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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win. Comments rarely add much to the discussion from the article, and they're often hard to follow. There's no reason to leave a comment saying "great post!". It's spam. It's unnecessary.

Blogs are a wholly inappropriate place for back-and-forth discourse to happen simply because if I have a blog, it's my blog. It's not a discussion board. I inherently have the advantage, I control the conversation, and it's all about me. I have the ability to delete comments I disagree with. That's not discourse, that's an echo chamber.

I completely agree with Medium. Just because blog posts have historically had comments doesn't mean it's the right choice. The minute people accepted "pingbacks" as a valid form of comment was the moment comments died. V!AGR@ and P3N15 type spam sealed the deal.

View on HN

> Commenting on articles is a terrible method of interaction. Anti-spam is hard, and spammers always win. Trolls always win.

But that's practically what HN is, yet I like to believe it's a good platform without too much spam or trolls.

That makes me curious as to the mechanisms hn employs to combat spam. I've never seen a comment I've been able to tell was spam, which is impressive.

Visit your HN profile then set "showdead" to "yes" to see some of such comments.

There's some stuff that shows up there, but surprisingly little.

I've been browsing "showdead" for quite some time. My main complaint is that there's no obvious way to tell if an account has been shadowbanned or not. I'll report questionable instances to hn (via email), and on something like 3/4 of cases, the account has been, though it's not clealry evident.

I'll vouch for some flagged items. Flag others. Generally I think the comment ranking is pretty good. There's a tendency for somewhat fluffy comments to be excessively highly rated, but as compared to other systems (say, Reddit), HN compares favourably.

There's also a slight tendency for the hivemind to punish critical, but valid, comments. But again, compared to most other systems I've seen, not particularly, and the situation often evens out.

I also recommend a visit to the new submissions section. There's a lot more there too.

It's heavily stepped up lately, folks are just good at policing it. I have dead posts turned on and I usually see at least 2-3 "work from home" scam comments per article.

If you have showdead on, lately has been awful with comments about “I make $$$ from home” or some shit. I regularly read dead comments, because HN has a tendency to downvote even valid comments from time to time, but lately has been rough -.-

There's a lot of self-policing here. If a comment or submission is obvious spam, I am very quick to flag it (as are many others, apparently).

HN has several moderators. If you're willing to add eyeballs, any system can work.

Blogs belonging to software tend to be very valuable. People will share insights or tips long after the blog post has been written, often extending the shelf life of the code or software.

I disagree. There are lots of different kinds of "comments" on blogs. I agree that pingbacks and one word reactions are awful. However, comments that are a few sentences, or a few of paragraphs, of good thoughts are fantastic. Often people can provide additional info on a topic, or they don't have a blog themselves but want to contribute to the conversation. Besides, as a sibling pointed out, HN comments are basically off-site blog comments, and I think a lot of HN readers enjoy them.

I'm sure moderating comments is hard. But when it's done well comments are great.

>Blogs are a wholly inappropriate place for back-and-forth discourse to happen simply because if I have a blog, it's my blog. It's not a discussion board.

That's, like, your opinion, man.

I personally enjoy engaging in discussions on blogs and on my (now defunct) old personal blog, and have seen great exchanges (Just see Lambda the Ultimate for an example).

Sure, also bad ones, that's just life. Articles and posts can also be as bad, if not worse, than comments.

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