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Comment by Tycho | Hacker News Reader

Actually, you just gave me a great idea (I think). The problem is mainly snide remarks, right? So make it impossible to make snide remakrs. How?

Minimum comment length of ~50 words.

This would A) get rid of casual snideyness, as those sorts of people wouldn't put in the effort to formulate a longer post; B) discourage crowd-pleasing one liners, which while enjoyable have a long term negative effect; C) still allow jokes, they'd just have to be asides to actual substance; D) encourage longer, better thought-out posts in general, and backing up of claims.

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This reminds me of the Slashdot lameness filter, which IIRC just caused (causes? I haven't been there in a while) lots of posts ending in, "La la la la, adding some content to get past the lameness filter." and the like.

And we could make it policy to immediately downvote such cases.

Sorry, your comment is too short (as is mine)

It's telling that this comment got more upvotes than any of my other (much more constructive) comments in this thread

I think that gridspy's comment is worthy of some upvotes. He made a valid point, and in a meta-joke kind of way. I'm perfectly happy with flippant posts, so long as they're not mean, and they add something to the discussion (be it humor or insight or both).

Pithy, incisive remarks are to be celebrated, not supressed.

You just banned 10 out of 12 of the 'pg comments on this thread. :)

Ha. It would certainly lead to less comments overall, but maybe that would be a welcome timesaving. Who knows, people might even start pre-emptively addressing counter-points for their arguments and the whole debating process would be greatly contracted. (am I at 50 words yet? maybe 30 would be better...)

I was thinking the same thing which is why I didn't mention the length idea. However... what if users over say 1 year and with a high comment average were exempted?

To add to that, lionhearted posted a comment about inevitable site decline because of open membership and equally weighted voting. What if only accounts over 1 year could vote (or diminish their vote weight)?

Wouldn't instituting a min. length requirement and taking away new user voting improve the problem significantly?

But there is something unsavoury about that sort of elitist/privilige system I think. Perhaps, however, the word-count restriction could apply only to the 'top-nodes' of the comment threads, ie. if you're replying to the submission itself. That way, things are started off on the right foot, and snidey one-liners never get upvoted to the top of the whole thread.

I know what you mean, but is it really elitist if it's only a time requirement? It's like admission to a club, anyone can get in but everyone past the current site size pays their dues (in this case by sticking around). If the goal of the site is to not die from popularity, this may be understandably necessary.

On your other point, I'm thinking that short unwanted quips can rear their ugly head anywhere along threads.

The thing about elite prestigious clubs is that a large portion of the discussion and activity inside the club turns out to be about membership -- who wants it, to whom we should give it, who is unworthy of it, how worthiness should be decided, and how awesome we folks inside the club are compared to all those folks who aren't inside the club.

(Or at least, that's what I assume it's like -- I don't know, I've never been invited into any elite prestigious clubs...)

Even if you say "Oh, it's just a time requirement", what are you gonna do if Big Name Smart Person shows up wanting to comment? Surely you're going to let them in. So now you have an elite line and an unwashed line and you're arguing about who should be in the elite line.

The restriction isn't for commenting, only voting. "Big Name" would have to stick around 6 mo. to a year to vote. Shouldn't be a problem if site quality (the key draw) remains high.

The minimum length of your comment is inversely proportional to the amount of karma you have

I downvoted you because I have found this to not be the case in practice, and I find that setting some minimal comment length is not correlated to increasing the quality of submission. Casual snideness will still occur, and one-liners are not a problem in and of themselves. The context of that one-liner is, and a minimum comment length should not considered a judge of quality or context.

Have you seen this actually implemented somewhere? Note that I'm not contending that none of the short comments are valuable: far from it, sometimes they're the best thing in the thread. But having a limit would not necessarily deter that content from appearing. The authors would just share a bit more info/insight with us before hitting 'reply.' Meanwhile the timewasters really would be deterred. And while it's great to have sharp, witty remarks now and again, the problem is that loads of unfunny jokes appear, trying to emulate.

However, I suppose you could argue that valuable content would be blocked to some extent, it a knowledgeable contributor was put off because s/he didn't have time for a longer comment. Still, 50 words isn't much, or 30, 25... anything above the average sentence length I suppose would start to have the desired effect.

We implemented this on zootoo.com during a contest where posting rewarded the user with points (I understand 100% how ridiculous this is as a concept, how awful it is at achieving any kind of 'quality' by itself - and if I was the one who had been allowed to make the decision on this then it never would have been implemented - but karma is a kind of never-ending contest). Not only did the minimum length limit not work DURING the contest, but even after the contest was over and we had kept the comment length requirement in place, the quality of comments did not increase, and if someone wanted to say something that was below the minimum threshold they would simply add 'foobar-like' content to their post to meet the threshold.

The problem with time wasters is that it's no big deal for them, they're already wasting their time. It's always going to be up to users who care like you, me and others to try to mitigate the exposure of those time wasting comments while not penalizing legitimate contributions by users who care, and that's why I don't think a hard comment length should be implemented.

To be honest, you're probably right. Unless comment padding was universally down voted, there'd be lots of it going on, defeating the point. And sometimes valuable things like corrections are at loggerheads with a minimum word count.

I used to actively participate somewhere with a 10 character minimum. It caused people to add remarks like "10 chars" after a perfectly valid, meaningful short reply to get it past the filter. It also caused savvier members to come up with creative ways to fool the computer into accepting their shorter post without making it appear longer to readers, which caused less savvy members to wonder out loud if some folks had special posting privileges.

> Minimum comment length of ~50 words.

This would backfire because many useful comments aren't that long, and therefore people will be forced to pad them, this decreasing the s/n ratio.

For example, my paragraph above has 24 words.

I generally try to keep my comments short. Verbosity isn't good per se.

All the times I wrote reprehensible, un-HN things, I did not strive for conciseness. Quite the contrary - if someone can cause disruption with 10 words, 50 are a nuke ;-)

Length of a comment is not an indication of insightfulness. Wall of text sometime is a turn-off. People who are busy tend to just leave bare minimum to convey their point.

There is no point in saying 100 words when you can make the point in 10.

Short and snide are by no means mutually exclusive.

I can spend all day writing a post that has no substance, garners upvotes (in today's HN climate) and is as long as the day, but that doesn't make it good, or worthwhile.

Many of my short remarks are actually more to the point, or are asking a relevant question, or are politely correcting errors. It takes considerably fewer words to do this sort of thing than it does to be mean, while trying not to look like it.

Valid points, but I think for any worthwhile comment it's easy to 'extend' the content beyond a single line. For instance, if you're asking a sincere question, you could provide some hypothetical answers, or state your reasons for asking - basically increase the level of mutual comprehension in the entire discourse.

Forgive me, I didn't mean to imply that your suggestion doesn't have merit. It does.

I just think that it's far too easy to game.

Another big issue with comment quality, of course, is in the general vagueness of it all. Jokes, for example, are almost always discouraged. Almost. On some occasions, it's quite appropriate.

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