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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I like this idea of being able to hide comments and stories from submitters with accounts fewer than N days old, where N is a setting that each user can tweak.

This can omit important discussion, as I do remember a couple of items discussing either an article or a new site where the author specifically created an account so they could contribute to the discussion.

Account age has no bearing on the intelligence of the owner... there's a specific group of smart people (6 degrees of PG) that have been here a long time, and the rest have joined as it came up on their radar.

Most nasty comments seem to go unpunished. If someone says something clearly nasty that doesn't add to the conversation, why don't you personally kill it?

Lots of communities have tried to push moderation into the hands of users via flagging, and it never seems to work. I think the best and quickest solution to the problem is to use trusted but invisible moderators.

I agree that this is possibly the best general solution, and perhaps even the only solution, but it is certainly not "quick" when there are thousands of comments and only one moderator.

The only way to keep human moderation workable is to keep the work of each individual moderator small and scale out tree-style. Perhaps that will be the ultimate shape of the Web: a set of top level news sites, aggregating the best commentary from a larger set of second-tier news sites, aggregating the best commentary from a larger set of tertiary news sites...

Hacker News has many moderators.

I am sure it does.

One reason I don't kill mean comments is that I don't want to be censoring anyone. If someone says something super nasty I might ban them, so there at least won't be any more, but I rarely kill the comment I banned them for unless it is a spam or a very clear troll.

There's another more practical reason it's hard to kill mean comments: they often have replies by the time I see them. It would mess up the conversation if they got taken out then.

One reason I don't kill mean comments is that I don't want to be censoring anyone.

Then you need to bring onto your team some group of curators/moderators whose number 1 task is to keep the site free of nastiness on a nonpartisan, equal opportunity basis.

By all means please leave the nasty comments in. If nothing else, they should serve as an object lesson to other posters.

With a huge crowd, the system needs to train the users by providing cues and publicly "punishing" (through greyed-out text and negative scores) ill behavior. The more people you have, the more important this feedback system becomes.

Except that nasty comments are sometimes voted up very highly, which doesn't help anyone.

Consider having a penalty box for a certain period of time once a flag threshhold is reached - e.g. a few hours (where the offense is clearly marked that the user alone can see with a link to TOS) to shame someone into being more civil. If it's decorum that you're trying to change, then I'd keep the flag simple - e.g. an "ad hominem" flag. Part of the attraction for me to HN is its elegance and simplicity in great and relevant stories percolating to the top in addition to the unique and remarkable community.

Once an individual has a given number of penalty boxes, a moderator considers whether to ban them. The danger of doing stuff like this is that subjects that interest this community inevitably also spill over into the political realm and as others have pointed out the use of up votes and downvotes are ambiguous and further, open to abuse.

If you want to publicly shame someone, then once a member is on probation after a certain number of penalties/flags, add a dot or something relatively benign in color to their name.

Edit - I'd add that if it were up to me, I'd try to control personal attacks above all else given the community is pretty good at calling people out on comments that add little to no value.

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.

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.

generally, I agree, but I do find, for example, that as programming.reddit.com got worse the swearing went up, and as HN has gotten worse swearing has gone up. Now the swearing is not always mean-spearited, and probably the mean-spirited swearing gets down-modded on HN. But swearing could just trigger a filter that says "swear words are used to get attention in important situations. Do you really think this is that important?".

Even if you can find some effective filters to use, most may eventually be worked around by commenters as you are implying. But they could give you more breathing room to find long-term solutions, and may help in that effort by increasing your awareness of what exactly the problems are.

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.

Create an expanded group of users whose judgement you trust. If they flag a comment for being uncivil, then everyone who up-voted the comment has their voting power reduced (from then on, if their up-vote would count less than everyone else's). I think this would help with the problem of highly up-voted, mean, comments.

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.

Hear. Hear. HN is also my favorite general access site. (I am a member of an organization that has members-only email lists that are very, very good, but I still find things here that I share with them.)

The guidelines mention "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" as being on topic here, and I am deeply curious, having been an online moderator in various places since 1992, about how to keep an open online community civil and informative. My friendly advice to pg is to stay in the fight and don't give up. It may take a heavier hand in moderation of both comments and persons, aided by some of the crowdsourcing technical means being discussed in this thread, but HN has participants who cherish what HN is and who will be glad to help.

If I were creating my own ratings for my own personal view of HN, I'd like to discount votes of people who vote opposite of me: if I downvote a comment that they upvote, then I'd prefer to take their other opinions less into account.

Or, since I'm not actually all that active on HN, I'd prefer to be seeing a view that weighted more heavily votes of people who were not voting opposite to those of people whose opinion I respect, such as pg. And probably some others that I'd be aware of, if I were on HN more.

For me to take the next step and suggest that this then becomes the default view that everyone sees seems strangely egotistical. Not for me, I mean, but that you might seem egotistical if you were giving more weight to votes from people who voted similarly to how you voted. I'd probably like the site more if you did that though :)

That is a very interesting way to use voting to customise your viewpoint. Perhaps click-through to articles or news could also be a factor, those people who click through to the same articles as you tend to have more effect on the pages you see.

You'd end up with a graph representation where each user is a node and two nodes are connected if they share a similar voting relationship.

Everything that you can vote on keeps a list of the people who upvoted it vs those who downvoted it. Every day the list of voters are cleared (to reduce load), and those people who all voted the same have their relationships to each other strengthened. The submitter of the item you voted on has their relationship with the voter increased by a larger amount still.

You then take your relationship to the submitter or commenter into account when comments are ordered for you, perhaps via the shades of grey styling HN has at present.

The first thing to determine: are there "nasty users", or simply nasty posts, which could be posted by otherwise-kind people?

Treating nasty users is a simple and well-known problem: find out the user's disposition before you release their commenting privilege. Usually you'd put all the user's writings into a moderation queue, and only post them up (and retroactively make those moderated posts appear) if their average moderation score exceeded some threshold. The moderation could be done by users, of course; in fact, it could simply be part of the normal comment-thread interface, with an icon beside the post to represent that voting on it affects whether the user (and their posts) stay or go.

Treating nasty posts by good users might be similar to a problem of catching illicit activity on a bank account—simply asking the user "Did you really mean to post this? It doesn't seem like something you'd say." It might also be similar to a social bookmarking matchmaking service—except that instead of putting people with high pairwise right-handed Whuffie together, you'd be keeping people with low pairwise left-handed Whuffie apart, by somehow making it harder for them to confront one another.

I think a "Did you mean this?" flag would be useful. Sometimes I find I make a post that could use a little rewording that would make it clearer or less confrontational. I am prone to calling OP's crap (not comments). Perhaps I should apply the moose turd pie principle: Crap...but tasty.

Good thought. I bet many of the more nasty-prone posters are less likely to revisit their posts to see how they were received, and to consider editing or adding to their posts if flagged as too snarky (or whatever).

Having a way to offer some means of adjustment would help distinguish between the accidental and willful nastiness.

YES

Rather than resort to more sophistication in terms of voting and/or flagging systems, I am inclined to think the best hack would be a social one: Make the link to the guidelines more prominent. Why not place it in the bar at the top of every page, instead of in a tiny font at the bottom?

Indeed, why not make bopping by the guidelines a threshold requirement for a first comment, and put the link on every comment submission form?

Would you consider forking the entire site into multiple HNs? e.g. where one site encourages civility and another encourages nastiness?

Along a similar idea, I once started work (and since abandoned it) on a social news site where the idea was to auto-partition all the users into Dunbar's Number-sized buckets based on their commenting style. You could still see everything if you wanted, but you'd be placed into a "swarm" of people whom you'd get to know better than general population. So assholes would end up in asshole swarms, spammers in spam swarms, etc.

What did it mean in practice to be in a swarm? What could you do with people in your swarm that you couldn't do with people in other swarms?

On another thread, I thought it might be a good idea to keep around who voted for what. You use a recommendations system (perhaps from the Netflix contest) to determine how much you will like other comments, and then filter based on that. This might result in something similar to swarms; the idea is that your "swarm," the group of people where you like their comments and you like theirs, is the only source of intelligent conversation.

We intended to make online communities (swarms) work more like real-life communities.

A user could belong to multiple swarms. People who don't feel like they belong in a swarm could leave (or be forcibly voted out by the group) and join another. When swarms get too big (above, say 150-200) they could splinter into smaller ones.

In practice, each swarm would have their own stories and comment threads. e.g. Swarm 'A' hates TechCrunch stories and always votes them down, Swarm 'B' feels that the people in Swarm 'A' are uncivil, Swarm 'C' just loves to make jokes about everything, Swarm 'D' is extremely priggish and has very strict rules about what types of stories should be posted.

A user could choose to experience the raw unfiltered site, or just stick to swarms where he or she mostly knows everyone else. We intended to use voting and tagging statistics to suggest swarms in which an unattached user might feel like they belong.

Dunbar's Number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) was the inspiration.

The first year or two on HN, when the community was smaller and tighter knit, I found that when I recognized other usernames, I tended to feel an emotional attachment to them. The userbase was smaller, and thus, easier to say, "Oh, it's nostrademons. I like him. I'll reply to his comment". I felt that familiarity facilitated a sense or cordiality and camaraderie in our discussions. I think that was largely a function of group size.

I've lost that sense of camaraderie here in the past year. I find myself contributing less to the discussions, and I certainly don't submit near as much as I used to. I still lurk a lot, but I don't recognize a lot of the current users and I have no sense of personal attachement to most people here aside from the friends I've made over the last couple of years here. I imagine it's the same with a lot of other users.

If users could somehow be herded or segmented into smaller groups, that the sense of familiarity, community, and camaraderie might be able to continue in the discussions while a site scales. I don't know if it's necessarily a function of what limits, permissions or abilities that would be placed on individuals within the smaller groups, however. In meat space, an individual's actions and interactions change dramatically depending on group size. I suspect that similar forces work online, too.

The question is, how do you segment the community into smaller groups or swarms? I actually think that this can be acheived using recommendations. I have a hypothesis that I want to test. My hypothesis is that if reddit had succeeded in their recommendation engine, there would not have been a need for Hacker News. Why? Because those of us early reddit readers who were interested in hacking and founding would have remained somewhat clustered together automatically via article recommendations. We wouldn't have gotten irritated at the trolls and left. We would still be reading and commenting together on similar articles. All the while, the site could grow, and the users that were heavily intersted in politics, religion/atheism, zombies, etc... would have been ushered together via common recommendations as well. I'm looking forward to testing this hypothesis with http://newsley.com if and when I can get enough users to start doing recommendations.

> when I recognized other usernames, I tended to feel an emotional attachment to them

I think this is the source of all politeness/nastiness (both here on HN and in real life). It's hard to be gratuitously rude to someone you know personally... it's hard to even be passive aggressive.

Now that HN is bigger, it is by default more anonymous. It is less a group of friends sharing links as it is a public forum. Where insulting someone used to be equivalent to saying it to their face, it's now more akin to heckling from the stands.

I too have been coming here less and less. I came to HN for the discussion... the links were only secondary to me. Often the best discussions came out of mediocre links. But now I feel like all I see is catfights between minor programming stars, people debating whether relational databases are really dead, and the latest scandal involving rackspace/twitter/zygna/facebook. All of that stuff is destructive. It's all just churning the muck of the internet... and more importantly, doesn't make you a better person for having read it.

We used to laugh whenever the front page would fill with Erlang articles. Even when things were 'that bad' ... they weren't really that bad because the discussion was still insightful. I'm really not trying to sound like one of those 'back in the good old days' people, but I'm starting to become skeptical about the value of coming here.

One thing I believe holds well is that nasty comments are often short. Smart assholes often go for clever comments that skirt the edge of useful and obnoxious.

So how about a karma-moderated length minimum. New commenters (less than ~300 karma, maybe) have to post several sentences which has some chance of disincentivizing quick, brutal snark.

Longer comments can still be nasty of course, but it's going to require a lot more involvement for the user while making them a bigger target for moderators.

Do you think there is some size threshold beyond which a site cannot remain thoughtful?

If you do, maybe "fight" partly means actively limiting the growth of the site.

I agree that it is definitely a nastiness problem, so if you were going to add one of these two types of flags, I'd recommend 'uncivil' over 'frivolous'

I think the right consequence for someone who accumulates too many uncivil flags is to have the server start to throttle their IP. This allows it to be a gradual, linear and temporary disincentive to poor behavior, rather than a binary response. Just dropping the connection is also de-escalating relative to alternatives like sending a message only to that user. I could certainly see people absolutely exploding when they see that they've been flagged as uncivil. Add a message on top of it, and things will definitely get out of hand at least some of the time. But if the connection starts to just get dropped, they maybe keep refreshing, maybe go somewhere else.

Instead of trying to solve the problem with more software, have you thought about trying a people approach?

I know there are multiple moderators around; maybe it would be worthwhile to say who they are - and then when someone sees a race to the right margin, they can step in and gently remind that the thread is getting out of hand. I think the problems we have here are that people care too much, I don't think that anyone intends to be nasty.

While some comment threads have gotten a little ugly; I still think this place is head and shoulders over just about everywhere for community - personally I'm thankful that you've put this place together, ugly threads and all.

It seems like HN is transitioning from a community to a culture, and that's always going to be painful. It's easy to notice the bad things going on, but there have been a ton of really interesting things going on as well, it's just not as easy to pick those out because while everyone knows when someone is being an asshole, not everyone thinks the same things are interesting.

It would be good to have hide/show thread buttons like on reddit. That way if you see a useless thread carrying on, you can just click [-] and move on to the next comment. This isn't a direct solution to the problem at hand, really, but I think it would help, as comment sections are getting longer and a bit harder to follow and sift for the good stuff.

Show/hide functionality would be awesome.

I actually strongly considered peeking at the html and implementing the necessary JavaScript myself - I wonder if a contribution of this type would be accepted?

Honestly, I think people don't realize that nastiness makes their comment less effective. Most people don't take you seriously if you insult them, even if the insult is followed by a valid point.

How about something like this.... Create a set of general rules to follow for making an effective/polite post. Things like "calling someone a name brings more attention to the insult than your point." When you have a dozen of these or so, put a random one next to the "reply" button. This way people are constantly reminded of how to create polite posts.

More moderation (sucks, I know :(). I've seen enough communities to know you cant really code round this sort of thing.

On the other hand I do think there are a minority of people using this more aggressive tone (or rather are causing it to spread). So that makes it a little easier to deal with - having a jerk flag is a good idea, then you could start to limit the site for those with a high jerk rating (i.e. longer cool off times for them, delays between their comments, when they submit a comment it asks them "are you sure you want to post this hint hint"

Democracy does not work. A random fluctuation in tone will be picked up by other users and the entire tone will move in that direction. Even the flagging would go the same way. You have to create a sort of elitist system (like wikipedia), where the flagging is controlled by the model citizens, and people who are not flagged for a while then become model citizens, further propagating the model citizen mode. This way, a large change in the demographic of the site would not change the demographics of the elite, and after a while, the elite would swing things back to go their way, as they have more power than the masses.

Another thought if you're still thinking about this and monitoring this discussion - give people a limited number of "show stopper" flags intended to draw the attention of moderators. They only get say 1 or 2 over the course of a month - much like dating sites to indicate importance (e.g. plentyoffish with their 2 roses).

These could be used either to reward or punish depending on how they're designed but people would use them sparingly if they're given after a certain criteria is reached (e.g. age of account, karma points, etc.). The purpose would be to cut down the noise that moderators/you have to deal with. Thus there could even be karma points and a red flag/green flag score.

The red flags might only be visible when you click in to their profile for example so as not to draw attention to their presumably highly offensive postings while the green flags are visible highlighting extraordinary comments.

PS I hope you figure out a solution to this as I'm sure I'm not the only one who was alarmed by your comment "I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here anymore."

Maybe we can also get a nice flag for posts tediously and semi-hysterically grinding the same political axe over and over, and another for supposed discussions of science that, you know, don't actually contain any science.

Whatever. Flagged or not, one doubts the EchoChamber of Commerce News crew on what used to be "Hacker News" will do much more than upvote this kind of behavior.

After all, intellectual honesty is hardly as important as the bottom line.

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