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Comment by po | Hacker News Reader

I was just imagining how different hacker news would be if there were tags on each comment/post indicating what levels of disagreement hierarchy are contained within. I can't imagine a practical way to implement it but imagine the effect it would have on discourse if people were constantly reminded what they were reading/writing.

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That sounds like a fun NLP project. But given the less than stellar performance I've seen in those types of programs you'd probably either need to accept a lot of false positives or a lot of false negatives. Except for the clear "u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!" cases.

It would make me feel constantly judged, arbitrarily even (because how would you ensure level-headed tagging?). It'd be as bad as downvoting, which is deliberately not possible on HN (with few exceptions).

I was assuming po meant some automatic system. If you wanted to use humans maybe you could have moderators do it.

I agree that it'd be dangerous to let anyone tag. People on YouTube usually mark anything they disagree with as spam. Hopefully it wouldn't be the same here though.

After reading your comment I realized I've seen downvoted comments but I can't downvote. Is there a karma requirement?

Yes. After you hit a certain karma threshold a down arrow shows up and you are able to downvote. The specific threshold varies, but it's below a thousand and above a hundred.

"The specific threshold varies..." around 200 points if I remember correctly

500 now.

You're right to some extent... which is why I said I can't think of any practical solution. I disagree in that I think the biggest bar is not the judgmental nature of it (we're all being judged anyway) but the fact that it would be a ton of work to categorize comments along those rules if it were not automated.

I just feel that part of the reason people descend to name-calling is because there's no feedback before they hit post. Nobody says "That's not a very good reply." Afterward, it takes someone motivated enough to call it out. In the meantime people see it and think "Lots of name calling on here." I think it's good that downvoted comments are still visible rather than removed so that people learn what is considered unacceptable.

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