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Comment by marilyn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Let's not get too self-congratulatory here. Yes, the civility on HN is much higher than on many other discussion sites, but it's still a lot lower than you'd find in most real-world situations.

I agree that throwaway accounts are useful, and that there are times when anonymity is advantageous, and that the added civility that comes with real names is a bad tradeoff in this case.

However: in this case, the second point (downvoting) didn't prevent an uncivil (yet insightful) comment from becoming the highest ranked comment in the thread.

I'm not saying Suster's suggested fixes are good ones-- but I don't think we should dismiss the problematic out of hand.

Unchecked nastiness and incivility are the broken windows of the online community.

Actually, having just observed a situation where a bunch of people who met in real life exploded into an immature email discussion full of insults and accusations, I don't think the civility on here is any worse than it is in real life.

I think the reason why it feels like "real life" is more civil is that you don't hear about people insulting each other in real life, because they don't usually shout it out on the rooftops (in my experience, after a particularly nasty discussion, both sides prefer to keep it quiet and just not talk to each other anymore).

I think that demonstrates a broader version of his point: people are more civil towards each other in the offline world than they are in the online world.

In addition, most issues in real life don't leave lasting traces the same way that typewritten messages on forums/comment threads do.

> However: in this case, the second point (downvoting) didn't prevent an uncivil (yet insightful) comment from becoming the highest ranked comment in the thread.

So? Does it happen often enough to worry about?

> still a lot lower than you'd find in most real-world situations.

It's not clear that that's true and even if it was, it's not relevant. The relevant comparison is with comparable real-world situations.

Which reminds me - there's an acceptable way to call someone an asshole in every situation. Are you measuring "civil" by whether the acceptable form is used or by whether any form is used?

If someone is being an asshole and pointing that out is useful, I don't have a problem with what form that takes so long as it doesn't draw unnecessary attention. In fact, failing to point out assholism in many cases is itself uncivil.

YMMV.

Is the civility level on any site like this doomed to decrease over time as popularity grows?

  The civility on HN is unparallelled

I submit that http://ask.metafilter.com is as good, or better. Mostly due to their excellent moderators.

[edit to expand] Also because you have to pay $5 to join and they impose traffic caps on newer users to get around some of the spamming problems. So yeah... not entirely apples-to-apples.

Yes it is apples-to-apples. Sometimes you have to pay more for the nicer apples.

> The civility on HN is unparallelled.

Try looking at lesswrong. Scary. I think prefer the odd venomous irrational spew at the moment rather than having to mathematically prove my opinion. Good reading though.

Making Light (http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/) is both civil and open to the non-paying public, and has no registration requirement. So it's possible to do it. In this case, they moderate, and they attract more literate people to start with.

Certainly no "flame war" there has gone any further than you might have over drinks with your friends if you'd had a bad day.

Anonymous posting is very important to me - I don't ever actually use it, but I like to know I could. I really don't like the idea of having to present photo ID to express an opinion.

I actually rather like that HN doesn't do email notifications or an RSS feed of your own comments/replies.

Well, it is possible to use searchyc to snarf people's streams; I do so for a handful of HN users, e.g.

http://rss.searchyc.com/user/wheels?sort=by_date

He's asking for a notification of when his site is linked to, not anything to do with conversations. It sounds like a clumsy solution to a problem that trackbacks should already have solved.

I agree. Hacker News has a lot great people on it.

Karma, however, is a joke because accounts are regularly nuked for no good reason, which necessitates starting over at zero. Hellbanning spammers and outright trolls makes sense. Hellbanning good posters who make one annoying comment is ridiculous. If you don't like what someone has to say, disagree with him. (This is also why I don't like downvoting without a reply; I think people who object to something should say why they object to it.)

I've made a prodigious amount of comments, and I'm sure some of them were quite stupid, and yet my account hasn't been banned. So have most of the people on the leaderboard. I guess it's not "one annoying comment", but a) how bad the comment is, and b) how much contribution that user had made in the past.

You don't get to the leaderboard if your account is nuked. Survivor bias.

Admittedly I've said things that are immature and stupid and that I regret. None of them merited the destruction of 2000+ karma account. Not a one. The banning policy around here is extremely inconsistent.

Also, I once got hellbanned for comparing Clojure favorably over Arc. (Although Arc wins on aesthetics, Clojure has the JVM libraries which is a win in the real world. That was the gist of my argument, and enough to merit a ban.) The ban policy on HN is heavy-handed, inconsistent, destructive and, quite frankly, moronic. If Paul Graham is directly responsible, he should be embarrassed; if others are doing the trigger-happy banning, he should revoke these powers.

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