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Comment by andrewbinstock | Hacker News Reader

When I was the editor of Dr. Dobb's, we were very concerned about how to create a lively discussion forum that was free from jerks and unpleasant people. Ultimately, we settled on two components: treat everyone respectfully even those who seemed to be trolling, and delete all insulting posts. This largely worked. Similar elements seem to work here on HN too. That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests that the problem exists primarily b/c sites are willing to put up with bad behavior.

View on HN

I'm glad to hear that an experienced editor sees HN that way, and also that you see evidence of a repeatable approach. Those are good signs.

As I'm sure you know, it's a more complex problem than just being willing or unwilling to put up with bad behavior. There are costs to addressing it—quite a few, it turns out, no matter what approach one takes.

Our plan is to move HN toward more community self-regulation. Each step we've taken that way—e.g. when we added vouching for dead comments—has worked well. I doubt the community can become completely autonomous (though a mod can dream), but we're pretty sure it can go further in that direction, especially if we do a good job of specifying what kind of site HN is, and isn't, supposed to be.

You guys do a great job with HN moderation and I've always been curious what ratio of mods:numComments is sustainable and still keep quality high and mods not burned out - do you think HN is a good datapoint or just special?

More mods doesn't necessarily mean more moderation, or the ability to moderate more content. From what I've seen it just means the moderation happens quicker and the mods pay less attention because "someone else will pick it up".

This does kind of make sense; excepting some special moderation view that allocates posts directly to each mod, they're all viewing the forum in the same way, posts bumped to the top or sinking to the bottom, so things will get the same amount of attention or outrage either way. Speaking again from experience, it's all dependent on how long that fire's burning before a mod sees it. A crappy comment deleted quickly causes little fuss, a crappy comment left to fester for a couple hours then deleted will still have the aftermath hanging over it. Even if the entire thread is purged, it still exists in the memories of users and effects the overall tone/behavioural standard of the forum.

Not sure I understand the question. Can you rephrase?

It sounded like there were two questions:

1) What is the right number of moderators per comment for HN

2) Do you think that number would generalize to other forums.

In that case the answers are I don't know. We don't have many moderators, and I mostly think it would be a mistake to try to solve HN's problems by adding more official moderation.

IMO the biggest challenge of self-moderating communities is avoiding the echo chamber effect: ideas surviving and spreading due to their popularity, rather than their merit.

I'm curious if you agree that this is a problem, and what your plans are to address it, if you do.

I think you're really overestimating the relevance of moderation on that, in lieu of, (for example,) the education level, ages, and number of people and their investments in the community.

Communities run in a tight feedback loop with their populations; when a community goes in any direction, some people who don't like it will leave (and some outsiders who observe it may refuse to join), which pushes a community further into that direction. People within the community like HN are all self-selected, so the education level, ages, etc. depends strongly on the direction the community is going.

Indeed, one need look no further than Slashdot to see this in action. 100% community moderation produced a comment section that is all confirmation and no information.

You need to moderate based only on civility. And emphatically NOT content (which slashdot does).

Say something completely wrong, but you are polite about it? No problem, it stays up.

Say something right, but insult those who disagree? Take it down, even if it's right and the others wrong.

That's a fundamental point and one we can do more to clarify. It's in everyone's interest not to discredit their own argument by going about it uncivilly.

I wonder how good or useful a civility algorithm might be in this case? Aren't sentiment analysis tools pretty good now? Finding examples of rude and uncivil comments on the Internet certainly won't be a problem.

I agree that it's a problem, one HN already has. I doubt we can solve it. We can maybe mitigate it, or at least not make it worse.

One tactic for not making it worse is to introduce changes slowly and with lots of time to assess the effect of each change. We're also willing to get procrustean, if we have to, about lopping off any changes that have bad effects. We've done that twice that I can think of.

Any new form of community moderation will come with a mechanism for overseeing it. For example, when we added vouching for users to rescue dead comments, we also added a review mechanism for moderators to catch vouching being abused—e.g. dead comments being rescued when they ought to stay dead because they violate the site guidelines. This combination, which was inspired by the flagging mechanism, turns out to work well. HN's userbase has vastly more capacity to sift through comments than moderators do, and makes good decisions most of the time. Meanwhile it's orders of magnitude less work for moderators to review vouches and flags than to read all the comments directly, and doing so lets us correct the community decisions that don't align with the site guidelines. Such an approach benefits from the strengths of both sides, users and moderators.

I joke that our goal is to turn HN into a pyramid scheme such that the community does all the work and we can just monitor things from time to time, but the real joke is that a 'pyramid scheme' in this case would amount to the holy grail of a self-regulating system. In my wildest dreams it would work à la the Tao Te Ching and simply run itself with the occasional tweak. But I don't expect to get off that easily.

The kind of community moderation we want has to do with protecting the values of the site—intellectual curiosity and civility—rather than particular content people post or views they hold. If you were to argue that those things can't completely be separated, I wouldn't disagree. But I do think we can influence it by how we design the software, and more importantly by how we clarify what the values of the site are. HN is getting to the point where we need a new round of specification about what the site is and what it is not. That's coming soon.

How on earth do you propose to separate merit from popularity?

Besides, there's also the question of "for whom is this a good idea?" especially in the context of things like Uber and SF property values discussions. It matters which side of the proposition you're on.

Are you really arguing that there are no objective standards by which we can judge rationality?

To the extent that there are, that would really limit the scope of discussion. There's no objective morality and no objective politics. Even if we try to limit discussion to "facts", things fall apart fairly rapidly once we start talking stochastic events and statistical morality.

Rationality can tell us about likely means to achieve goals and give a probability distribution of outcomes. It can't tell you what to want, what is right, or what to risk.

>There's no objective morality and no objective politics.

Really? The majority of academic philosophers disagree with you, and they have very good arguments for moral realism.

One thing to think about: it's not possible to affirm objective standards of rationality and deny objective standards of morality at the same time without being inconsistent, since both epistemology and ethics deal with normative statements (what one ought to do), not fact statements.

Really? I wasn't aware that morality was a solved problem! Now that we have the one true moral code, why aren't copies being distributed everywhere?

The truth of moral realism is a meta-ethical fact that doesn't preclude debate and experimentation regarding what the Good actually is. Just like how the existence of an objective material reality is a fact assumed by science without precluding scientific debate and experimentation regarding the nature of that reality.

Asserting the existence of moral realism without proving a specific moral reality is acceptable.

The closest thing I can think of in computing theory would be that the statement "A perfect player playing Go will never lose when going first" is obviously accepted as true, despite the fact that creating a perfect Go player is an open problem.

i'm curious: what are some of the major costs of addressing it that you referred to?

It's hard and not always very gratifying work, which means you either have to pay someone to do it (as YC does with HN) or rely on volunteers who will extract other compensation from the system.

Then there are many psychological costs. I'll list three. Often the people whose comments are being moderated do not feel that their comments are bad. They can become harsh, which can push your buttons. With the law of large numbers, any button you have will eventually get pushed sometimes, and when that happens it doesn't feel like a mere statistical process that's afflicting you. It feels more like an evil genius or demon that has perfect knowledge of how to drive you crazy. So you literally can feel driven crazy every day. (Edit: more on 'demons' here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....)

Second, an even harder problem is that people want explanations for why their comments are being moderated. It's hard to provide precise explanations in every case. When you get it right, it's helpful—at least to the general audience, and often to the commenter too—but it takes a ton of energy to get right because there is endless variation and nuance in these things, and the cost of being even a little wrong is high: it causes hurt feelings and a general sense of injustice. On the other hand, if you don't provide explanations, people feel that you're being arrogant and heavy-handed.

Third, every mistake you make will be jumped on by lots of people. Their intentions are largely benign, but it's hard to remember that when your mistake is being jumped on. I could continue!

There are different strategies you can take to this, but they all involve tradeoffs. When PG was moderating HN he relied on software to do as much as possible and did the human part with a minimum of (i.e. usually no) explanation. That led to complaints about lack of transparency and so on, but given that he was both building YC and raising small children at the time, there wasn't an alternative. By the time he handed HN over, the community had reached the point of needing a different approach. But no matter what approach one takes, there are these sorts of costs. I think the trick for keeping going is to design the system to have rewards as well as costs, but that's a different conversation.

(Edit from when I ran across this years later: from a 2020 perspective I would say that of the three psychological costs, #2 is the hardest because it consumes by far the most energy. #1 and #3 can be worked on internally, but #2 requires a lot of careful external communication, often under high-pressure conditions. I'm still thinking about what can alleviate that load. It's a bit of a double bind, because if you answer every objection and protest, it's draining—actually it's physically impossible—but if you don't answer, then people will imagine their own answer, invariably a hurtful one, and go away firmly believing it and feeling aggrieved, which is a bad outcome in its own right and often comes back to bite you later.)

Thank you for doing a great job dang. When you're doing your job right, it becomes invisible. I for one, tend to forget that the great community I enjoy here doesn't just happen all by itself.

I can often be an asshole on Reddit. But I never am here because HN is so clean and well kept. The signal to noise ratio is fantastic and I'll be damned if I'm going to be the one to lessen it.

Kind of amazing to me how it works that way: once there's graffiti on the wall, suddenly the perception is that it's okay to put graffiti on the wall.

Plays nicely into the Broken Window Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

Thank you for sharing. That's exactly what I was trying to convey, without knowing the term.

How are you measuring success? I feel that the quality of HN has declined a lot over the last year or two; we see a lot more one-liners and "couldn't resist" comments, and less technical content. (I think the caustic attitude of old HN helped; people who made jokes used to be shot down very quickly, whereas now people try to be nice about it). I now consciously avoid the site while America is awake.

> How are you measuring success?

Being a marketing platform, I would imagine something like the maximum number of people within their target audience engaging.

And two: not having facts/discussions which tarnish their company's image on the platform.

> I now consciously avoid the site while America is awake.

Is this one of those troll comments to which we should respond by saying something nice? Because if it were an American making a similar comment in reverse, then it would be buried as jingoistic/xenaphobic/racist/etc.

You look great today.

Serious answer: Cultural differences DO exist. I come from a place where, confusingly, passive-agressiveness is preferred over direct confrontation, AND sarcasm is used very seldomly and only very obviously.

Both of these things put me on edge with americans who, on average, despise passive aggressiveness and use sarcasm as if it were the salt of conversation. The result is that i have to think in a completely different mindset to talk to US people, to avoid misunderstanding them or having them be disgusted by the way i talk.

I don't see how an American wanting to avoid comments from another continent would make them afraid of a warrior princess.

On a more serious note, I too have noticed a shift in the comments on this site; I really enjoyed the fact that HN was a more "serious" place for sober discussion, where most comments were useful (larger signal-to-noise ratio). This culture made me reconcider my own comments on a few occasions.

EDIT: Not saying that this is a huge problem - just a development I don't enjoy.

I suspect, though I don't know, that the difference I perceive is more a factor of what kind of moderation happens in which timezones than a difference in regular users.

One liners can be informative.

> That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests that the problem exists primarily b/c sites are willing to put up with bad behavior.

I think there's a little more at play, here. Look at the two subreddits /r/askhistorians and /r/askreddit, which vary about as much as possible in moderation patterns and resulting quality: /r/askhistorians is possibly the best moderated forum on the internet, allowing only high quality top-level comments from a historiographical perspective. OTOH /r/AskReddit is a cesspool of bigotry, puns, and reddit memes so tired they might as well be generated stochastically.

However, looking at what differentiates them, it's entirely culture. It's not that the moderators on /r/AskReddit are bad or aren't interested in moderation, they are simply trying to cultivate a much less formal discussion. Similarly, I think you'll see higher rates of success wrt moderation on focused, interest-driven discussion than on "free-for-all" forums where one can e.g. successfully start a blessed conversation with the intent to troll the forum itself.

For an example, people arguing for neo-nazi type politics on HN (or Dr. Dobbs) might not be tolerated for obvious reasons. But they're also not likely to comment in either place. On an article discussing controversy affecting the general public, you're going to have an extremely difficult time finding a line between civil and uncivil discussion—the normal for the context is probably not civil by most peoples' standards, but restricting the conversation would look a whole lot like trying to shape it.

Tl;dr every community has its own needs and expectations; I don't think there is a moderation panacea without creating isolated communities that self-select towards the conversation they want to have.

Thoughts?

I keep seeing deleted comments on /r/askhistorians though.

Community is so big that they probably get new users all the time that they don't know the rule.

Oh yea, the most popular posts are known as "comment graveyards" because they're cross posted to other reddits. But believe it or not, that's a sign that the moderation is working well. It's the less popular posts that slip past the front page before being replied to that slip in quality—those posts will often have sub-standard replies that never get the moderation they deserve.

> they don't know the rule.

I doubt it. I've seen reddit mods complain about being harassed across multiple social media sites, sent death threats and so on, not least by people professing to be affronted by their offenses against "free speech". I would be very surprised if a goodly number of deleted comments aren't people deliberately posting off-topic.

There are ways to look at a number of deleted comments in those threads, and very few if any seem to be deliberate attempts at community sabotage.

On the contrary, most end up being made by people feeling compelled to share their opinion, or some personal anecdote in reaction to a question, which would be completely fine in almost every other subreddit.

On that subreddit in particular, it's like 10% shitty answers referencing pop history (e.g. Jared Diamond, Howard Zinn), 80% shitty answers with no basis (e.g. "jefferson smoked weed"), 10% typical reddit shitposting (bigotry, holocaust denial, conspiracies, memes, moderator complaints).

I suspect the answer is something along the lines of:

The subject matter and associated demographics of some sites is such that, with appropriate moderation systems and commitment to consistently dealing with bad (or at least the worst) behavior, discussion forums can maintain a reasonable signal to noise ratio. The worst offenders usually get bored and go away after being banned enough times.

But a site that deals primarily with political topics? Even on HN, the level of discourse is far lower than with more fact-based technical topics. And even politically-oriented blogs and sites that I consider to have somewhat readable comments, are far more "raucous" than would be tolerated here.

And as for comments on controversial topics on truly mainstream sites like your local newspaper? That's pretty much a lost cause. There's so little signal to start with.

Yeah, the topic point is a good one here. Some stuff (like the aforementioned politics, religion, controversial issues, anything 'illegal') tend towards lower quality discourse partly due to the demographics that use said sites.

Meanwhile, something fairly benign or less popular will tend to draw a much more civil audience.

That the efficacy of this approach is repeatable suggests that the problem exists primarily b/c sites are willing to put up with bad behavior.

Many people, even people running discussion forums with years of experience, simply do not know how to fix it and often believe it cannot be fixed. It is also common for them to "put out the fire with gasoline." On an email list, I used to say "fighting against the fighting is still fighting." Many people do not know how to address bad behavior that doesn't involve some form of fighting, punishment, etc and this tends to deepen the problem rather than resolve it.

You may have figured it out and HN may be doing pretty well with it, but that is not evidence that the problem continues elsewhere merely because people are willing to put up with it. It is far more complicated than that. One of the problems is that absence of a problem does not, by itself, point to effectiveness of a particular approach. In fact, what you will often see is that outsiders will assume you were merely lucky to not have had X thing occur rather than that you did something elegant to kill the problem without overt drama. The lack of overt drama gets read by most people as evidence of lack of a problem, not smoothness in handling it.

Aka have the patience of a saint?

No, not really. I am not a patient person and I am pretty good at certain aspects of this. If you know that doing X will actually make things worse and suck up more of your time and energy than foregoing X, it really does not take patience to sigh deeply at your computer screen and choose to pass on the option of shooting yourself in the foot.

Knowledge is power. Having it clear in your mind that certain things simply are not a path forward has nothing to do with patience and everything to do with having the right mental models, knowledge and education.

On the other hand, I am also medically handicapped, so sometimes I fall on my face anyway. But when I get it right, it has nothing at all to do with patience because I didn't get that gene.

Edit: Let me put that another way: Impatience is why I don't do certain things. If I know what a painful timesuck it is, impatience is my motivator for just not going there.

>> Many people do not know how to address bad behavior that doesn't involve some form of fighting, punishment, etc and this tends to deepen the problem rather than resolve it.

While I would agree with this, I would add that banning and punishing people only makes them try harder to continue to be the thorn in your side and make every else just that much more miserable.

Multiple accounts, using proxies, and other means to cloak your IP address then leads to spending untold hours trying to track this people down and block them instead of actually doing moderation and even site improvements.

It's a zero sum game in the end.

source: ran several BBS's in the late 90's early aughts.

Yes. Technical tools can be useful, but technical solutions do not solve social problems. Social problems require social solutions, something technically oriented people who run online communities sometimes seem to just not get.

Thank you for adding that info.

A few people will do this. Most people won't, in my experience, especially if you use hellbanning. I've seen HN accounts full of rude comments that have been hellbanned for years.

Is that a different term for "shadow banning"? I only recently came to know this while reading more about moderation techniques.

Apparently people will be allowed to say whatever they want but nobody will see it? I wasn't aware HN had this.

Check your profile settings. There should be one called "Showdead." Turn it to "yes."

If it is already at "yes," then you may have just not noticed because it looks similar to when someone's comment has been flagged to death or downvoted into the negatives.

I think it means the same thing as shadow banning. We have largely phased that out, except for spammers and serial trolls. For the most part we tell people that we banned them by posting a reply to one of their comments, and when they seem rehabilitable (I suppose that's not a word?) we invite them to email hn@ycombinator.com if they want to be unbanned.

Does the automatic shadow ban when you reach super negative karma not happen anymore?

It does still happen, because trolls.

However, vouching allows the community to rescue legit dead comments, and we review all the vouches. That means that if an account has negative karma (perhaps because of a faux pas early in its history), but has been posting good comments since then, we'll eventually see it. When we do, we use an internal feature code-named 'redemption' to put its karma back to 1 and restore any remaining dead comments.

I also think WRT to Dr. Dobb's is that the tone of the publication was thoughtful and did not invite controversy.

I think half of the reason why HN has succeeded to a degree has to do with the niche subject matter. This approach doesn't work on more general forums such as the large subreddits or twitter.

I don't think that's true. HN is not about some specific subjects.

We discussed everything from the Iraqi war to brexit to programming languages, etc.

While true, I think it has more to do with the way the relative niche-ness of HN shapes the community. The average person who comments on an Iraq war thread in HN is not selected from the same sample as the average person who comments on an Iraq war thread across all fora. HN consists of enough niche topics that the average person doesn't want to hang out here and make an account just to jump in on random Iraq war or Brexit threads (the current frontpage has about 25/30 tech-focused topics, many of which are beyond esoteric for most people). This shapes the community in a way that affects the make-up of the commenters on even such politically-charged threads.

Right. And if there is a thread on the Iraq War or Brexit, I'll pretty much guarantee that it's going to be heavily weighted with arguments and comments--mostly reflecting the talking points of a particular political perspective--that have been made a thousand times before. Plus a good smattering of "F so-and-so."

I agree with your conclusion, but the common thread I see is more the type of person than the subject matter. I don't mean that HN's audience is homogenous across some simple metric, but even among its vastly different members I see a shared respect of logical reasoning and evidence-based argument. That, and just generally smart people, are the hallmarks of the culture here for me (at least the positive part of it).

Right, and the subject matter (at least at the outset) has a large influence on the culture that develops. Challenging subject matter tends to attract people who share those traits.

Niche subject matter is a barrier of entry allowing only a specific subset/types of person in. To be precise a certain type of personality self-selects to find a site like HN.

That fact alone makes a significant impact on moderation.

> delete all insulting posts

This would be ok on HN. I'd rather that than people downvoting because they disagree or because you made an honest mistake. It wounds me every time I get a downvote, and often I just logout and create a new user, so that I don't feel marred by being associated with a past comment that someone didn't like. I had a serious amount of karma about 9 years ago and probably should've just gotten over it, but I said a few things I believed at the time, got seriously embarrassed when others disagreed, and then just started quitting and creating new users, and have been doing it ever since. I'm not proud of it. Really- I'd much rather everything just be anonymous. That would be easier.

I also disagree with the rules saying that you can't frame something as "I know I'll get downvotes but..."- really, I don't understand why it matters. I think flagging offensive or spam comments really should be the only control necessary. I know that being a moderator is tough, but the community should be welcoming to all sorts of ideas and comments. I'm not a troll.

I agree with you. HN should get rid of the downvotes. They don't really serve a useful purpose. It just adds needless friction and anxiety, puts a certain amount of negativity at the center of the discussion, and reinforces a certain level of groupthink. If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on. Downvotes also encourage some pointless noise in the conversation involving the downvotes themselves.

I could see keeping the upvotes as a way of helping to keep things positive (pun probably intended), but I'm not attached to them.

Although I agree with this point, I wonder if the removal of downvotes would alter the usage of 'flag' by a measurable amount, and flag be used by some as a proxy for when they would have used a downvote instead.

My guess is that the downvote system is an intentional encouragement of laziness in order to drown unpopular comments for whatever reason (sometimes valid such as noise, sometimes to intentionally suppress challenging viewpoints) while avoiding the heavy burden of moderation.

Just like Reddit's system, it is heavily flawed and easily gamed, as seen pretty much all the time here.

Having used things like Facebook, however, I don't think a single upvote is a better system; a bad post from somewhere or someone with enough momentum gets enough upvotes to perhaps go viral — even if completely factually incorrect. You need the -1 to balance it out, sometimes.

I don't tend to downvote if I disagree (and I'd argue, I think, that one shouldn't — if you disagree, comment); I typically only downvote if the post is extremely factually incorrect, not adding to the discussion (for example, repeating an earlier point or asking a question that is answered in an ancestor comment — i.e., not reading), or is rude. (I reserve flag for extremely bad posts — and often HN has beaten me to it.)

Not saying a +1/-1 system like Reddit or HN is perfect, nor is it the only alternative to a just-+1 system. One could imagine, for example, giving experts in various topic areas more sway in their vote, if you knew the topic of a given article (they should know what they're talking about); but that could just as easily backfire if a newcomer has a completely valid — if unconventional — idea.

> it is heavily flawed and easily gamed, as seen pretty much all the time here

I don't have that impression, and would be interested to see examples of HN's mechanisms being "easily gamed".

I think this is what dang means when he talks about building the technology to make the site YC wants. Users will use the features to get the results they want, often against the intentions of the site creators. reddit and the ongoing battle against 'downvote isn't for disagreement' in every sub is a good example of this. What mods want it used for is different from what users want to use it for, and obviously the users win.

Taking away the downvote button might seem like it would fix the problem, but as you point out, it would probably just shift the site behavior so that people use different features (flagging) to achieve the same result.

Is there a consensus on when to downvote? There are now quite a few people with enough karma to downvote, but from what I've seen there seems to be no clear guideline on when it's appropriate.

Should you downvote factual errors? Should you downvote hateful comments that don't contribute to the discussion? Should you downvote comments you don't agree with? Should you downvote for bad English? Should you downvote a comment like this one which is completely meta and not anymore relevant to the original post?

You need a certain level of karma to even give downvotes, so maybe the assumption is that people at “that level” should already know to how to use them.

I have the karma, but I'm not quite sure how downvotes should be used. For this reason, I almost never use them. A grand total of one of my own comments has received enough downvotes to get a total negative score, and I can understand why, but it's not enough for me to build a cohesive understanding on what the community means when it downvotes.

I don't know if there's a consensus, but I doubt it.

One way to think about downvotes is to keep them symmetric with upvotes. When I first came to HN, I expected downvotes to be asymmetrically reserved for people being wildly factually incorrect, or wildly negative. But, maybe if you upvote something on a whim because you lightly agree with it, it should be equally acceptable to downvote something because you lightly disagree with it. I don't do that, but I don't have any compelling reasons not to, aside from I don't like getting downvoted, it still feels more serious than upvotes.

When do you upvote things? I upvote for a number of different reasons including but not limited to when someone says something funny, contributes something valuable or different than others, posts data or relevant links worth bookmarking, says something that I agree with, shows a high level of nerdery and/or expertise in a weird subject matter, has a great attitude or meaningfully positive spin on something, etc. And as long as it's tastefully done, I'll even upvote the occasional correction or sarcastic comment.

I also tend to upvote people who engage with me, and respond to things I've said. Lately, it has been especially important for me personally to upvote people who are being critical or disagreeing with me, even if they're pushing my buttons. If my goal is for the conversation I start to bubble upward, then upvoting the thread is better than downvoting.

So, I'm only one person and I don't even have a consensus myself about when to upvote. ;) I don't personally expect consensus on when to downvote, other than a general wish that people use it judiciously - and I have to say that by and large, that is what I see going on. It's uncommon that I see or experience unfair or unreasonable downvoting.

> You need a certain level of karma to even give downvotes, so maybe the assumption is that people at "that level" should already know to how to use them.

I can only speak from my own experience and say that my ideas about how to vote changed between when I first started here and when I finally earned the ability to downvote. Not having the ability to downvote for a while did help me learn how to say more things that contributed rather than get stuck in the eddies of Internet arguments. If I'd had the ability to downvote from day 1, I would have used it a lot. Since I didn't have it, by the time I got there, I now don't see the need to use it, and so I don't.

> If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on.

That depends on how wrong they are. There's plenty of fringe lunacy that's wrong but you could spend all your life uselessly rebutting. Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.

In this context, downvote is basically an eyeroll.

> Everything from chemtrails to anarchocapitalism.

Here we see one problem with downvoting lunacy: some people notice it where it doesn't exist, and others fail to see it where it does.

I'm not ancap myself, but I think the movement deserves respect; for example, I've not read The Machinery of Freedom, but I've heard good things about it, and I don't think you can dismiss it as fringe lunacy.

Chemtrails, though? Obviously dumb.

"Lunacy" more as a modality of discussion than a property of the ideas themselves. Usually involving taking the ideas as dogma and failing to think about practical application or relevance to the particular subject under discussion.

Another example: Marx wrote a lot of reasonable analysis of the mid-19th-century economic condition (and some bad analysis). Marxists tend to be tremendously irritating write-only dogmatists. It doesn't have to be that way. The right has a similar bunch of people who are Friedman dogmatists.

> If someone's factually wrong, a response pointing out the errors is far more effective than a downvote, and encourages further discussion. If something is offensive, flag the comment and move on.

I try to downvote poor conversation norms: a common one is replying to an argument that someone didn't make. (Especially when it begins "oh, so you think...") I'd be okay with flagging such things if we agreed that that was an acceptable thing to flag for. In the meantime, I think it's good to downvote such things.

Plus, it seems arrogant to say, but some people are simply clueless. Pointing out their errors is exhausting, and doesn't make them less clueless. They're not actually trolls, but they might as well be. I'm not sure about flagging such people, but I'm okay with downvoting them.

> I'm not sure about flagging such people, but I'm okay with downvoting them.

It may save your time, but a downvote doesn't explain why you think someone is clueless. Even link a link to something they could read to enlighten them to your point of thinking or a book title might be adequate in making your argument and would take maybe 30 seconds more, at most.

I've lurked on this site for maybe 4 years and only recently created an account. I find that I'm okay with downvotes on particular comments, but what kills me is having my score right there at the top of the page all the time. Just reminding me of how well I'm doing. It makes it harder to be sanguine about paying the price for an unpopular comment.

That said, getting past valuing fake internet points is a great exercise. I use reddit a fair amount and some of the subs I'm on are far more capricious than HN with the downvotes, often using it as an echo chamber reinforcement tool. I consider it good to acclimate yourself to paying the price for voicing unpopular opinions (without being a jerk obviously).

Sometimes one's comments have trollish effects even though one wasn't intentionally trolling. It took me years to notice this in my own case, and when I did see it, it fundamentally changed my approach. Effects matter more than intent.

Interesting. Can you provide an example?

I'd be embarrassed to provide one of mine and it would be unfair to pick on somebody else's.

I do not care to lose karma because of my strong opinion on a subject (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12055486). I am more annoyed when I lose karma trying to give more matter of thought (for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11723170 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11713948). This may be linked with my poor English level, but I do not really understand.

> It wounds me every time I get a downvote

I love that you said this out loud because it's candid and vulnerable. I feel the same way, and spend disproportionate amounts of time worrying and feeling insecure about down votes, when I hardly even think about up votes. Especially if I really truly try to contribute something and use a positive tone and get downvoted without any visible disagreement or explanation.

I have yet to cast a down vote because of this - I noticed how much it affected me inexplicably, and I don't want to pass that around, even if most people are impervious to it. I don't think I'm somehow being virtuous by not down voting -- some ugly comments I'm delighted to see being downvoted. But I'm not sure down votes are a necessary part of the system since things percolate to the top with up votes.

Maybe getting people to downvote less was the intent of the down vote karma threshold. Maybe it's working really well, I don't know. But that also makes receiving down votes sting just a tiny bit more.

What's funny about this to me is that it's meaningless. Why do I even care about karma? I have no idea. Once you have down vote power, what does it earn? Not much.

> I'd much rather everything just be anonymous. That would be easier.

I'd like to hear more about this. My working assumption has long been that anonymity makes bad behavior worse and more frequent overall, both comments and downvotes. Is it because you'd care less about your own profile & karma, or because you've seen anonymity produce more civility, or something else?

>When I was the editor of Dr. Dobb's, we were very concerned about how to create a lively discussion forum that was free from jerks and unpleasant people.

I think this seminal essay is required reading on such matters: http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...

Thanks; I just re-read that and it seems to me that HN is mostly pretty well aligned with what he's saying. But let me phrase that as a question: what's the most important insight in the essay that HN does not currently line up well with?

As a long time lurker, but a brand new user, I think my one criticism, as it relates to the article, would be that HN doesn't facilitate conversations as well as I would like. Or I'm using the site wrong.

So far as I can tell, there is no way for me to know when a person has responded to a comment of mine other than keeping my account page opening and refreshing to see if anyone has posted a response to me. Some means of being told, hey, someone posted a response to your comment 'X' would be nice.

That and there's a dearth of sex talk. Get us more of that you delicious beast.

> So far as I can tell, there is no way for me to know when a person has responded to a comment of mine other than keeping my account page opening and refreshing to see if anyone has posted a response to me. Some means of being told, hey, someone posted a response to your comment 'X' would be nice.

It used to be that you could put a token for an YC-backed messaging startup, but I think the startup died since you can no longer do so. In the meantime, bunch of HN notification services were created. I currently use HN Replies[0], which sends me an e-mail every time someone responds to my comment.

I agree this is a very important feature if you want to facilitate actual conversations; otherwhise, it's hard to track discussions that started more than a day ago. I've noticed a significant positive change in the way I interact with HN since I started using third-party e-mail notifications - I'm more likely to participate in a comment thread over several days, and I now consider it good manners to respond to replies that try to engage me in further conversations.

So, tl;dr - 'dang, I strongly second the "comment notifications" idea!

[0] - http://www.hnreplies.com/

Thanks for the tip off on that, it looks like a decent work around for what I'm looking for. Except that I hate getting a lot of email, but I'll have to live with it.

One of the things I get frustrated by with online conversations is how frequently they just sort of die without making much progress. I'm usually not interested in just scoring points with searing rebuttals followed by a mic-drop. I like hashing things out. That these conversations take place on HN so frequently is put in an entirely different context now that I see how poorly the site facilitates it.

As a side note / issue: culturally this site discourages low quality posts (like this one would be if I just said a quick 'thanks for the link' like I intended to), but sometimes manners dictates an acknowledgment even when you have nothing else to add. Some means of doing that beyond an anonymous upvote could be kind of cool.

> As a side note / issue: culturally this site discourages low quality posts (like this one would be if I just said a quick 'thanks for the link' like I intended to), but sometimes manners dictates an acknowledgment even when you have nothing else to add.

I see what you did there ;). I sometimes too spend a while figuring out something constructive to write when the only real thing I actually wanted to say is "thanks!". I agree it would be good to facilitate this use case better, but I have no idea how to approach it. For now, if I can't for life find anything else of value I could add to my reply, I'll just write "Thanks for the [link/explanation/whatever]!" and hope it won't be treated as comment spam.

(As an aside, I tend to upvote honest "thank you" comments whenever I see them. As a way of encouraging civility, I think one should not only reward the good comments, but also expressions of gratitude.)

Lots of people have asked for that and I think we'll probably break down and add it relatively soon. Also, welcome!

Probably can't help with that other thing.

I wouldn't say that HN moderation is always effective. There is a local groupthink that will get you downvoted fast for rational commentary that runs contrary to the popular consensus. Much like Berkeley students shouting down any opposing viewpoint they've predetermined to be invalid.

I've heard this several times; I know there are viewpoints that HN tends to lean certain ways on (many of us are similar not only in profession, but that probably leads to similarities in views). Would you happen to have a link to a good comment thread that shows the alternate viewpoint not getting fair treatment or serially downvoted? (or, if not that, is there a particular topic area or debate, s.t. next time it comes up I might know to look?)

Perhaps the best I can come up with is the debate around good encryption, network communication, and the government's abuse of people's rights; but in this example, the counter-arguments I've heard have just not been convincing, which I find different from not getting fair treatment.

It's difficult to link to shadowbanned comments, so...

Basically anything to do with the cult of diversity. The double standards and refusal to acknowledge charlatans is impenetrable. It's no problem to demonize approved groups of people based on hearsay, but considered harassment to point out fraud or lies from protected demographics.

That's a holy cow that HN has slowly but surely adopted. The response is usually a kafkatrap: accuse the poster of being dishonest, and treat refusal as an admission of guilt.

If no explicit statement can be picked at, you get accused of "dog whistling".

Politics related threads have that issue. Downvoting should go: lots of people use it as a way to try and suppress political views they disagree with.

For instance, I pretty much accept that pro-Brexit posts will always get downvoted, even posts that state a matter of fact with citations. I don't care, I have great karma scores already and I've noticed that initial negative scores tend to end up slightly positive -> the problem eventually gets corrected, but it's incredibly obvious that lots of people simply downvote posts they disagree with regardless of content.

I am working on a project that will eventually reward good users with credits they can sell for Bitcoin. It is not my idea but I got recruited into it. http://kr5ddit.com but the server might not handle too many requests. I am trying to help convert the software to an open source license.

Users earn credits for having comments and posts voted up by others who spend credits moderating content. Downvoting bad content earns credits, upvoting good content earns credits.

I exchaged 100 credits for 12 mBTC recently, a small amount maybe enough for a coffee.

FYI Chrome's telling me that your SSL cert expired a week ago.

I think your site could work if it remains small. As soon as it grows large enough to be worth gaming for fun and profit, I can't see any way of avoiding it - very sadly!

There's also the opportunity for all kinds of fun with users colluding with each other - and no doubt some fraud with others along the way.

If you manage to pull it off, more kr3ddit to you!

> jerks, bozos and assholes

Looks like incivility to me.

In my humble opinion, more often than not, when a techie refers to another commenter as an "asshole" they simply mean that they dislike the other commenter's politics or lack of left-leaning political correctness. You see, most techies espouse leftist views, which are rarely challenged in public because most media lean left. When they come across real-world opinions held by a large percentage of the population, they flip out and call the offender(s) "jerks, bozos and assholes."

I'm on the other side. I see the entire original post and most of the related comments on HN as examples of intolerance of truly diverse opinions. Those who would flag-kill differing opinions are the "assholes". Those incapable of seeing their own bias are likely "bozos" or "jerks". In short, several of the self-congratulatory commenters on HN fail to understand that the words "asshole", " jerk", "bozo" apply squarely to them.

I had a recent post which got 5 quick upvotes then was flag-killed for failing to hew to feminist orthodoxy and the feminine imperative. That's how intolerance is done.

> real-world opinions held by a large percentage of the population

Quite a lot of the population believe all sorts of intolerant things about women and nonwhite people. That doesn't make it right.

> most media lean left

Hahaha no.

Quite a lot of the population believe all sorts of things about all sorts of things, prejudiced beliefs about "others" being fairly high up on the list.

> Hahaha no.

I know "That which is asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof" and you're totally in the clear here, but it does make me wonder how you'd go about testing that claim (both yours and the GP's)? I mean, from my point of view many media outlets do lean somewhat left but partly because "reality has a left bias" or however the saying goes (although I lean somewhat left, so it may just be my filter bubble).

How do you determine it for even one media outlet? You could maybe do it by vocabulary choice. There are definitely some terms that are used primarily by one side or the other. Or the metric of what issues they try to get their readers outraged about? I've noticed sometimes there's bias not in how stories are covered, but in which stories are covered.

Perhaps it's not possible to do in isolation, but some sort of clustering technique (percentage of readers in common with another outlet as a similarity measure?) would reveal obvious groupings.

Regarding "most", would one weight different media outlets based on their viewership? Or does my local town paper count equally to Fox/whatever in adding "most"?

I guess really I'm just trying to have a more useful discussion than "media are biased left!"->"lol no", but it is actually an interesting question I think, and if anyone has resources about this (this question has definitely been asked before) I'd be interested in links.

It's a problem. There are various "anti-media-bias" organisations, most of which are themselves pushing some extreme view and denouncing opposition as bias. Even defining 'left' and 'right' is country-specific. Then you have the Overton Window problem that lobbying intends to actually move what is considered the 'centre' around.

Then you get back-formation of labels depending on party loyalty, which is a particularly bad problem in two-party systems. Something will get labelled as 'left' because it's supported by the Democrats or 'right' because it's supported by the Republicans, not the other way round. Widespread overuse of "socialist" and "liberal" as terms of abuse rather than descriptors makes this worse.

Then there's the question of whether newspapers should simply report what people say, or make their own efforts to determine whether it bears any relation to reality. Sometimes this is impossible: the greatest piece of anti-libel hedging I've ever seen was an article calling Leon Brittan a paedophile, which was comprised entirely of reported speech.

For clustering, see http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20050415-my_country... : an attempt at reduced-preconception data-driven partitioning of viewpoints. It seems to have held up rather well over the past decade: people attempting to look for common factors driving the Brexit vote have found that the strongest correlate is being pro-capital-punishment. The old left/right axis seems to be subordinate to the modern pro-/anti-internationalist one.

That clustering link is really interesting, thanks!

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