:

1) Help with search if it is ever implemented

2) Allow users to quickly disseminate the subject of articles on the front
page without ever opening them (especially helpful for ambiguous titles)

3) Maybe in the future allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe to certain tags if
the front page starts getting too busy

~~~
pg
Hmm, interesting. The problem though is that these tags are supposed to be
private, so there would be no force to make customs converge.

~~~
fragmede
Have good tags (common, not blacklisted, thresholded) not be private and pre-
seed list of tags. Have a karma threshold to see tags? Would talking about an
article's tag be verboten in the article's comment, or just deserve a 'meta'
tag? I could see an article's comments being a force for custom convergence.

------
gojomo
The number one kind of alternate flag I'd like is 'review headline' rather
than 'kill'. There are many stories that would be OK, _if_ they didn't have a
misleading headline.

~~~
ricree
Or "review link" for that matter. It isn't all that uncommon to have an
interesting story that links to a page that is just repeating content from a
better and more complete source.

~~~
cwan
The solution is just to flag these and post the better link since you can't
change the link after the fact which makes sense. I'm sometimes guilty of this
though sometimes I do think there is editorial content which adds to the
original story.

~~~
gojomo
Moderators can update the headline and link; fixing in place can be better
than another submission on the same topic, because it aggregates upvotes and
conversation in a single place.

~~~
cwan
Given how rarely it happens (though it does happen) and the volume of links, I
suspect there just aren't enough moderators. It might therefore be more ideal
to give the community the tools to enforce.

~~~
jimmybot
Okay, so why not have something that submits "better link and headline" and
that can be voted up? Pass a threshold and the original headline and link get
swapped out.

------
maxklein
I think you should add this as an option, and only for the karmarific users.
This way, less than 10% of the site would actually use this, and since these
are likely to be the oldest and community invested users, the flagging would
always lag behind the movement of the site userbase, leading to a stabilizing
force in community feel.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
This concept needs more exploration. The delay/lag seems very promising on
cursorary inspection.

------
richardw
How about letting those with big karma attach tags to their downvote? Others
could agree by downvoting the tag. This allows a slightly more organic
approach where the best tags emerge over time. Maybe anyone over (lower) karma
can propose a tag but the tag only applies if a few agree on it.

------
Tichy
I prefer to use my brain for absorbing news here, not for mastering popularity
games. With more ranking options, HN would start to look like work.

------
gojomo
For handling individual comments, I think the better system would be to have
two-dimensional comment rating. One dimension, upvote/downvote, is "valuable
contribution/not-valuable contribution". A second dimension, agree/disagree,
allows expressing support or dissent without the connotation of reward/censure
that upvote/downvote has.

Agree/disagree would only be tallied inline at the comment for reference --
there's no persistent reward for simply saying things many people agree with,
nor penalty for saying unpopular things.

Then, it's OK for downvotes to serve the role this "more flags" idea does.
Downvotes then unambiguously mean: uncivil; frivolous; factually wrong;
repetitive; unwanted. (And, moderators could focus on highly-downvoted
comments as much as 'flags'.)

(Previous comment, with more backlinks, on this idea:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721853> )

Another related idea: never show a comment at 'maximum negative' score to a
person who hasn't yet voted. Show it as '-3' instead (no matter how many net
downvotes it's received). Then, there's always a motivation for adding your
own independent judgement. (Once they vote, the true-but-truncated-to-range
score can be shown.)

The poster could see the 'true' score, so they know if they've really touched
a nerve.

~~~
Perceval
I dislike agree/disagree voting overall. We all dislike groupthink, and we all
appreciate constructive informative posts, and we all like differing
viewpoints. So why have a moderation system that records or values
agreement/disagreement at all?

I think gojomo is 100% right that people should be rewarded for constructive
informative civil contributions, rather than because the moderator happens to
agree with you.

An agree/disagree arrow could be left simply as a honeypot, so that people
don't use the other descriptive ratings as a substitute for
agreement/disagreement.

~~~
gojomo
My theory is that a separate agree/disagree fights groupthink because it moves
popularity/agreement _out_ of the reward/penalty dimension.

People want to register their opinion -- and sometimes that opinion is just
yes/no. It's good for a site to offer a low-effort, low-visual-pollution way
to capture that -- single click votes/favorites/likes work well for that.
(It's better than lots of 'me too' or 'I disagree' or 'my thoughts exactly'
micro-comments.)

But, if those signals are mixed with a sense of righteousness/transgression --
which is inevitable with leaderboards and display rules whereby 'high-rated'
comments move up, and 'low-rated' comments fade from view -- then people may
withhold unpopular but important viewpoints, or be tempted to race to be the
first to post a banal but crowd-pleasing viewpoint.

My theory could be wrong. Some people might care so much about agreement that
they obsess over that score, and knowing exactly how many people
agree/disagree would then cause even more synchronization-of-publicly-
expressed-views. But I think this crowd is sophisticated enough to draw (and
make use of) the distinction between a _bad_ comment and a _controversial
minority viewpoint_.

And I would like to be in a place where someone who advances a _controversial
minority viewpoint_ , but does so in an articulate, thought-provoking, civil
manner, could be on the leaderboard even if every individual post of theirs
has more net disagreement than agreement.

(Which brings up a related point: it would be interesting to report an
agree/disagree axis as two totals, not just the net difference. '101 agree,
100 disagree' is more meaningful than a net score of '+1'. A sparkline bar
graph or tick-series could work really well for this, though it might not need
to appear on every comment, or appear until requested.)

~~~
Perceval
Ranking +101/-100 comments higher than +1/-0 comments is something that they
implemented at reddit a couple months ago. They use an algorithm called a
"Wilson Score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter."

Here are some relevant links:

[http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-
sorting-s...](http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-
system.html)

[http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-
rating....](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html)

[http://blog.linkibol.com/post/How-to-Build-a-Popularity-
Algo...](http://blog.linkibol.com/post/How-to-Build-a-Popularity-Algorithm-
You-can-be-Proud-of.aspx)

Digg also has a way to rank comments by "controversy", so the comments that
are most contested by up and down votes are placed at the top:
<http://about.digg.com/blog/new-comments-system-released>

------
philwelch
If you're going to have flagging options on comments for uncivil or frivolous
comments, you should probably raise the moderation floor to -1 or 0, because
it doesn't seem fair to let people be downvoted below that point for
disagreement alone.

~~~
pg
Yes, that is a related problem. The floor used to be -8, but as the number of
users increased (and maybe the median user got meaner) there started to be
lots of comparatively earnest posts that got downvoted to -8. So I raised the
cutoff to -4, but that still seems unsatisfactory. Voting still feels like
it's being done by a mob.

I tried not displaying points on comments a while ago, in order to solve this
problem, but users complained that this made HN harder to read because they
couldn't pick out the good comments. I only gave it two days' trial though.
Maybe I should have given it more time. Or maybe there is some other solution.

Anyone have any ideas?

~~~
dschobel
The feedback of the voting system is still essential, it's just that you can't
really trust the voters anymore. It's gotten ridiculous to watch the votes
swing from extreme to extreme on one comment based on the follow-up discussion
where people openly advocate for more or less points for the OP.

The only way to fix this I can see is either some form of meta-moderation
where you hold people accountable for their votes (ala slashdot), or the
system I'd personally rather see, where rather than a full-democracy the users
pick whose votes they see on comments. I'd have my pool of 20-30 users whom I
trust and I could see their scores vs the throng's.

Just as you hand-picked some users as moderators who you feel represent what
you want HN to be, let us pick who we want to serve as our content filters.

~~~
pg
I agree with you about the voting swings. I think that, more than the extreme
numbers, may be why voting is starting to seem such a mob thing lately.

It's a very interesting idea to have users see only the votes of other users
they choose. One problem though is that it could easily lead to leaking who
voted for what, which would make a lot of users (including me) uncomfortable.
E.g. your pool is your 7 coworkers, and user x. One day you know all your
coworkers are on a plane, and that you're therefore seeing user x's votes.
Another problem is that it could be a lot more expensive to generate pages.

~~~
asdflkj
You could fix the deanonymization problem this way: when you pick a trusted
user, you can see not only his votes, but all his trusted users' votes, too.
Maybe weigh the votes differently depending on how "distant" they are from
you.

~~~
dschobel
This is a great idea.

My original thinking was to suggest a combination of enforcing a minimum
number of trusted users and then reporting a weighted average of your trusted
users + the mass' rating but your solution is conceptually nicer since it adds
the same noise to the vote but while extending the idea of valuing a
particular user's judgement.

The big technical issue will be computing these "trusted ratings" for every
comment. The trust graph could be done asynchronously so that wouldn't be an
issue.

------
swombat
The comment flags is a great idea - there's a good chance that it would cut
down on "why am I being downvoted" types of posts, which would in turn reduce
noise.

Are you thinking of adding more flags to stories too?

~~~
pg
I should probably add a way to flag a story specifically as a dupe, and maybe
also for having had the title reworded too egregiously. Those are common
problems people currently have to use comments for now. Can anyone think of
others?

~~~
rms
Flag as meta? A lot of people don't care for the meta-discussion.

~~~
decklin
I would really like to see this. I'm inclined say it shouldn't have any
relation to karma or killing, because there's nothing _inherently_ wrong with
meta-discussion, but the front page would be infinitely more pleasant to me if
I could see "100 comments (90 meta)", instead of guessing if there were
_really_ 100 things to say about the article or if after the only 10 someone
just hit a nerve with a downvote or a pointless "this isn't HN" snark and
started something big and ugly.

I'd go so far as including a "meta" checkbox next to the reply button,
defaulting to the parent's value, which it would be considered polite to set
truthfully, but maybe that's just me.

------
DanielBMarkham
I think this is a good idea and long overdue.

Ideally the system will train new users. It has been difficult in the past for
me to figure out exactly what downvotes meant.

Over the last few months I'm seeing a rise in ad-hominem attacks. No matter
what the subject of the article, technology, startups, history, whatever -- it
seems like within minutes somebody has called the author's reputation or the
news source into question. Sometimes the information is pertinent, but most
always it's just an effort to look superior and/or take easy shots at people.
If I remember correctly, we've even had posts about "check out my startup"
where the founders were trashed, not to mention the nastiness with Dennis a
while back.

I don't think downvoting is sinking in with the people who are doing this. As
much as most people don't understand ad-hominem attacks, it'd still be good to
have that flag, because it's the same old discussion every time.

EDIT: I meant Dustin, not Dennis. Sorry about that Dustin.

~~~
pg
Yeah, I've noticed a decline in the tone of comments too. The site seems to be
getting nastier. I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't
want to be here anymore. But I am determined not to let HN go down without a
fight.

If anyone has any more general suggestions for solving the nastiness problem,
besides these new types of flag, I'm all ears.

~~~
edw519
_I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here
anymore._

I had no idea. AFAIC, this is the best site on the internet. It is the home
many of us have been seeking for years. I talk about things here that I have
no one to talk to in person and I imagine there are many others like me.

I have also noticed that things run in cycles and we seem to be in a bit of a
trough lately. My usual response has been either to submit lots of stuff I
really like, or just quit and come back the next day. That often works
wonders.

Whether we like it or not, it is the nature of this site for people to show
others how smart they are. That's just the way we are and this is the perfect
place to "show off" (for a lot of us, it may be the only place). Many of us
never really fit in, didn't play sports, weren't "cool", and didn't get
noticed by the ladies as much as we would have liked. But we had passion for
other things, exactly the things discussed here at hn.

So the nerdosterone runs heavy at times. Accompanied unfortunately by
occasional meanness.

 _But I am determined not to let HN go down without a fight._

You won't need a fight. Just a little of what we do best: some good old
fashioned problem solving.

A couple of ideas:

\- Stop the meanness before it hits the data base with a front end "meanness"
filter. When you click "reply", scan the text for cuss words and frequent
phrases and give a warning, "Your comment has triggered the meanness filter
because of the phrase "xxx". Please take this opportunity to reword it. Say
what you want, but please be civil." They could modify it or submit the
original anyway, but have to wait a "cooloff" x seconds or minutes. This could
easily be gamed, but that's not the point. It would actively establish the
expected tone, especially for new people.

\- Weigh votes by karma. The top 100 get 3 points per vote. The next 1000 get
2 points per votes. Everyone else gets the usual one point per vote. The idea
is that those who have the most invested in the community would be more able
to slow down out-of-control group think.

~~~
pg
Unfortunately I'm pretty sure mean spiritedness is too semantic to catch with
a filter. Dumb jerks are not the problem. The type who curse a lot get
downmodded into oblivion and eventually banned. The problem is smart jerks.
And unfortunately these are not uncommon in our world.

~~~
astine
Maybe a 'jerk' flag? Something that wouldn't effect individual comments, but
would aggregate. A user with a high number of jerk flags could be called into
scrutiny and possibly be dealt with if he was abusing the site.

Another thought... What if we could filter out users who's comment we didn't
want to read or we felt were offensive or a waste of time? This would reduce
the noise for indivudual users without anything so draconian or subjective as
flagging plus moderation.

Another less-pleasent thought is more aggressive banning policies. I remember
being part of older BB-esque forums that managed to maintain strong
communities by enlisting members as moderators and enforcing strict and
clearly promulgated discussion policies. It worked because it was transparent
and because the enforcers were active members of the community. They had
reputations _and_ interest in keeping the quality of discussions high and are
bound by the same rules that apply to everyone else. If need be, their
rullings could be appealed if they were abusing their authority. I always felt
that that system worked.

------
gruseom
I hadn't noticed the site getting nastier (and since everyone seems to agree
that it has, I'm now regretting a recent nasty comment!)

Regarding flags on comments (not stories), I suspect it might have more of an
impact to add just one new type rather than several at once. That would send a
clear message about what we're all being asked to focus on. Along those lines,
I'd say "uncivil" is more important than "frivolous". In my observation, over
the last few months, HN users have gotten pretty good at using downvotes to
regulate the merely frivolous.

If someone's comment has been flagged as uncivil it might be helpful to inform
them of this with a call to action such as "Please be more polite" and a link
to a fuller explanation of what they are being asked to do. I'm quite sure
that many (though not all) people just don't realize how their comment might
come across.

Perhaps comments flagged as uncivil could remain editable for a longer period.
It's true that this would distort the history of conversations a bit, but
maybe in a good way. If I find out that I made a comment that people found
rude, I'd like the option (after my two editable hours have expired) of
editing my comment for civility and having it marked as such. After all, if
one is found "guilty" by a jury of one's peers, it's good to have a way to
make amends in addition to the negative feedback. Besides, if people started
noticing comments that had been "edited for civility", social proof might
nudge their own behavior in that direction.

------
breck
> Yeah, I've noticed a decline in the tone of comments too. The site seems to
> be getting nastier. I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just
> don't want to be here anymore.

Could the community help monitor the general tone of the site? It seems like
keeping things civil is a hard task for you and the top users.

Could there be an automatic survey sent out each week or month to a random
sample set of users to measure their overall satisfaction with the site and
tone? It could even be just one question ("How would you rate the discourse on
HN lately? Highly Civil, Civil, or Uncivil").

That way there would be a good objective gauge to see trends in tone and to
monitor the impact of any changes like flags.

As the site continues to grow it gets more challenging to preserve the level
of discussion. Having some long term measure of that might be helpful and make
it easier to know when a new feature needs to be implemented.

------
pavs
For the love of everything that is good, please either block techcrunch (very
unlikely to happen) or put a hard cap on how many stories can be submitted
within 24 hours from one domain (I suggest 2).

Sometimes reading HN feels like reading TC rss feed. If I want to read every
single story from TC I would have subscribed to their RSS feed.

~~~
swombat
TC is extremely relevant to start-ups. Blocking it would be pretty ... silly.

~~~
pavs
I am not saying all of TC is irrelevant. We have our share of irrelevant stuff
from other sites too. But on average we get 3-4 stories from TC posted here on
HN, stuff like twitter going down (every freaking time, how often does it
happen?), facebook going down for 5 minutes, rackspace going down (in itself
is relevant news, but from TC the news is the internet went down because TC is
hosted on rackspace).

If this much crap was posted from any other website, they would have been
blocked without any debate whatsoever. There is a reason people subscribe to
rss feed, why would I come to HN to see one blog hogging the whole site?

Which is why I suggest either a hard cap on number of subs per domain per day
or give users the option to block out certain domain so that they don't see it
in their HN.

I don't think it is an unreasonable or very difficult request to implement.

------
tptacek
This idea didn't work for Slashdot at all.

~~~
pg
What went wrong for them?

~~~
jordyhoyt
I think what went wrong was that they publicly displayed the score for
whichever axis was most significant. Here, the only score that is displayed to
all is the only positive one we have: "this comment adds to the discussion."

The reason I think this is what went wrong for them was that they had flags
like "funny", for things that obviously don't add to the discussion, and too
many choices for the other positive votes. IMHO, having one meaning for upvote
and a handful of negative flags would be ideal if the flags were only visible
to the submitter (to educate noobs/reprimand those who should know better) and
whatever process is responsible for threshing the chaff.

~~~
tptacek
This is a good point. "Uncivil" is more valuable than "Offtopic" and "Troll".

~~~
ericb
The Uncivil tag should prove a fun exercise in reading tone and sarcasm from
text. Someone needs to invent Tone Markup Language--and not just emoticons.

------
iamelgringo
I somehow get the sense that the quality of the discussion has correlates with
how long an article lives on the front page. A year or two ago, articles could
hang on the front page for a day or two. Now, the volume of new articles
pushes interesting discussions like this one off the front page within hours.
I pretty rarely visit page 2.

I used to spend 30-35 minutes writing and editing a comment. It doesn't seem
worth it any more when the article is going to drop off the front page in 8 -
12 hours. When I thought people might read it for a day or to, it felt like it
was worth the investment.

It seems like the current speed of article churn has increased the pace of HN,
and has inadvertently encouraged shorter, shoot from the hip type comments
rather than encourage slower more thoughtful discussion.

------
ErrantX
One bug I did notice (slightly off topic but this seems an appropriate place)
is that people can work around the cool off delay for replying by clicking the
"link" button on a comment. This has given me a textbox and let me reply to
the comment way before the cool off.

------
wglb
I would favor the addition of a rude/inappropriate/trollish vote that would be
anonymous in addition to the current upvote/downvote. Perhaps those are three
buttons that are downvotes in that category.

This would add a useful dimension to the feedback.

I find myself using the up/down arrow largely for "contributes to the
discussion". There is an element of "I agree", but I frequently click up on a
comment that I disagree with because it is well-reasoned or brings up a
thoughtful angle that is new.

To avoid the mob clicking of these new buttons, they could be shown only to
the author of the comment, or very high karma individuals.

------
ScottWhigham
I'm likely to be of the lowest caste here but I think a single flag works for
me. I tried to think of others and the only two logical ones I could think of
were "Spam" and "Duplicate" for posts. I support you could flag comments but
again I see two options: "Spam" or "Offensive".

In any case - that is to say regardless of the reason it was flagged - I think
it should be killed. Therefore one "flag" link and that's it.

------
whyme
How about allowing the primary post to have extra settings that affects what
can/can't happen: Example: Min karma to post: 1000, Min Civility to post: -100
points.

This way if the community sees a mob problem, the community can tweak the
settings accordingly. I'm sure you can come up a good algorithm to maintain a
moving set of defaults.

Also, maybe allow readers to filter posts based upon their threshold settings.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I'm downmodding now because I think this is a bad contribution but rather
because, since this isn't a poll per se, I think that upmodding/downmodding is
sort of how we are voting. So don't take it the wrong way :)

~~~
whyme
No worries. I'm partial on it myself. I don't like the idea of excluding
people, however I was trying to think of a way to have people care about the
quality of their contributions. ie. give the community incentive to be nice :)
It's certainly not that easy.

------
mhb
Maybe this is the place to ask why, relatively frequently, there are comments
which seem perfectly reasonable and inoffensive, that are dead.

~~~
swolchok
If it looks like noise, it deserves to go. In other words, if, after reading a
comment, I feel that my time was wasted, I should downvote the comment.

------
mrlebowski
Should down voting some one also negatively affect the down voter's karma? It
will help restrict the number of down votes anyone will give..

~~~
tokenadult
Aren't many downvotes efforts to improve the community, and thus worthy of a
karma INCREASE, if anything?

------
gregwebs
I would like to be able flag a story as not a primary source/not the best
source and give an alternative. Not sure if this will help the dicussions, but
I think that a discussion tends to only get as good relative to the story.
Often times the most helpful comments are ones which give alternative sources,
so it might be good to think about supporting that.

------
scorxn
If public meta-commenting is the issue, and assuming the comment isn't an
outright troll, it'd be nice to know who took issue with it, and be able to
ask why privately. Hence, civil discourse as though we're face-to-face.
Anonymous one-word stamps are no more sensitive than unexplained downvotes,
and will give rise to the exact same questions.

------
mixmax
Have you considered downvotes for submissions? Maybe with a Karma threshold,
so that it'll only be used to get irrelevant submissions off the front page.

~~~
pg
Flagging seems better for that, because if they're really offtopic they should
be killed, not just have fewer points.

~~~
swombat
I guess the trade-off there is between a purely binary action (kill / don't
kill) which depends on a moderator's opinion, versus a softer, more gradual
action of slowly pushing a story down and letting more worthy stories rise to
the top...

------
coffeemug
Gamedev.net has one of the most civil and informative forums on the internet.
At some point they had a pretty mean spirited community too, and the owners
pulled the site into one of the best sites on the internet. I spent a lot of
time on these forums, and I think there are three main things that contribute
to very high quality.

\- _Non-threaded comments_. I know this has been discussed to death, but I
think the downside of threaded comments (fragmentation of the discussion and
incentive for witty one-liners) far outweighs the benefit (having separate
unrelated conversations). A non-threaded approach gives huge incentive to
bring the community together into a single coherent conversation, gives the
reader a great sense of a timeline (which gives further incentive to maintain
an intelligent discussion), and discourages fragmentation of the discussion to
a point where it isn't interesting to anyone anymore. I know this is a big
change, but I would strongly encourage at least giving it a serious
consideration - it _can_ make a huge difference if done right.

\- _Active topics_ \- on sites like Hacker News and Reddit it's very easy to
lose track of interesting discussions that are going on because top threads
are tightly coupled with the top articles. We can have interesting discussions
long after the article has left the front page, and an active topics page
would go far towards encouraging intelligent interaction. Basically, every
time an article is commented on, this article goes to the top of the list.
This way I can see all active discussions at glance (including the ones I
participated in), and continue interesting discussions, even though they're
not on the front page.

\- _User rating system (not article/comment system)_ \- in real life, if I am
usually a very interesting, intelligent person, and one day I suddenly act as
a jerk, it can very seriously ruin my reputation. On gamedev people rate
_users_ , not comments and articles. So, I can give a user a rating -
extremely helpful, helpful, not helpful, jerk. The karma is a combination of
ratings for a given user, and the strength of a user's vote is proportional to
his karma. So, if someone is a jerk one day, it can affect his karma far more
significantly than simply downvoting his comment. In addition, jerks have less
affect on the system overall. Rating people's comments never made sense to me
- it always ends up signaling agreement or disagreement vs. usefulness. If
people rate users instead of comments, this problem goes away always entirely,
plus very strongly discourages aggressive behavior.

I think these three things would help immensely to scale the community. These
are big changes, but I think they're worth seriously thinking about.

------
prakash
How about giving more people moderation access for a short time period, and
then aggressively flagging/deleting a whole bunch of articles/comments.

