P.S. Yes, I'm aware of the irony in that I'm commenting on a comment-centric site about how much I hate comments. Let's just say HN is the least cesspoolish place I've found so far.
Two useful links on the subject are http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html and http://www.meatballwiki.org/wiki/
pg is already more than capricious enough already, I shudder to think of how ridiculous things would get around here if he started taking lessons from the dark master.
A choice summary quote: "i would never never ever hire tnh as a mod ever -- an inquisitor, maybe, a chief of secret police, certainly, but a mod, no!"
They take great pains to avoid banning people (excepting spammers, who get their signup fee refunded!), though sometimes they dole out timeouts. The community policing means that the shitty users tend to disable their own accounts.
pg takes the opposite approach, applying a single assholish technical approach to all problems: hellbanning for everyone!
But I agree that Metafilter handles moderation better than HN. The way voting is here, it seems like it mostly depends on the time of day as to whether a comment of mine gets -4 or +30. (Usually this works out for me pretty well... but I can't help feeling dirty when I write something that gets upmodded that high.)
But if you want a like-minded small community it's a tradeoff that's necessary.
Why do you feel dirty though?
"Benign dictatorship" works. Anything short of it is asking to be rules-lawyered to death by trolls and griefers.
Contrast this with Engadget, who can enforce discussion that aligns with whatever site policies they choose to adapt. Or you can take this even further, like on my blog, where openness means nothing and I can just delete anything that's not a question or an anecdote that adds to what I've written.
In an open discussion forum, your biggest problem will be always be open discussion.
"nice article I wrote one like it at http://buyviagra-cheap.example.org
and "HOW TO INSTALL THIS???!!!!!?!!! IT DOES NOT WORK!??"
Invite readers in, tempt them with an interesting article and then leave them in some internet shady backstreet area. It doesn't need free speech, delete the tripe, edit the rest mercilessly (but note that they have been 'edited').
> It doesn't need free speech, delete the tripe,
> edit the rest mercilessly (but note that they
> have been 'edited').
Of course, I always end up missing some, so I tend to go through every few weeks and prune those that I missed. What we really need is gmail-esque spam filtering in disqus.
Comments close after a period of time, so it shouldn't scale temporally, comments for a large site with lots of authors, well, they have lots of authors.
If you want commentors to be able to suggest corrections indefinitely, then either a wiki is a more suitable medium, or an "email me" link. Depending on what you want to achieve - a communally edited document or a personal reply.
As far as newspaper sites go, they go beyond 'comments'; hundreds of comments is in the realm of a forum and deserves some kind of moderators and so on.
You want to publish to the world and have the world able to reply to you while you aren't paying attention? That's not going to work. If you want to publish to the world and have the world reply to each other, well that's what people have their own blogs for, surely; why would you want to host that indefinitely?
And if you are going to have an abandoned corner of the internet where nobody 'in authority' checks what happens, then you need to rely on the passerby, hopefully give them some tools to step in and help, e.g. several downvotes over several days from different sources = autodelete. I doubt that's a solution; if you could automatically tell who to trust in the first place you wouldn't let the spammy comments be submitted.
4chan also implemented Robot 9000 on one of their boards: http://boards.4chan.org/r9k/
A site with high-quality comments can increase the value of the existing content exponentially, but because there is a more removed connection to revenue generation it seems like the majority of comment sections (HN excluded, of course) are thrown in as an afterthought.
Bit tangential, but has anyone (e.g., start-up) solved the problem of massive discussions? Anything over a hundred or two hundred comments becomes unmanageable in a hurry. Some of the larger sites (e.g., Huff Post) routinely have 2000-comment threads that would take days to plow through.
Is there a solution that combines karma, upvotes as a means of identifying the 'cream' as well as grouping of sub-discussions and points-counterpoints? I haven't seen any solution take a serious shot at a way of grouping sub-arguments and discussions.
The level of comments on the typical news article here in Australia is embarrassingly bad. Any discussion quickly becomes a confusing read without threading and a complete waste of time without persistent identities or moderation. Disqus has taken a crack at the basics, but is it much better for discussions over, say, 500 posts?
Here are her (very cogent) thoughts on how to moderate massive discussions:
Back in the day slashdot was great for quality comments. Then they grew and added a karma system which... didn't really help, just buried the dreck for a time. Now it's mostly a mess.
Similarly, Engadget used to be alright, then they grew and added the voting system... etc.
Frankly, what works for smaller sites doesn't scale. At their visibility, Engadget should either go comment-less or do subscriptions for early-access and comments. Anonymous comments just don't provide enough value with that much noise.
I get to page 5 or 6 on reddit, just because I get bored, and read fairly fast...
15 minutes a month of moderation per person seems to be sustainable/scalable, because it's been working for ages and I have noticed no real change in Slashdot's +5 comment quality.
Where that fails with HN is that we have infinite mod points all the time, which:
- Encourages point inflation as the community grows.
- Discourages people from taking moderation seriously as if it was a big deal you wouldn't be able to do it all the time.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I really like the HN system whereby upvotes are free, but downvotes are restricted. (Well, I assume that's the way it is --at least, it's easy for me to see how to do one, but not the other.)
This makes it easy for me to give a post a tiny bump up, so that I don't think much of it, but emphasises the cost of giving it the equivalent tiny bump down; and isn't that a good attitude to instill in a commenting community? Certainly I think the culture here is notably friendlier than just about anywhere public-facing site (LtU (http://lambdatheultimate.org) being perhaps a notable exception).
EDIT: I saw a mention of Metafilter elsewhere. I forgot it as an example of another site with a novel approach to the commenting problem; namely, make commenting not free by imposing a small, one-time cost.
This tends to be perception only. I'd agree with @sjs382, a +3 browser here and I was surprised at the improvement in discussion from what I remembered. #2774
I am also not able to access old comments which if intentional doesn't seem to be a good move (imho).