If anyone has any more general suggestions for solving the nastiness problem, besides these new types of flag, I'm all ears.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having a way to offer some means of adjustment would help distinguish between the accidental and willful nastiness.
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?
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you do, maybe "fight" partly means actively limiting the growth of the site.
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.