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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality (my comments excluded, of course, they are of much lower quality).

A large part of that is it was started with a pretty small group that set the tone and quality, and it has always been very aggressive towards new commenters in the form of limiting down-votes, and chastising lower quality comments. That bring to a slow boil method seems to be pretty effective. I've always been curious if it would be possible to scale up an online community to reach Reddit's size while maintaining an HN signal to noise ratio.

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> Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality

For the most part, especially on well trodden topics that regularly feature on HN (tech, science, &tc). Unfortunately most HNers have the same blind spots and are unable to spot low-quality comments on more esoteric/fringe subjects - especially if it confirms their bias. I've seen inaccurate screeds about 3rd world countries be voted to the top more times than I care to count. Sadly, after many years, I still can't think of a way to personally profit from from this knowledge-gap, maybe via some form of arbitrage?

HN is very actively moderated by dang and sctb. It's mostly soft moderation, but it's pretty effective.

Lack of high-sticky features (no "notifications" indicator, e.g.) also help.

Founding cohort and community also help.

| Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality

Websites get the commenters they deserve. Leave trolls unchecked because they bring in clicks - become a haven for trolls.

Would Ycombinator be willing to start a separate product with its ranking/reputation system to allow other sites to host comments section?

Comments section allows discussion and debates, which is what Democracy is built on.

I'd guess that a big part of the quality control here comes from efforts of the moderators, so I don't think that replicating the ranking system would replicate the quality of discourse.

It'd only work if you keep the quality of the people commenting the same or better. There's nothing really unique about the way HN works, there's just smarter people here, on average, than in your typical Youtube comment thread.

Much of the apparent quality is the prohibition of topics that will attract controversy _regardless of their importance_ and regardless of the authenticity of the commenters who spam nonsense on it.

For example, I imagine this item[1] would be of some interest to anyone dealing with ad revenue yet it is unworkable on HN as is essentially all discussion of Russian hacking.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/technology/forgers-use-fak...

I honestly believe that the HN community is good largely because the website is so terrible. The buggy and unappealing UX turns off most low effort users.

>Hacker News after all these years has managed to maintain a pretty high standard when it comes to comment quality

It's easy to maintain quality when the majority of your visitors have the same political and social beliefs. Basic income, renewable energy, income inequality...

It gets really old for people living outside of the Silicon Valley bubble.

Are you implying that NH is limiting its audience to politically agreeable, or that those who disagree self-censor themselves and move to other platforms?

If the latter, it does invite the question of why. Is it impossible to disagree on basic income, renewable energy, income inequality etc without reducing your comment quality below the bar that is acceptable here?

If the latter, it does invite the question of why.

It's simply not worth the effort. Forget about the political topics you mention for a second. Changing minds in that realm through conversation is know to be hard. Look at something easier like conveying factual information about non-controversial topics.

Even in that case, if a topic is complicated enough that an early 20's newbie can't pick it up from a 1000-word medium essay, forget it. People who engage in trying to inform are fighting a constant uphill battle with no upside if they succeed.

Now pile the baggage back on of trying to disagree the "conventional wisdom" of a social bubble. A few try, most give up, and the spiteful join the jokers in trolling.

> Is it impossible to disagree on basic income, renewable energy, income inequality etc without reducing your comment quality below the bar that is acceptable here?

If you care about your karma level, you have to be careful about it. There are some perfectly reasonable positions that attract downvotes from some quarters. At the end of the day, it's just internet points, though. Sometimes unpopular things need to be said, if for no other reason than to register the existence of dissenting opinions.

It's to do with story selection.

That is a bizarrely anti-factual description of HN, which as a moderator I can tell you is deeply ideologically divided. It surprises me that this isn't obvious.

You think that because I'd like to see a basic income, care about renewable energy and income equality, that I must be living in the Silicon Valley bubble? Is that genuinely what you think?

You think that because I'd like to see a basic income, care about renewable energy and income equality, that I must be living in the Silicon Valley bubble?

Nope, you're not "in a bubble" for holding those positions. I see parent poster as listing some things that happen to be popular in the bubble, even if they're also generic american left. When discussing a "bubble", it doesn't matter what the positions happen to be, but how they're discussed, how uniform opinions are, how well they understand where their own positions fit into the contemporary political spectrum of people who share their government, how dissent is handled, etc...

Is that genuinely* what you think?*

Now, this remark is how I know you're in the bubble.

Heh, stop being so provincial. Not everyone on the planet fits into your simple-minded categories.

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