Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

I'm not sure that I can agree.

1) The blog post of yours which attracted such vitriol was entitled "Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees"; you aren't using a conciliatory tone and it seems unfair to expect one in response.

2) Practically all the comments I read on here are more civil than I see elsewhere on the web.

3) In pw0ncakes original post there were a lot of measured statements (for instance Job hopping is almost always involuntary-- not in the sense of a person getting fired, but in the sense of a person being wise enough to realize that he's in a position that his wasting his time, and moving on-- the rational response.) which you appear to have disregarded.

4) Most of the vitriolic posts I've seen on HN have already been modded down into oblivion.

5) Although purely anecdotal I notice the civil air here and censor myself accordingly (in real life I tend far more towards "sarcastic douche" than I do here).

The civility on HN is unparallelled. This community, with pg's guidance has done an amazing job of fostering a thoughtful community for intelligent discussion. Suster's arguments all focus around one particular discussion in which emotions ran a little higher than usual, and are not, in my opinion, representative of the community as a whole.

As for Suster's suggestions, the first one would be a mistake. There are many situations when a throw away account is warranted, such as asking for anonymous advice on a tricky work situation, or submitting a controversial article.

For the second suggestion, it already exits. Once a user reaches a certain karma level s/he has the ability to down-vote comments.

For the last, an RSS feed on a user's "threads" page would likely be useful to those who wanted to be notified on updated conversations they are participating in.

His complaint seems to partly center on the amount of swear words... one reason I prefer HN over other communities is we are not scared of the word fuck. Swearing is a part of honest society (and, luckily, gratuitous swearing is downmodded to oblivion in my experience).

Why did pw0ncakes get upvoted. a) because he is probably right but b) mostly because he accurately represents his generations reaction to things like this (and, lets face it, the original post was rather silly/incindary)

My suggestions (which will not be popular with many of Ycombinator’s hackers but may meet your goal of civility).

And here's the problem with this entire post; it adopts the same slightly sneering, "peering down on us" tone. It's not overtly rude - but no better, really, than "fucking asshole" (once you get over the swear word).

It's not, actually, a post about improving civility on HN - it's a thinly veiled attack/return shot :)

Ok, I'm not going to support calling the guy and asshole (he sounds like a bit of an idjit, I think, reading through the various posts/comments etc. and the original post he made before the updates did sound a bit "asshole") and, yes, there is a slightly growing problem of attacks over fair argument here in HN comments. But this is still a stellar community; positive suggestions are good, sneering resentment, probably not :)

Send me alerts when comments come in on a story I’ve written

That's silly; just monitor your logs if you want to see when HN comments come up (or set up a google alert etc.).

But actually I would prefer not encouraging people to come here to write about their posts unless they are already a member, reasoning:

- they are probably not "up" on how things work here, and so it risks going downhill

- comments here can be acerbic and honest, and people do take offense at that (which seems unfair to the writer)

By all means if it benefits the discussion invite him/her in. Otherwise leave it be :)

OP is asking for gadgets to treat the effect, not the cause of the problem. The cause? I'm not really sure, but this whole discussion reminds me of some simple, yet brilliant advice my grandmother once gave me, "If you look hard enough for trouble, you'll probably find it."

Mark, I've been here for ages and simply have not witnessed very much of the negativity you talk about. I don't remember any of the original threads you cite, so maybe I just travel in a different circle within hn. Or maybe I stick to more technical issues. Or just avoid threads that invite more emotional responses. I don't know.

Or maybe you're just looking to stoke a little bit. That's fine. We need that kind of thinking from time to time. But don't be like the kid with green hair that gets upset when people react. You know they will. So deal with it. That's my tip. Not much else needed here. Move along.

1. If you are writing self-admittedly inflammatory material, and you get inflammatory responses, you should try stopping doing that and see what happens before suggesting changes in HN. People are mirrors.

2. You can flag inappropriate comments (click on their link or parent link for the flag link to appear). [EDIT maybe there's a karma threshold to see the flag link.]

I think swearing and meanness is very rare on HN. I would say there is a fair bit of "scrappiness" - argumentativeness/combativeness - which sometimes undermines the productivity of the discussion. But although annoying, it's quite different from mean spiritedness.

Wow, I love Mr. Suster's contributions generally but this one is unfair. It reads like an indictment. HN "falls short" on its goal of maintaining civility. A YCombinator company CEO goes there only when he wants to get "upset." And so on.

This paints the site in a false light - yes, the individual bits of evidence might be true in the particular case cited but they are nowhere near representative of the whole and to say that they are makes it a gross distortion.

Not at all fair to this site or to the administrators and core members who, if anything, regularly go way out of their way to keep standards high around here.

That said, I look forward to many future outstanding posts from Mr. Suster, who remains one of my favorite bloggers on the whole range of startup issues that are important to the HN community.

HN is not civil towards external targets (i.e. bloggers, Microsoft, Zuckerberg, etc), but it is civil in the sense that HN readers are discouraged from attacking each other.

I guess we could learn to not attack the authors or subjects of the articles, but that's not the point. The "civil discussion" rules are there to keep the discussion from degrading into flame wars, not to be nice to bloggers.

Also, not that he uses simple present (HN readers are mean), then only considers one article (his own article about why you should never ever hire a job hopper). Most of the discussions seem fairly civilized to me. I guess you wear a bit of heat if you suggest that a large fraction of your audience isn't worth hiring. The insults weren't pretty, but they aren't typical HN comments.

    > I have thick enough skin or I wouldn’t blog.  

...

    > It’s totally acceptable to me for people to harshly criticize my  
    > points-of-view. No problem.  But calling me a f***ing a**hole or some  
    > of the other epithets used goes too far.

Does not compute.

Though I agree with you that such language is not nice and can be (should be) avoided as much as possible. Some people sometimes have bad days and certain topics can bring the worst in you. As long as it is not regular pattern of certain individuals being very liberal with their Fs and As, I think it is fine. The examples you gave are cherry picked in reference to a discussion about a blog post that you made and was directed at you. It says nothing about the general level of civility at HN, which I think is pretty decent, not perfect, but decent.

Forcing people to use their real name is the worst idea that I can think of.

In my opinion, the people looking for civility are often people in positions of authority looking to maintain a hierarchy. They're often rude and uncivil to people of perceived lower status in real life, but because of their status don't expect that same tone to be reciprocated. They dislike the internet, because in general the clues about status aren't as clear, and thus they get talked to just like everyone else.

Had the author of the article had responses that did not bruise his ego because of what people on the internet said to him - he would be writing an article about how awesome Hacker News was.

Posting another article explaining how you would change HN to your own benefit is adolescent behavior. Maybe, just maybe, the OP didn't have the correct view point. These types of people hop from job to job because everyone at the old company was "a bunch of idiots." Irony much?

Bluntness induced to make a point - suck it up, make a conscious effort to understand the true source of your emotions, and allow other people to have an opinion you may not like.

Dear Mr. Suster,

While I personally don't condone obscenities, insults and ad hominems in a discussion, I couldn't help notice that most of the time HN audience downvotes comments according to their signal/noise ratio, which means that we're willing to tolerate even occasional obscenities for the sakes of a valuable contribution.

In the first example you pointed to, pw0ncakes actually made a rather valuable contribution to the discussion, despite obscenities. He gave the view of the other side of the story, the side you seem to have completely overlooked in your original post. Let's also be honest here and admit that it's very naive to expect calm and collected responses from everyone after writing an inflammatory, one-sided post on an emotionally significant topic. In the old Internet jargon, we would describe your situation as "he trolled and they flamed him for it". That does not justify what happened, but pointing it out might help avoid your readers getting a one-sided interpretation yet again.

Another thing I would like to point out about pw0ncakes' comment is that it's actually not the most voted. His comment has 61 points and is served first, just like you noted. However, the most voted comment was posted by apsec112, has 116 votes and has no obscenities whatsoever. It might not seem important, but it's really recommended to thoroughly check your facts before addressing your audience, especially if you're going to accuse that audience of improper behavior.

Yet another point worth noting is your own writing style in this latest post. I'm sure you've heard it said that people in glass houses should not throw stones. If you really expect a calm and rational discussion, then I would wholeheartedly recommend avoiding rhetorical tricks like "OK, HN folks, let ‘er rip. I can take it." Setting yourself up as a victim in advance is pathos. Considering that your post is asking for logos and ethos, it seems like a bit of a double standard to me.

Last, but not least, I'd like to state that I actually agree with most of your suggestions on improving the quality of comments and the user experience with them. Certainly #3 is an excellent idea. While I believe that #2 might be a good one, it should be studied for other side-effects it might have on social dynamics here. As for #1, I firmly believe that people should have the right to post anonymously if they want to. I prefer to do it in a public way, which is why my username is connected to my blog, which in turn has my real name, but I would not presume to take away other people's rights. Especially not on the grounds of someone's hurt feelings.

Cordially yours,

Vojislav Stojkovic

To be totally honest, the article those comments were in response to was an ad hominem directed at many of our users. It's one thing to ask if someone's going to leave in 6 months. But it's another thing to ask if someone is a job hopper.

I think a point can be made that we should have risen above his ad hominems, but don't complain about an argument you started.

Such spiritedness is very rare on HN, and such comments can be downmoded to invisibility, which I think is enough.

Those comments he linked to did contain actual arguments. They also contained insults, which is unfortunate, but they were definitely not merely ad hominems.

I would not have problems with such comments directed at myself. As long as there are well written, structured arguments in there a insult won’t annoy me. Well, it probably will, but not very much.

I think it‘s also important to note that this is a controversial, highly emotional topic. I would expect it to get a little bit rough whenever that’s the case. The vast majority of comments on HN don’t contain insults or ad hominems.

I'm pretty happy with Hacker News as it is. I think the comments are generally insightful and the few trolls are dealt with swiftly and ruthlessly.

Let's face it, we're not Olde English Lords here in polite discussion. People have opinions and occasionally get animated. Really, who fucking cares if someone curses, if they've got something good to say?

how egotistical is this guy to assume that we should play by his rules, because he doesn't like the outcome of the game.

First its with people leaving his company so obviously its our fault, now its with people that comment on his blog. Its simple if you don't want criticism don't write anything, or if you do want to write controversial things then grow a thicker skin. Lets be real for a minute. People are attacking him because he is saying something controversial and he can't take it.

This is nonsense. I enjoy HN primary for how quickly posts that add no value are down-voted into oblivion. I enjoy it because commenters are generally blunt, measured, and to the point. I could care less about swearing as long as the comment adds value.

Bottom line is, you wrote a story and you didn't like the response you received from the community. It is what it is. If the rest of the world -- not even saying 'the internet' -- was as civil and to the point as HN I'd be one happy man.

"Make all users post under real names that you verify".

Advantages:

* Better comment quality: verified users would think twice if they wanted a curse words to show up when someone googled their name.

* Connectivity: If you like someone's reasoning and thinking, it would be easier to check out more about what they do online (accomplishments, blogs, twitter, etc).

Disadvantages, anyone?

Hacker news might need a vector arrow over it. In other words, has the direction of conversation changed from one where "hackers" (those that grok a vast or complete portion of a given system, and can identify and implement a clever tweak) can have vibrant discourse to one where the VC side of the coin has come here to observe, and essentially squash out the dialog in the process? (uncertainty principle involving observation and position)

As the hackers post less they become lurkers observing the commentary of the business folks. Eventually, interest is lost in even that. I recognize a VC professional could be redefined, interpreted, or understood as a hacker operating within the domain of the larger business and financial world, so I give them credit for that.

I don't know about using real names. People use real names on Facebook, and i've seen some very nasty stuff there after wandering into the wrong groups by accident.

There just needs to be a way, and a culture, of playing the ball and not the man. Most of use are OK with the substance of our arguments being torn apart, but aren't ok with abuse. Sadly there are many who can't do the former so always stick the latter, like quarreling bullies in the schoolyard. Maybe that's where they are from.

"This comment received the most votes (61) out of 128 total comments and therefore comes first as you can see here."

If you scroll down you will the the top comment was here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287147 And had over 100 votes.

It wasn't the main point of the article, but on a side note, Hacker News doesn't even have a reset password link, do you seriously expect email notifications to bloggers?

Job hopping is a touchy subject because young people don't like job hopping, as was discussed in those posts. They do it because, in today's corporate climate, they usually have to do it in order to prevent being pigeonholed, neglected, and otherwise left to stagnate.

Most people in most companies are going to find that the people above them don't care about their advancement. Sure, companies have their spiel about personal growth and continuing professional development, but it's often paper-thin. Managers can't look out for the careers and development of 10 or 20 different people, so it's often only one or two who gets "protege" status (favoritism in project allocation, mentoring, political look-out).

Also, the level of visibility and relevant work that are necessary for career advancement in today's competitive culture simply cannot be available to everyone. Unless you're a startup founder, you have to become the protege of someone important-- which only happens for the lucky few within 12 months at a new job, or you're wasting your time. This means that anyone with half a speck of ambition is going to keep moving around until finding a fit. No one exactly likes doing this; it's better to have this success early on and no longer need to "job hop".

So job hopping is not really voluntary. It's a natural outgrowth of today's corporate culture, one created by our elders who seem to be unhappy about our rational response to it. They're mad that the people under 35 have actually figured out the unwritten rules.

Oh, and I am pw0ncakes. Why did I (have to) change username? Because the incivility on Hacker News exists on both sides of the table. At least uncivil comments can be seen and argued against, whereas the sloppy, poorly-reasoned, invisible and heavy-handed ban policy, on the other hand...

I experienced directly some uncivility recently on an oil disaster thread. While not pleasant, I expect it when you have a large group of mostly strangers, of varying degrees of maturity, together in an online forum. There will probably always be a few rude juvenile assholes who unleash. It would be nice to see a consistent ban rule in such cases, but I don't expect it either. As with many things in life, the world would be better if each individual would follow something like the Golden Rule.

Something I've been working on is editing my posts to remove words like "obviously" and other statements that (subtly) vilify people with whom I disagree.