
HN comments are underrated - ingve
http://danluu.com/hn-comments/
======
pavlov
I second Dan's advice of blogging more.

I'm a very average HN commenter. I do put in effort in writing here, trying to
be civil above all and sharing my experience where it could be of interest.
But I'm not Alan Kay, I've never rewritten a distributed deep learning system
in Haskell using a genetically optimized Paxos consensus protocol, and my
entrepreneurial experience is a loose string of "don't do this" case studies
at best... So my comments certainly won't make anyone's "Best of HN" list.

Last week, after the news broke that Salesforce walked away from buying
Twitter, I was about to write a HN comment about what Twitter could do. The
text got long enough that I decided to expand it into a Medium post instead:
[https://medium.com/swlh/twitter-could-be-the-next-
mozilla-e7...](https://medium.com/swlh/twitter-could-be-the-next-
mozilla-e788e3bfd841#.x0gbzodo4)

To my surprise, the post has 28,000 views and 755 recommends so far. If I had
written it as a HN comment, it would have got maybe 5-10 upvotes and perhaps
spawned a short discussion thread about how unrealistic my idea was. (Please
don't bother to criticize the content of the blog post in replies here -- I'm
just using it as an example of blog vs. comment.)

I love reading HN discussions... But maybe there could be a site that slots
between the HN and Medium formats, and lets you expand your comment into a
blog post with minimal friction? Call it "HN Long-Form" or whatever. Ideally
it would interface with the HN comment system so that you could mark your
comment with something like "Promote to long-form" after you've written it.
That would create an editable post on the long-form site. You could then later
expand your comment there, and publish it on the long-form comment aggregator
site. (Maybe I should just build this myself and see if it feels right.)

~~~
atmosx
> I'm a very average HN commenter.

An 11k karma is not _average_ IMHO. You're way above average HN commentator.

I think that you just used the _best tool for the job_. That doesn't really
mean anything about comments. You read what I consider _low level_ comments
and _high level_ comments on technical and social subjects from the SAME
nickname all the time at HN.

~~~
pavlov
I've been on the site since 2008 IIRC, so I've had plenty of time to
accumulate karma.

------
pavlov
On second read, I'm not sure I agree with the first paragraphs of Dan's post
at all. He seems to be saying that HN is terrible, but a handful of comments
from star posters rise above the muck. I just don't think that's fair.

Yes, the cliché is that HN is a place full of mean, entitled semi-autists who
will criticize your site's CSS whitespace formatting when you ask for business
feedback... And of course there's a grain of truth to that (persistent
stereotypes usually don't come out of thin air), but it misses the mark on two
dimensions.

The first is that the criticism you get on HN is no worse than what other
aspiring creative professionals suffer. I went to an art and design college,
and the critique you'd get from students and even teachers was 99% of the time
harsher than the HN style, yet no more guaranteed to be useful.

Consider a first-time novelist who spent years on a book. One day it gets
critiqued in a newspaper. The professional critic might find that the author
has a clumsy style, poor research, paper-thin characters, and seems to lack
the life experience to even write about the topic. What do you do after that
kind of criticism? You suck it up and go back to work on the next novel.

Making use of feedback is all about filtering and reducing multiple sources
into something actionable. Nobody is right all the time. Your parents were
wrong. Your teachers were wrong. Your peers were wrong. Your professors were
wrong. Your boss was wrong. Your cofounders were wrong. Your investors were
wrong. HN commenters were wrong. Still it's worth taking in all these inputs
as much as you can.

The other dimension of HN comments is that they can be surprisingly deep. When
an arts or culture topic makes it to the front page, it seems like someone
comes out of the woods with the perfect personal anecdote. Whether it's
Mondrian, Messiaen or Modiano, there's always someone on HN who happens to
have a passion for it.

HN comments are underrated, but it's not just because of star power: it's
everyone's contributions that make it consistently worthwhile for me.

~~~
Mz
Comment moved, per request.

~~~
lucb1e
Is there any reason why you replied to a comment instead of responding to the
article? Because as a sub it has little added value to the parent, but as a
top level comment I would have liked to see it as the #1 comment.

Edit: for the record, it moved to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775905](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12775905)

------
anton_tarasenko
When I worked with the HN post data, I noticed that some years ago HN users
had correctly predicted the "Show HN" projects that later got funding. Those
projects had more upvotes.

The more recent data has no such connection. It seems that the influx of users
reduced the quality of judgement.

So one way to improve HN submissions and comments is to weight points by the
user's tenure on HN.

I also suspect that early comments dominate late comments by the time factor
alone. The sorting algo gives a brief advantage to new comments, but old
comments are more visible. A post on the front page gets 30+ comments in the
first hour, and latecomers can only post into the void. To address that, long
branches could be collapsed by default, leaving only 2-4 visible messages per
branch.

~~~
tgb
Interesting, but when I upvote Shown HN posts, it's because it contributed to
my enjoyment of reading HN. That's largely orthogonal to whether it would be a
good product, and often times is directly contradictory towards it (fun tech
demos -> upvotes, products -> meh). I don't think that's a decline in the
quality of HN, it's just a different focus. I use HN as entertainment rather
than as a prediction market. But I can see that others would not like the
shift.

~~~
jschwartzi
Yes. And the analysis could be improved by coding each submission according to
its intended status as a cool toy or a side project. I bet that as HN has
grown we're seeing more toys and less startup projects on Show HN.

------
anexprogrammer
HN comments are full of naive political opinion, groupthink, and a tendency to
blind optimism on all things technology or new. Often older ways have merit
too.

It's also probably the only place left on the net where, from comments, I'll
find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes I'm
often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic, and
sometimes talk with the guy who invented it. My ADHD brain loves the depth
that side topics can get explored and being surrounded by people far cleverer
than me.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

~~~
Jimmy
>I'll find out rapidly, and bluntly with citations, when I'm wrong (and, yes
I'm often wrong on the Internet!), usually learn something new on the topic

If you stay off the default subreddits and only go on the intellectual/debate
subreddits, then I honestly think reddit is better for this. The amount of
expertise on reddit is astounding. It's very easy to find someone to
rigorously challenge any view I have. I'd go so far as to say that it's the
smartest place on the internet (except for maybe places like MathOverflow and
some other specialty blogs/forums). They do have a natural advantage because
of their huge userbase.

~~~
shawnee_
Business startup ideas are essentially experiments in economic theory.

Yet HN comments are vastly inferior to Reddit's when regarding anything to do
with economics.

It didn't used to be this way, and I kind of miss the HN of old... where logic
and fearlessness were valued more than affiliation or keeping up of brand
appearances. I've been finding it increasingly disconcerting that the
incentive here lately has been to discredit or silence (bury) comments from
anybody whose opinion points out something like: yeah -- Airbnb's "business
model" might be creating way more more problems than it's claiming to solve.
Or that collusion in and among YC-funded companies might (or maybe should)
yield some Antitrust issues. The tech commentary can be pretty good, and there
are plenty of active HNers whose opinions I respect. However, it is leaning
heavy on becoming selection-biased and just plain mean to anybody with an
original idea.

~~~
VodkaHaze
Reddit is a swamp of filth wrt economics comments.

Basically all the subreddits except /r/academiceconomics, /r/badeconomics,
/r/econpapers are awful. I'm friends with the mods of /r/economics and they
have a really hard time reigning in the masses of ideologues (on all sides)
ruining what should remain pure economics discussions.

~~~
tptacek
Reddit and HN make an interesting comparison. Reddit's highs are _really_
high, far higher than HN's, often skirting the level of "so good as to be
newsworthy". But Reddit's lows --- and I don't mean trolling and harassment, I
mean the lower bounds of normal conversation there --- are much lower. I think
the median HN comment is better, by a lot, than the median Reddit comment.

I think you can extend the same judgement out to entire threads --- the best
Reddit threads being so much better than HN's that it's hard to even imagine
what HN could do differently to compete, and the median HN thread being better
than the median Reddit thread.

Another interesting thing is that the comparison would probably fall apart
completely if not for the heavily-moderated subreddits that produce the best
comments. If the Reddit comment cohorts included only the lightly moderated
subreddits, HN would probably win on all metrics other than volume and
diversity of topics.

~~~
toxican
While I still think HN probably has the better median, the quality of what
you're exposed to on reddit is mostly up to you. Ditch the defaults and
Reddit's median skyrockets. Ditch some of the more popular non-defaults, it
skyrockets some more. Start building a list of well-moderated subreddits with
a strong sense of community, and it jumps some more.

Not that you're doing this with your comment, but it has always struck me as
odd to treat reddit like it's a single website with a single experience for
all users. Yes, there's a base, universal experience, but it's truly up to the
user to tailor that experience into what they want. You want memes and fart
jokes? There are subs for that. You want to look at breathtaking photos? There
are (poorly named) subs for that. You want to discuss why obscure Warcraft
character A is behaving so oddly toward Warcraft character B? There's a sub
for that. To me, that will always be Reddit's strength.

No matter what reputation it gets, no matter how much shit goes on in the
defaults, there's always my little specialty subreddits filled with meaningful
content to consume.

~~~
tptacek
So that's the obvious response, and I agree, I think --- the comparison does
get trickier if you take just, say, AskHistorians versus HN (there are casual
Redditisms condoned even on well-moderated subreddits that are annoying enough
to keep the comparison tricky).

But if you compare the basket of subreddits relevant to HN --- programming,
crypto, etc --- right now, I feel like HN is winning handily. Reddit only
starts crushing HN when you broaden out into topics that aren't really in HN's
bailiwick.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
I find /r/crypto much better than HN for crypto discussions; you have more
than one crypto person there ( as opposed to essentially just you).

~~~
cpach
AFAIK HN has more than one qualified crypto persons.

------
dancek
I think HN needs a way to easily find the top comments. There are absolute
gems deep in discussion threads, but you'll need to spend a lot of time
reading to find them. Hence, it's very nice of Dan Luu to list some of his
favorites.

The top root-level comment for each comment page is obviously easy to see, but
good comments deeper in the comment tree are easily lost. Would be great if
e.g. the top 5% voted comments on a page were highlighted in some way.

Perhaps a workable solution would be to just follow the comments listing of
smart people. Guess I'll at least try that.

~~~
qb45
I swear there was a way to show top voted comments but I can't find it now.

~~~
DanBC
[https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments](https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments)

~~~
tptacek
The problem with /bestcomments is that it's based on votes, and thus does not
in fact track the best comments.

------
latch
Removing the vote count was a step back.

You end up with highly positioned comments that are factually wrong and no way
to weigh the corrections made in replies.

If you saw that a comment had 20 votes, but a reply had 500, you'd have
something to go by. If nothing else, they could show the relative score of a
reply to its parent.

~~~
crispyambulance
How about just reading and evaluating what the damn words say instead of
relying on a "score"?

~~~
latch
Because there are a lot of topics, even in my professional field, where I
don't have the necessary foundation.

Because sometimes a comment reaffirms or conflicts with my evaluation and it's
useful to have a weight assigned to that.

Because the world has enough people who make their own evaluation and refuse
to change their opinion regardless of overwhelming evidence.

~~~
coldtea
> _Because there are a lot of topics, even in my professional field, that I
> simply don 't have the necessary foundation._

And what makes you think that the "majority vote" on them will be correct?

Most often, it's the majority that doesn't have the necessary foundation.

~~~
latch
It's not an all-or-nothing. It's an extra piece of information.

There might be valid reasons to remove it (it hurts the community, it leads to
negative behavior, .... I forget why they took it off).

But when it comes to trying to assess the quality of the comment, more data is
better than less. Then you have the option to weigh it as you see fit,
including ignoring it.

~~~
BeetleB
>It's not an all-or-nothing. It's an extra piece of information...But when it
comes to trying to assess the quality of the comment, more data is better than
less.

It could be an extra piece of _disinformation_ , which can make it more
difficult to evaluate.

I suppose I'd like it if there was no way to sort. What happens on Reddit is
that such comments easily bubble to the top, and they're often wrong, or just
making a silly joke rather than being informative.

------
tedmiston
I really think the author is onto something here.

Recently I've been thinking about doing a couple blog posts that summarize the
HN thread for a given article* in perhaps ~1500 words. I think of it like the
approach that r/tabled uses for AMAs on Reddit (example: [1]).

Would others find this interesting, or would you rather just read the comments
yourself?

A second idea is — a daily / weekly update of comments from all of the people
you're interested in "following" on HN. You can do this very manually right
now. I think it could be an interesting proof of concept.

*When I say one article, I really mean the aggregate of recent links around that topic as discussions are often merged or commenters bring information from other sources into the commentary for whichever link takes off on that topic. Often that is the most original source, but not always.

[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/4lh4t1/table_iama_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/4lh4t1/table_iama_i_am_david_belk_im_a_doctor_who_has/)

~~~
jacquesm
I did this once:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-sell-your-
company](http://jacquesmattheij.com/how-to-sell-your-company)

It's still one of the most visited pages.

~~~
tedmiston
This looks excellent, and _very_ thorough. Thanks for sharing.

------
sideproject
I absolutely love comments on HN and they are probably the main reason I read
this site a lot. Some times, the posts themselves are quite self-explanatory
from the title and I just go straight to the discussions.

I created a little site called HackerNews Club

[http://hackernews.club](http://hackernews.club)

Where you can easily search for user's submissions and comments. FYI, here's
Dan's comments :)

[http://hackernews.club/luu#search/52e35e01f172df6d183c59633c...](http://hackernews.club/luu#search/52e35e01f172df6d183c59633ce86089ad66cece)

And HN users ordered by the number of comments they have made.

[http://hackernews.club/#search/39a2159841122c713bf4324d6f9de...](http://hackernews.club/#search/39a2159841122c713bf4324d6f9de7fbb98cfcd1)

~~~
phs318u
Seconded. I too love HN comments. Overall, my perception is that HN has
reasonably non-clickbaity articles with a good blend of tech and non-tech. The
comments I find largely pertinent, overwhelmingly constructively critical,
with FAR fewer trolls, flames and biased voting than any other public forum on
the internet I've ever come across since the original Usenet days. In fact, it
reminds me very much of good ol' Compuserve (there's nothing like having to
pay REAL money for a subscription to curb bad behaviour).

------
qwertyuiop924
You post a list of the best comments on HN without putting The Wisdom of Bane
on the list?

Seriously, how did The Wisdom of Bane not make it one here? That is one of the
best comments on all of HN.

For the uninitiated:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902739)

~~~
bane
Aww shucks. Thanks for the shout out.

I realize reading this again that I owe a more significant writeup -- I
started one not long after this and wasn't happy with how it was shaping up.
Maybe I'll have another go at it.

Since writing that comment two years ago I've added a couple more examples
consistent with the ones in the original post.

One thing I keep seeing is how teams seem to think that the planning stage of
this kind of work involves figuring out how to shove the problem into the big-
data platform du jour instead of figuring out how to solve the problem that
has the business need. When they're working with the platform, and hitting the
inevitable and unplanned for performance issues (because, you know, just shove
the node to the hadoop cluster and it'll magically take care of that), the
solutions never tackle the algorithmic bottlenecks but instead seem to focus
on messing with the platform or changing platforms, or changing run-time
languages or throwing more hardware at it.

If you are having trouble taking the nuts off your wheel to change a tire,
using a bigger hammer or a blow torth isn't going to help. Take the time to
find the wrench, of the right size, and then things will work much better.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
I mean, you get shoutouts every day. Thanks for responding to this one.

>One thing I keep seeing is how teams seem to think that the planning stage of
this kind of work involves figuring out how to shove the problem into the big-
data platform du jour instead of figuring out how to solve the problem that
has the business need.

Ahhh yes. The "when X is your hammer" problem.

In this context, I think the appropriate incarnation is, "When Hadoop is your
hammer, everything looks like 1000 nails to be hit very quickly, using brute
force."

------
acabal
These criticisms, when phrased in the manner of the post ("HN is full of mean
and rude people"), suggest by omission that there's some kind of internet
forum Nirvana out there where everyone's nice all the time and nobody every
says mean things or is rude. ("HN is full of mean and rude people [... unlike
place X, which is always great all the time]")

But the thing is, once a community reaches a mid-to-large size, certain kinds
of people will always going to think it's full of jerks and trolls, and that
its golden age has long passed--regardless of the community's age or actual
composition.

I run one of the largest online writing communities online, Scribophile. We've
been around going on 9 years and I personally pride myself on the reputation
we've earned as being a friendly and supportive community. By and large people
seem to agree. And yet every now and then we still get people complaining that
Scrib members are out to get them, that everyone is mean, that Scrib's golden
age has passed. (I started hearing that same golden age comment about 6 months
in, by the way).

I think the truth is more like the faceless, voiceless, anonymous internet
makes it really easy for people to both a) be jerks, and b) misinterpret
harmless posts as people being jerks. I think this phenomenon happens in every
mid-to-large sized community, ever. And I don't think it's really helpful to
criticize any community of that size as having nothing but mean people, or
trending towards meanness.

~~~
zodiac
Uh, did you read his second paragraph?

> And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical
> commentary.

~~~
lstamour
I don't think they're mutually exclusive opinions. HN could be seen as mean or
rude just as it can be technically correct -- and sometimes at the same time.
The original post also acknowledges that there's been an effort to reduce
negative comments in the past few years.

~~~
zodiac
I read danluu's first two paragraphs as making the argument that "comments on
HN are bad, but better than comments on any other online community", instead
of as trying to distinguish between meanness and technical correctness.

------
oskarth
I often find my self searching through old HN comments for all kinds of
things. Just off the top of my head I've searched for comments on: Redis, ZFS,
Raft, SQS, ZMQ, message queue, RDS, connection pools, ECS in the last few
days. I've learned quite a lot of things from reading comments by people with
way more experience in these matters than I have. And that's probably less
than half of my searches. A google search might give me some good stuff, and
Stack Exchange too, but HN comments are indeed underrated.

~~~
akkartik
Indeed. Searching on [https://hn.algolia.com](https://hn.algolia.com) is an
integral part of my workflow. When I read an article I often want to see:

a) What did people say about it on HN? Because the comments there are often
superior to the comments on the site itself. If there are multiple threads on
it separated by years, it's often interesting to read them all and reflect on
how opinions of reasonable people have drifted over time.

b) Did I upvote any of the threads? (i.e. Have I read this before?) Did I,
perchance, _leave a comment_?

Often this process adds a few more favorites to my list
([https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik&comments=...](https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik&comments=t)),
which is also growing to be an integral part of my workflow.

------
blt
I think the culture of rejecting joke-only comments is significant. I love a
good joke, but so does everybody else. Rewarding jokes would have a major
effect on the signal/noise ratio.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Maybe have a [jokular] tag and let readers flag a comment as such, then allow
[jokular] comments to be hidden for the people who find them noisy.

Edit: this comment deservers the [overengineering] tag...

~~~
mortehu
Slashdot has something similar. Moderators' points have to be tagged with
"Funny", "Interesting", etc, and users can choose how to weigh each type of
point.

------
shubhamjain
I prefer cynicism over unthoughtful, inconsequential comments that floods
several discussion forums that I have come across. "Nice article", "Great
write-up" and the next thing you know, you have created a place where people
are only interested in submitting their articles and getting it upvoted rather
than make meaningful contributions.

People want to make good contributions here and that's something that
differentiates HN from other news aggregators.

~~~
nabla9
".. the measure of a healthy organization is probably the degree to which
negative thoughts are allowed. In places where great work is being done, the
attitude always seems to be critical and sarcastic, not "positive" and
"supportive". The people I know who do great work think that they suck, but
that everyone else sucks even more." ­­-- Paul Graham

~~~
wpietri
The first bit is true, but the second is pretty much the opposite of what
Google found: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-
learn...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-
its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html)

In particular, Google found that psychological safety is a key component of
successful teams.

Indeed, I think in an environment where rudeness is the norm, it's much harder
to get people to share negative thoughts. Sure, you'll have a few alpha-dicks
who will say whatever shitty thing that comes to mind. But most other people
will just keep their lips buttoned because they don't want to deal with
critical, sarcastic comments.

If you want real, long-term organizational improvement, you have to create an
environment were people are willing to share problems and concerns without
fear that they'll get insulted or blamed.

One great example is Toyota's culture of continuous improvement, which helped
them go from post-WWII decimation of Japan to the world's dominant carmaker.
They're explicit that "respect for people" is foundational. A good book here
is Rother's "Toyota Kata", which goes into Toyota's culture and people-
management practices.

Another is airplane safety. For its ubiquity and technological complexity,
flight is amazingly safe. But this requires a culture of deep, thoughtful
honesty. Sidney Dekker's "Field Guide to Human Error" explains how much this
depends on creating blame-free contexts, how much it requires a deep respect
for people. Without that, people will a) blame others, and b) cover their own
asses in an effort to avoid getting blame. That muddies the waters enough that
you can never find and fix the systemic problems that caused bad outcomes.

TL;DR: If you really want people to share negative thoughts, you need
positive, supportive environments.

~~~
hiou
Nope. Seen both many times. The positive enforcement causes no one to share
any negative thoughts after a while and the company smiles it's way out of
business.

Unfortunately people who will not speak up out of fear are toxic to company
culture. The creative process is immediately destroyed when people need to
second guess everything they say or do since it is impossible to know if you
are about to say the wrong thing.

If someone can not tolerate cynical and sarcastic comments they need to be
removed quickly. This is very different from mean spirited put downs and
intentionally hurtful comments.

Stuff like "idk that button looks like it was mad in 2002" or "I swear we have
the shittiest parser ever right here". Is good and fine.

"You talk to much", "why did you write it like that? It doesn't make any
sense" Are bad.

Notice how the first like says "we" or talks about a specific feature and the
others talk about specific people.

~~~
xenadu02
First your anecdotes are not persuasive compared to two incredibly successful
companies and one incredibly successful industry.

Second, you missed the point. It isn't about prohibiting anyone from
expressing a negative opinion or sugar-coating things. That's a false
dichotomy. It's about not attacking the messenger and not looking to place
blame. It also means accepting valid criticism. You can be 100% honest without
being an asshole.

Why do so many people (especially in tech) try to link "being a raging
asshole" with telling the truth? The two are unrelated.

~~~
hiou
The problem is that many people who are hurt easily by cynical and sarcastic
behavior(which is very different than being as asshole) typically take
themselves very seriously and it's a sign that they are very self focused and
place their own concerns way above those of the team.

I wonder if there is a language barrier but cynical and sarcastic is very very
different from putting people down.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"The problem is that many people who are hurt easily by cynical and sarcastic
behavior(which is very different than being as asshole) typically take
themselves very seriously and it's a sign that they are very self focused and
place their own concerns way above those of the team."

Please give evidence supporting that claim. What I've seen is a lot of people
are just non-confrontational by nature. They'll do a lot to avoid being in a
fight. However, they may want to discuss things even with criticisms. It just
becomes harmful to them after the conversational style crosses a certain line.
Knowing this, groups like Toyota put a line down that allows the negative
information to come in without the personal attacks or circumstances that shut
many people down. Continuous innovations resulted that dwarfed the competition
doing what you suggest. This is not an isolated incident as many innovative
companies create similarly respectful environments where everyone tries to
improve, either positively or negatively, the process or products without
attacking each other.

~~~
grzm
Lots of good discussion in this whole thread. Another thing to keep in mind is
that good, effective communication involves both/all parties.

That involves the speaker communicating in a way that will be effectively
received by the listener, and the listener actively participating to try to
hear what the speaker is trying to communicate. So it's context dependent as
well.

There very well can be mismatches and miscommunication, but if the goal is
effective communication, I think in a lot of cases these can be tolerated and
worked around. Takes both sides.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"That involves the speaker communicating in a way that will be effectively
received by the listener, and the listener actively participating to try to
hear what the speaker is trying to communicate. So it's context dependent as
well."

That's a good point. In my classes on it, they called it active listening.
Anyone interested in following up on your point should type that phrase into
Google to find all kinds of interesting resources appear. Another angle I
found interesting was "dang" linking to Principle of Charity:

[http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html](http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html)

I think that would've stopped a lot of arguments. I was against enforcing it
totally at moderation level as I'm for empirical approach where we do dismiss
bad information if it clearly fits the pattern. It's good as a general
principle in discussions, though, when one's instinct is to think other party
is an idiot on specific topic. A combination of active listening, charitable
approach, and follow-up questions can make that discussion much better for
both parties. I even learn from people who are clearly wrong about an issue
when I see what things matter to such people & can fine-tune my solutions or
arguments to reach more people. Other times I'm wrong with similar effect of
fine-tuning ideas or beliefs as long as I suck it up. :)

~~~
grzm
Thanks for the Principle of Charity link! It calls to mind Anotol's Rapoport's
rules, summarized by Daniel Dennett as:

> How to compose a successful critical commentary:

> * You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly,
> vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of
> putting it that way.

> * You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not
> matters of general or widespread agreement).

> * You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

> * Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or
> criticism.

[https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-
rapo...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapoport-
rules-criticism/)

Might be too much for every comment response, but good to keep in mind.

I think I've been particularly fascinated by this whole area recently in part
because I know it's something I need to improve on. Your point _I even learn
... suck it up. :)_ is spot on.

Thanks again for your thoughtful remarks and contributions. Much appreciated.
Off to dig into the Principle of Charity and its references.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Yes, Rapoport's rules seem comparable. Succinct too. Bookmarked. :)

------
angry_octet
I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups -- NNTP ones, not yahoo or google groups, or
any of the pale http immitations. The best were usually moderated of course,
but even unmoderated ones often had high signal to noise. I imagine how they
might be now with rich text rendering, e.g. embedded TeX and images.

Good newsreaders (MT-Newswatcher on MacOS springs to mind, but also fast
console programs like _tin_ ) really helped. There were no 'likes' or 'vote'
buttons. But there was the ability to whitelist or blacklist certain authors
by adding them to a user's 'killfile', leading to the wonderfully pithy
permanent downvote reply:

<plonk>

~~~
DrScump
"I greatly miss Usenet newsgroups... but even unmoderated ones often had high
signal to noise..."

Me, too. My presence there began in 1987.

Part of what helped its signal-to-noise ratio was that participants tended to
be in industry or academia, resulting in both better-informed contributors and
a sense of community.

There was, of course, the odd flamewar here and troll there, but they were the
exception, not the rule. Even passionate arguments were mostly civil (ah,
comp.lang.c was quite a lively place as the ANSI standard was being
discussed... even just the NOALIAS debate alone).

Participants also cared about readability; good netizenship meant trimming
text unrelated to the context you were discussing ( _interleaved posting_ , as
Wiki calls it).

As the AOL bridge and the top-posting mongrel horde of Outlook posters flooded
in, there went the neighborhood... _damn neighbor kids messing up our lawn!_

~~~
angry_octet
And now top posting is the norm in email! It's so _anti-electronic_ to do it
that way, as if we were exchanging _letters_.

> Participants also cared about readability; good netizenship meant trimming
> text unrelated to the context you were discussing

I get confusion these days if I use [snip], people think I am mutilating their
email through spite or something.

------
mooreds
I have often thought it's be great to do a "best comments of the week" email
list the same way "Kernel Traffic" did for a number of years with Linux kernel
development: [http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-
traffic/archives.html](http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-
traffic/archives.html)

Condensing comments down to the 5-10 gems would be very interesting. And,
perhaps with the voting system, not that difficult.

~~~
veddox
I like that idea! The only problem I see is that great comments are often
embedded within an extensive discussion - how do you give readers of such a
digest the necessary context without too much bloat?

~~~
mooreds
I can think of two options:

* Embed enough to give the reader context (maybe a link to the original article or quoting the parent or grandparent is enough)

* Only include those comments that are stand-alone.

It'd be quite a lot of work, but even if you highlighted 10% of the great
comments, you'd provide a great service.

~~~
veddox
Absolutely! If you do it, I might just subscribe :-)

~~~
mooreds
Same to you :)

------
libeclipse
Another thing I've noticed about HN comments is that everything is hyped
beyond what it deserves.

For example, the recent DDoS attacks were just a bunch of skids with Mirai,
but it was discussed as if it was the end of the internet.

There's also the issue of self-censorship, where users will refrain from
posting their opinion in case they get downvotes and negative karma.

The things people post here are fascinating, but the comments, in my honest
opinion, aren't.

~~~
sotojuan
To be fair those two things aren't HN specific. They seem to be human nature
as they've happened in ever forum I've been part of.

------
throw2016
I miss the deep expertise often on display on forums like slashdot in the past
which is conspicious by its absence here.

In many ways this is more of a professional board than a personal board. A lot
of folks here are in the profession and don't seem to speak their mind, lest
they lose career opportunities. This also seems to promote an affection of
expertise and authoritative tone even on subjects commentators may not know
much about.

There is offhand dismissal of dissent as 'resistant to change' and a serious
lack of scrutiny that often allows broken technologies and services to be
hyped endlessly untill people come back months or years later to report
deficiencies but by then the train has left the station.

And any forum that promotes downvotes to signal dissent cannot by design
promote diverse discussion and will naturally coalesce around a 'socially
acceptable' consensus.

------
cyanbane
Reading this article and thinking back on the users on HN that I do enjoy
reading comments from I think that a neat feature may be the ability for a
logged in user to "favorite/mark" specific authors. Those authors only get
some particular character in front of their name (or a different color) so
that they stand out more. I do agree with this post about seeing certain names
and knowing that the signal ratio will be higher is nice. May just need a
better way to discern those when scanning a comments section.

~~~
cju
On Firefox, you can use extension "Favorite Users - Hacker News".

------
amelius
I wish there was more research in moderation systems. I think it is a
fascinating topic, because it can make or break an online forum. And perhaps
it even has applications in political decision making.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I agree. I don't know of any such research but this article posted on HN was
one of best summaries on the subject I've seen:

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-
moderato...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderator-
history-youtube-facebook-reddit-censorship-free-speech)

------
bambax
> 1838 days ago

Trivial improvement to HN: after more than 30 days, render time in number of
years and months instead of just days.

~~~
cybertronic
Even better: actual time and date of submission

------
return0
HN comments need a vertical bar on the left side to indicate indent level. i
find it hard to skim conversations in narrow screens.

~~~
sidcool
Agree. But I am just happy that they added collapsible comments.

------
lorenzhs
The comments on that "Lenovo is blocking Linux on some new laptops" story a
while back were truly abysmal. I think that's the only time where I was really
disappointed by HN comments. Now obviously (and as many of the more thoughtful
commenters pointed out) this was just a case of missing support in the Linux
kernel. There was no "secret deal" between Lenovo and Microsoft that the
customer service rep on that forum revealed. Intel posted some patches to fix
this a few days ago: [http://marc.info/?l=linux-
ide&m=147709610621480&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=linux-
ide&m=147709610621480&w=2)

The thread I question, with over 1000 points and 500 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12545878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12545878)

~~~
qb45
There was more to it than missing support in Linux.

These SSDs have two modes of operation: AHCI (supported by any OS) and
proprietary (requiring special drivers). Lenovo chose to hide the
corresponding menu in UEFI setup and hacked the firmware to revert changes
made through UEFI variables so that the SSD was permanently stuck in
proprietary RAID mode, at that time supported only by Lenovo's modified
Windows 10.

Ultimately Lenovo said they did it because RAID mode performs better, but they
only published this explanation after the outbreak of Internet drama.

~~~
lorenzhs
I didn't argue that Lenovo did everything right - but there was no conspiracy.
No secret deal with Microsoft. There were lazy decisions on Lenovo's side and
missing driver support in Linux.

But regardless of what the actual technical reasons where, when you look at
that thread now, wouldn't you agree that many of the comments were sub-par and
didn't meet the quality guidelines of HN?

~~~
lisivka
If deal is secret, how you know?

~~~
lorenzhs
Because you can now boot Linux on these machines. If there had been a deal, it
would have failed its purpose. Occam's Razor leads me to conclude that almost
certainly, there was no conspiracy. Let alone that some community forum
support guy would never be told about a secret deal.

~~~
qb45
> Let alone that some community forum support guy would never be told about a
> secret deal.

Nobody said it was secret, besides you. I think it was parent's point that you
are strawmanning here.

This was also the sole reason I responded to your initial post. You
misrepresent people's position and then complain that what you presented is
"abysmal" and "disappointing".

~~~
lorenzhs
That wasn't my impression reading the original submission or the comment
thread. Lots of things that would adequately be explained by lack of Linux
drivers and stupidity on Lenovo's side were attributed to malice and purported
as fact.

Also, the source of the entire story seems to have a background of baseless
accusations about vendors maliciously preventing Linux:
[https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/778680150812536833](https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/778680150812536833)

~~~
lisivka
But we also know that MicroSoft bribe officials for looong time. See link[1]
for example. MS can just bribe someone in Lenovo directly. Or, maybe, someone
in Lenovo is a huge fan of MS, so he can act against Linux just in case (I saw
this in my own company).

[1]: [http://techrights.org/2016/02/15/microsoft-bribing-
officials...](http://techrights.org/2016/02/15/microsoft-bribing-officials/)

------
netsec_burn
This article and its comments are surprisingly negative. I've long held the
opinion that HN is the best aggregator out there, and the comments are top
notch as well. Far better than Reddit, subreddits like
/r/programming+sysadmin+netsec etc, /g/, Slashdot, and the list goes on.

------
franciscop
My feeling is that a large enough part of Hacker News has been any time within
the last 10 years actively contributing in Stack Overflow. From my own
experience, I learned how to ask/answer technical questions and participate in
a technical discussion there while trying not to keep it political, and I
totally feel that has helped me to provide good comments in HN from time to
time.

So I would challenge the sentences:

> And yet, I haven’t found a public internet forum with better technical
> commentary.

I have, it's StackOverflow. Even though it is not a _public internet forum_
properly, I've found there some awesome technical commentaries there and I
think it might have helped HN a lot on that side.

------
cronjobber
> when people make comments that aren’t just reasonable sounding but are
> actually correct, those comments tend to get upvoted

For a while, I found that on pages with lots of comments the most interesting
ones were to be found at the top––and, buried between actual dross, at the
bottom.

That _might_ have changed, I don't see it that much anymore. But that could be
a side effect of something even less desirable. I think _some_ people may have
started flagging whole articles when the discussion has "too many" comments
they dislike. I can't prove this, of course.

~~~
zzzcpan
I have the opposite experience. I never found the most interesting comments at
the top on popular posts. They usually just reflect a public opinion or come
from "famous" HNers. I even reconsider my opinions, when my comments are
upvoted too much. Because it means that public shares the same opinion and it
is likely to be influenced by PR/marketing/politics.

------
sharpercoder
Coming from a certain frame, context and worldview given to someone by his/her
parents, many comments are not ill-intendend but come off as unhelpful or
negative. A problem with moderation on the web is that for willing people it
is hard to grasp why you have been given the mdoeration you got.

An idea I'm toying with is to allow meta-comment reactions to comments. They
would extend horizontally (as opposed to vertically for non-meta comments) and
allow medium-to-high experienced users to provde meta-comments (feedback).

~~~
humanrebar
> ...many comments are not ill-intendend but come off as unhelpful or
> negative.

Unhelpful to whom? Pointing out bad examples as bad examples is helpful to the
inexperienced; they may learn to avoid some pitfalls.

People who publicly push back against popular bad schools of thought provide
encouragement to others in the minority who might give up the fight out of
fatigue instead of conceding on the merits.

~~~
sharpercoder
I'm trying to point out that meta-comments (feedback) can help guide the
discussion in the correct direction. It's generally unwanted to mix meta and
non-meta discussion. So it may be practical to do allow for meta-commenting on
comments, but display it horizontally. This would allow users to focus more
and better on the matter at hand.

------
spectrum1234
This article and the (currently) highest rated comment with the Medium article
is making me want to write more.

I've always considered a simple blog where I just write short commentary on
articles I've read that I feel are incorrect or incomplete. One thing that has
held me back is knowing I'm not a brilliant writer. However am going to try
and keep in mind the great blog post by Paul Graham that stresses to always
write in short sentences. Good luck me!

------
hellofunk
> comments are often gratuitously mean, and people will often defend
> gratuitously mean comments by claiming that it’s either impossible or
> inefficient to convey information without being mean.

> Most of the negative things you hear about HN comments are true.

I think it is interesting how the relatively anonymised nature of the internet
has a similar effect on people of all stripes. HN readers, I believe, are
among the more intelligent, or at least curious, in our species. The same is
true of another popular internet forum, Stackoverflow. Yet there exists an air
of negativity that is of much higher ubiquity than in "real" life where people
are not anonymous. And this is true of most other internet forums as well
where more of the general popular participates. I think it shows in a strange
way that people just have a lot of negativity to vent, and the internet has
made that really easy and without consequence to the rest of one's life, and
that this remains true regardless of one's interests and general intelligence.

~~~
GrinningFool
I've found my negative tendencies curbed quickly when I started using my real
name, or accounts directly linked to my real name (such as this one). For me,
it just forces an extra second of thought - whatever I type next affects
people's perception of _me_ as a person.

At first this was just in the form of considering my reply more, but over time
it shifted to occurring as a part of reaching my initial conclusions.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I use my main account as "nickpsecurity" for the same reason. I've posted as
"Nick P" in security field for a long time. It's close to my real name. I do
controversial posts and generate plenty of material that could be used for
smears but tying it to my real identity does filter out some foolish, reckless
or smearing comments I might otherwise make with zero accountability.

So, I post everything here under that name or don't post it at all. The
results have overall been positive with a very low amount of bad reactions in
moderation or downvotes vs an aggressive throwaway I might create to write
comments of dubious value.

------
Mz
Yet another human bemoaning the fact that when myriad humans randomly get
together on the internet, some folks are clueless, some folks are not nice,
some folks write poorly, etc. There are things that can be done to improve
online discussion. But expecting everyone to be equally knowledgeable, savvy,
etc is simply not a reasonable expectation.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Well, you can't have both that and "open", at least...

------
renke1
I admit that I usually read the comments first and then go to article.

------
lmm
> For the last couple years (ish?), the moderation regime has been really
> active in trying to get a good mix of stories on the front page and in
> tamping down on gratuitously mean comments. But there was a period of years
> where the moderation could be described as sparse, arbitrary, and
> capricious, and while there are fewer “bad” comments now, it doesn’t seem
> like good moderation actually generates more “good” comments.

I agree that there was a major change in moderation 1-2 years ago. But I think
it's worse rather than better. The moderation is more arbitrary and capricious
now (in particular it's a lot more active during the hours when the US is
awake), and there are a lot of positive-but-contentless fluff comments and
even humour, both of which are inimical to what made HN great.

------
zyngaro
So true. I often jump to the comments before I read the linked article. The
comments a very often of better quality and more informed than the article it
self. HN is unique in today's internet it's a great community and I hope it
stays that way.

------
bashexporting
HN comments are moderated (not the moderators which are completely fine and,
in my case, always clear of what was off-topic and in need of flagging, but
the community that flags) by the hive-mind that is like any hive-mind against
diversity.

Of the dozens of accounts I had, some have reached karma levels of awe, and
some were met with extreme flagging and disapproval.

The most pleasant and interesting discussions are mostly in the technical,
scientific themes.

When it comes to diet, lifestyle issues, comments are overflooded with bunch
of anecdotal claims, unscientific babbling and extreme boasting.

I stay away from these threads after I've realized this was the case.

------
ericolo
I come here for the content. Before I started frequently coming here, I used
solely reddit. I didn't "get" HN at the time. But at some point it started
growing on me, I started coming here more and more often, and right now it's
my primary source of random information. I still reddit, but more for leisure
and time wasting than anything else.

I don't check comment much, thought.

As a side effect, it had also changed my browsing customs; before it wasn't
difficult for me to go down to the 10th page on reddit.

Nowadays I'm barely past the 2nd page.

------
xcombelle
From my point of view, which is biased relatively to the HN target audience
because I'm not so much interested in the startup things, reddit is overall
superior to HN, either concerning the posts or the comment thread. concerning
the technological news feed, my best source of content is definitely
[https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/)

------
soufron
I feel the same. Most often, the comments are way more interesting than the
links they're commenting. This led me to calm down on commenting all the time,
coz I felt like I needed to try to make good quality comments in order to
compare favorably to the rest of the discussion, and to contribute to the
community. I wonder if others feel like this and decided to restrain on
commenting?

------
karussell
> HN comments are terrible.

The truth is that more articles than comments are waste of time (as comments
are often a lot shorter or simpler to grasp) so I have to disagree here: I
often find myself reading the comments before clicking on the article to save
me time. And I'm not the only one.

------
egeozcan
Of course the top comment can sometimes be positive. For example when the
article is about HN itself.

On a more serious note, I guess most people in the tech crowd can make a
5-item list of why HN comments suck and that is exactly the power of HN
comments.

------
Jaruzel
Zero criticism here - I _love_ danluu.com posts[1], but ...

Who is he? And why does all of his posts get massively up-voted?

Thanks in advance, from an ignorant chimp. :)

\--

[1] However, a little bit of CSS sprinkled on them wouldn't go amiss - even
just 'max-width' would help a lot.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I upvote danluu.com because I consistently like the posts; at some point, the
domain name becomes a marker of quality.

Dan Luu has an about page and a LinkedIn page, but he's not a mega-celebrity
or Chief Architect of Google or some such - he's mostly a guy with an
uncommon-but-useful mix of backgrounds who writes well.

------
z3t4
One thing I dont like about HN is that I do not have time to read everything
and explore each new technology. It's like throwing away good food when you're
hungry.

------
jordanpg
The bellwether of a bad but possibly technically interesting HN comment is one
that begins with a humblebrag: "One time a Fortune 500 company hired me to re-
write their entire web tier using Django" or "last year, for fun, I wrote a
fully-functioning TLS implementation in node".

Such nonsense (or at best, unneeded information) is intended to provide
credentials so that the reader will take what follows more seriously. But
ironically it only serves to erode confidence.

~~~
GrinningFool
More and more I'm trying to take those at face value - a statement that
translates as: "I have opinions on this, but before I give them let me explain
why I think I am qualified to do so.

For most, perhaps it's a bit of both. And is that a bad thing? Is there
something wrong with asserting your right to wield a technical opinion while
also showing off a thing that you're proud of having done?

On the other hand, if I had prefaced that opinion with the following , it
would be been a bit over the top:

I've been reading comments for years. Not just on HN, but all over the
Internet. In fact, once I spent 60 hours in a week, just reading comments.

------
yanjuk
A way to reduce disruptive comments might be to make one downvote cost one
karma point.

Down-voting should be for disruption, not ignorance. Ignorant comments are
fine. Get them out there so they can be aired and corrected. Laymen get to
know what they think. Experts get to know what laymen think. Occasionally
there's a good idea.

Talk is cheap and we should do more of it. The alternative is people being far
more ignorant than they already are. But silently, in private, with more
potential for harm.

~~~
veddox
> A way to reduce disruptive comments might be to make one downvote cost one
> karma point.

That is such a good idea it has actually been integral to HN for, oh, I don't
know, a pretty long time... From the FAQ
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)):

''' How is a user's karma calculated?

Roughly, the number of upvotes on their stories and comments minus the number
of downvotes. The numbers don't match up exactly, because some votes aren't
counted to prevent abuse. '''

~~~
tedmiston
This is what Stack Overflow does. Since it "hurts" their own karma, people
downvote less. One implication of that is that when threads stay at zero, it
can be hard to differentiate the reason why. Sometimes it's just that the
question is well written but obscure.

~~~
NeutronBoy
> Since it "hurts" their own karma, people downvote less.

Yes, so they just vote to close the question instead.

------
jasonkostempski
"Some downsides of immutability" ...

------
dilemma
The first and second paragraphs seem to contradict each other.

Comments (and previously blogs, but not so much anymore) can have more insight
than news articles because they're based on first hand experience. Journalists
don't have that, and the organization they work for often has problematic
incentives which they push onto the writer.

HN comments are indeed very terse, to the point of being unfriendly. It
bothered me at first but now I'm used to the style and sort of like it.

~~~
scwoodal
I'm guessing the author tried to convey a stereotype about the comments in the
first paragraph. Then tried to debunk that stereotype in the rest of the post.

There definitely could of been a sentence or two to help transition between
the two as it felt odd to me as well.

~~~
maxerickson
The post is dismissive of the value of the majority of the comments, it just
thinks there are some that are worthwhile.

It also suggests moving that content off of HN (or at least replicating it
elsewhere).

------
wfeui3
I lost faith in HN crowd when hyperloop started. California can not even
replicate 40 years old TGV, but somehow it will build space-like technology
for fraction of price.

And than there are politics. Entire world should accept millions of refugees.
But SF is different, and should not even host 400 homeless who arrive every
year.

~~~
ghaff
But it should build lots of housing for tech workers for whom life just isn't
worth living if they have to be anywhere else on the planet.

~~~
argonaut
Yes, because otherwise they'll just take all the other housing, since tech
workers are paid more.

------
anythingbot
I would like to propose wikipedia edit history and comment deletion milestones
for the hn comment system, and in addition, a comment redaction facility that
works like redaction of classified documents.

------
emblem21
Honestly, I come here just for the comments. I rarely read the articles unless
a comment is excited about something arcane.

------
k__
I follow many people on twitter who dislike HN. Reason for this is opinions
here are alsmost entirely from white males with money.

~~~
jessaustin
If this were true, it would merit study. How can a forum that is open to all
and used in mostly anonymous fashion, so effectively police the race of users?
And how could other less open less anonymous activities hope to succeed in
diversity?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
With regards to the gender aspect, see any of the threads related to 'women in
computing' and the horrible posts therein.

~~~
tnones
Only if you assume women cannot be successful in technology without needing a
special interest group mooching off the entire enterprise.

It's a vicious cycle based on a kafkatrap. If you don't agree that women are
discriminated against in tech, you're discriminating against women. Culture
committees, diversity consultants and women-only groups are set up to
"address" this problem, yet all they do is create more division and
alienation, holding up the most stereotypical fragile princess as
representative for every woman on the planet.

They keep throwing all sorts of accusations and aspersions on every single guy
in the field, shriek and pearl clutch when they receive blowback, and have the
gall to call this empathy, in a field where the average worker is an
undersocialized and overworked code janitor. Whose preferred communication
styles, hobbies and accomplishments are fair game to ignore or bulldoze over.

Pointing this out gets you labeled as "horrible". Fine, then. Yet another word
to add to the pile that has lost all meaning. Misogyny used to mean "hatred of
women", now it just means "something a woman hates". Which appears to include
the average mid-rung nerd.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
A perfect example of my point.

