Hacker News Reader

This really bugs me. What defines mediocre to you? We're defining the problem in relatives. I mean, look at the exchange that just happened:

> Comments are getting worse.

>> What is worse?

> Comments are overwhelmingly mediocre.

So, I ask, what is mediocre?

Comments are the thoughts of human beings using your system, and there's no technological or psychological means to have any semblance of control over them. Their perceived quality is a direct reflection of the community you have. Any attempt to "fix" perceived quality is going to divide your community, and any disruption or improvement to the community is going to indirectly adjust perceived quality.

Just like none of us writes like Thomas Jefferson these days and a number of words have fallen out of favor, so has your community evolved and a new definition of "average comment" must be found. This is all a relative game, anyway; a comment that you call mediocre I might find to be a golden nugget of awesome, and why should my opinion matter any less?

As an aside, I wish I had a dollar for every suggested technological fix to the declining-comment problem. Based on how this thread is shaping up, I'd be doing better than my 401(k).

It's very reasonable to recognize quality.

I can distinctly remember several times the comments on an article were written by absolute experts in the material, full of insight and interesting content.

I could believe comments like those have become rarer.

That's your definition of quality, and I'm glad you shared it, but disheartened that you consider it the one true quality.

Reading your second sentence strictly, we can infer that to you, quality means (a) expert-level familiarity with a linked article, (b) insightful -- difficult to generalize because insight is different for different people, or (c) full of interesting content.

Of the three of those points, only one of them isn't dependent on the perspective, knowledge level, or interests of the reader. What is insightful to me might be common knowledge to you. What is insightful to you might be tediously stupid to me. What is interesting to you might be boring to me. On, and on, and on.

It's obvious there's no such thing as "true quality". But I am willing to value certain types of quality more than others.

I'm just expressing one vote that I agree with some peoples' consensus, that a particular type of quality of HN has decreased; and it's a type of quality that I value.

Example of a comment I find mediocre: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2433896

It doesn't really add anything to the discussion. Snarky comments really don't belong here on HN and I've noticed a trend of them getting far more up votes than they used to.

Ah, but neither does yours!

Why does the mediocrity apply to the comment you're replying to, but not your own? Your comment is dripping with snark and someone called you on it (thankfully). I actually think your comment is shittier than the one you're replying to, because you put yourself on a pedestal of telling the rest of us what to do.

Was that comment at the top of the discussion before you snarked it to oblivion? Probably not. It was most likely already in the deep hell of very light gray, and your content-free comment just made it worse. Calling the kettle black, in my opinion.

Actually, this is an example of a "mean" comment.

I think it was fine to say the guy's comment was "dripping with snark" (a specific criticism), but not that it was "shitty," and not that he was "telling the rest of us what to do."

I would call those bits "mean" because the amount of insult they add is disproportionate to the amount of content they have. In other words, it would have been worthwile (IMHO) to find a better way to say the same thing.

Now, the whole point is that who am I to say what's mean? And I agree, hence the proposal I made to allow people to "vote" on what's mean, and have a threshhold. I mean hell, different communities find different things to be unacceptable "mean," and that's fine.

"Mean" for a girl scout meeting and "mean" for the LKML are pretty different; I think HN should probably be somewhere in between.

And the point is, if HN becomes like the LKML, we're gonna enjoy it a lot less; that's why we want to limit meanness, not because we're big softies.

And now you've just provided another snarky, content-free comment that consists of nothing but an attack. Further, it's longer (and therefor more intrusive) than the comment it addresses.

Can we please stop this silly fained-hypocrisy treasure hunt? There is certainly appeal to a game everyone can play, but it's a pointless waste of time. What exactly do you hope to achieve? A world where spammers and trolls say what ever they want and well meaning people just remain silent?

Sometimes the only way to stop immoral violence is with immoral violence.

PG, if you really want to get hard data on whether comments have gotten "meaner", I'd be happy to help with that.

It seems the chief complaint is that comments are no longer increasing the happiness and confidence of the community, but rather raising anxiety and hostility. My startup is based on an algorithm for measuring the emotional impact of text and does in fact measure these four emotions.

I'd be pleased to help measure how comments' effects on readers have changed over time. I would do it myself, but I know you don't want me anonymously scraping every comment for the last 3+ years, and it'd be much faster to just get a data dump from the server.

Drop me a line if interested. :)

Will you provide examples of mediocre comments? (Feel free to point any of mine out.)

Votes are a terrible way of getting feedback on comments - I'd genuinely love to know if something I've said is "off topic" for the community but I often feel that some of my worst comments (one liners, or attempts at humor) actually get the most votes.

Perhaps some way of visualizing the way distribution of the karma bands for the people who voted on a comment (both positive and negative) would be good - I would actually go and check this occasionally to see if I was getting too far out of step.

e.g. Something that told me that your comment may have a total score of 30 but the people that have a karma level over 10000 who voted all downvoted etc.

Yours, it may have been serious, but it comes off as trolling.

(This one, it's mean and full of snark)

Instead of having an arrow for downvoting comments (which has a different intended meaning on hn than on most other social newssites) couldn't we have a button next to "flag" that has a name on it, e.g. "content-free/snarky/witty but pointless comment/fanboy pseudo-argument", so that people have some clear guidance when to click on it?

And then would be very interesting to feed a Bayesian filter with this feedback, and see if that filter can pick up future "snarky" comments automatically.

If that works, then requiring a proof of work (a simple-ish logical puzzle) attached to a snarky comment could bring a scalable barrier.

Sometimes it can be difficult to reply to a comment without the possibility of being perceived as being snarky. For example a comment thread that I was involved in about jQuery recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2429832

Fortunately the person I replied to took the comment in the sense it was intended, but I also know that people can be really defensive in this area and can perceive a comment as snarky even though it wasn't meant to be.

I read it and do not find anything snarky in it. But the way you mentioned it made me wonder: there are "intentions" and there are "results" - are there a lot of the comments that are intentionally snarky ? Or, the snarkiness is just a way a person would communicate ? And if that, is it worth hinting to that person that their written communication conveys not what they intended ?

Slashdot has had this for over 10 years, I don't think it adds much value. Well, you can easily find the '+5, Funny' comments, which is good; but '+5, insightful' or '+5, interesting' becomes meaningless quite soon (maybe I'm missing the nuances of the system, I've never moderated or meta-moderated - ironically, mostly because the whole system seems so complex that I never bothered to get to know it).

I wasn't aiming at having a comment be tagged as funny or whatever. It was just supposed to tell people that they shouldn't click on on the downvote button because they disagree with the conclusion of a perfectly well argumented comment -- which is what downvotes mean, e.g., on reddit. That's why I suggested to replace the downvote arrow with a few links/buttons.

> Meanness is moral mediocrity.

Shiiit Paul, hacker news has been screwed up since the beginning. Remember this video?

http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/

That video would show up on the front page about once a year, and is by one of your most popular members and commenters. The video is full of slander and straight up factual errors and even gets almost all of cryptography and network protocols wrong. It's probably one of the worst videos on security out there, yet, what did HN do?

Eat. It. Up. Nobody flagged that video, told tptacek it was bullshit, or bothered saying one damn thing about it other than cheering it on and laughing. You definitely didn't boot him off the site, and in fact gave him a top spot in your system. This is not how you tell people you don't like 'meanness'.

Over the years here and before I started commenting people called me a cocksucker, cock, asshole, douchebag, and every mean ass thing you can imagine. They do it to other people too, and I sure as hell don't see anyone getting flagged or kicked off. If you pick someone unpopular to insult you're totally allowed to be a dick here.

Paul, HN is in decline because you don't actually enforce your own rules. If you don't want people to be "mean" or talk like idiots then don't let mean and idiotic crap on the front page. Half the time, when one of my many clever ruthless jokes shows up on the front page I giggle. My jokes demonstrate what you've been allowing for years but only seem to care about now that it's insulting your own ethos of the "uber hacker scientist ruling the world":

You guys love cruelty and insult, I'm proof.

In other words, HN needs a few simple laws and some light moderation. e.g.

- no personal attacks

- no "x is an asshole because" inflammatory comments

- ostensibly duplicate content should be deduped

- no flame bait?

I agree that people making personal attacks should be punished. Perhaps a reset of karma and a limited time ban? Obviously there isn't going to be a silver bullet, but I agree with Zed here about enforcement.

How about "no curse words"? Swears almost never improve writing.

Easy to monitor as well.

No, please not. Treat us like adults not children. Censoring words doesn't change a thing, people will just offend with other words.

People are very creative in being mean to each other if they really want. Also it's not specific words that hurt but the context in which they are used.

wlad, good point. I guess the "say it to my face" rule already covers what I was after.

I don't think it is as easy as you think it is. Consider for example the Scunthorpe Problem [1].

Also consider that people on this site are hackers and so naturally we can all speek Leet [2] ;-) In these days of unicode it's extremely difficult to prevent people posting words that look like swear words, but which on inspection are just unusual characters.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet

arctangent, I was suggesting a lazy filter to set the tone. If you have to open the character map to put the 𝛍 in f__k that gives you time to consider whether it's worth violating the spirit of the forum.

I shortened my comment above but my full suggestion is to apply time-delayed negative karma to posts with Carlin swears rather than ban them. Who is going to spend 45 seconds finding the 𝛍 to avoid −2 karma?

My first point still stands, though. You can't apply a naive filter because people will end up getting penalised for using words like "scrape", "interstitial", "swanky", "spool", etc. ad infinitum.

Word boundary character.

You're very persistent but I'm afraid you're still wrong :-)

Firstly, I gave unicode as a simple example of the lengths that people could go to in order to swear. But it's actually even easier than that in practice. I you want to ban the word X then I can replace it with a slight misspelling which carries the same intent - and when you ban that a naughty user will just pick another one.

(Bad words aren't the problem we should address, it's the intention behind words which is the real problem.)

Secondly, the Scunthorpe problem is more severe than you realise and can't be solved by considering only whole words. For example, some words have more than one meaning: "tit", "gay", "sod", "knob", "cock", "prick", etc. Some or all of those words would be filtered out by a naive filter.

There's also the additional problem that people may not necessarily agree on whether a word is a swear word or not (even if it does not have multiple meanings like the examples I listed below).

For example, in 1977 the Sex Pistols won a court case about the title of their album "Never Mind the Bollocks" in which it was ruled that "bollocks" is not obscene in the UK (but may of course still be considered obscene in other countries!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollocks#Obscenity_court_ruling

And finally, some words mean different things in different coutries. For example, the word "fanny" means one thing in the US and quite another in the UK.

Naive filtering of swear words is never going to work.

never going to work

As I outlined above it's just about the incentive and setting the tone. If you have to write "siht" you'll think twice about whether it needs to be said.

I might do well to add that I am not suggesting this for prudish reasons. I took a creative writing class in college and the teacher banned curses and drugs. Intro to Creative Writing students otherwise substitute force for substance.

Monitor? Aren't people complaining about China's monitoring and stuff like that?

Well played, epic Rails guy.

> Remember this video? http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/

I know it's off topic here, but could you either elaborate on this or point us to more detailed rebuttal?

Thomas made remarks about Zed Shaw probably causing companies to fail and not hiring him. At least, if it is the same video I am thinking about.

In fairness you probably attract more of that sort of thing than 99% of people. I mean, if you're going to act so aggressively alpha, you're going to get attacked often. So your view might be a bit skewed here.

I've been doing Ruby for a long time, and back when the mailing list's signal to noise ratio was better, I used to read it daily, so I've been reading Zed's flames for a while. ("The Chainsaw Logger Infanticide Maneuver" was a pretty great one; I still show it and the resulting thread to people.)

I can say with a fair amount of confidence that Zed's fully aware of this effect, and is doing what he does intentionally. He has informative content, but also knows how to push precisely the right buttons. It's often entertaining, but the abasive style is also a brilliant and effective form of self-promotion. (Think Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh.) He knows precisely what buttons to push to get a reaction, and (as far as I can tell) enjoys himself immensely. It's great to watch if you like to see flames written to people that take themselves too seriously.

So I don't think you're telling him anything new here. If you sit down at a table and don't know who the sucker is...

Have other sites done this? I think its a solid idea, very based on the real world as well as supply and demand. I have a large supply of mediocre(or worse) things to say but in the real world if I walk around saying those to people that provide me an opportunity to talk they will eventually stop providing me those opportunities. Seems that the devil might be in the details on this one though.

Is karma the right thing for this? Maybe there should be a new thing called a "leave a comment" ticket. Every comment will consume a ticket. Every comment that gains strictly greater than 1 karma will gain you 2 "leave a comment" tickets but you can never pool more than 4 "leave a comment" tickets. I've left pure supply and demand here though and I've capped profit, maybe its more like supply and demand with government oversight. Every 3 days (tunable, like all prior #s) if you don't have any tickets you get a ticket(Socialism?). I think people will either quit being mediocre or will stop coming to the site, for better or worse. All this is under the assumption that other hackers don't like to read mediocre comments. I think all is lost if such an assumption is false anyways. BTW I have no idea how the HN comment system works now so someone correct me if this idea is perpendicular to the current system.

I've been reading HN for a bit over one year, and I have felt the decline in quality of both comments and posts.

I consider myself a bit of a Reddit refugee, and given the kind of comments that are popping up lately, I think there are many of us here (and if you look at Reddit now, it has been similarly declining, with an influx of Digg- and 4chan-like content and comments). I think a large part of the problem is that people are flocking to HN, and somehow "colonizing" it without trying to integrate into the "local culture". Hence the mean-spirited comments, etc.

I originally came here because I respected pg's technical expertise, enjoyed a lot of his writing, and initially enjoyed an actual (and fleeting) "hacker" community.

Since then, I've periodically left HN for periods of time because of the disappointing shift in focus from science and tech to "entrepeneurship", whatever the hell that is.

Now half the posts I filter past are frankly just advertising, or "SEO" in various guises, people selling their useless web app, pushing their own affiliate links, breathless chortling over the lastest gray areas to investigate for reducing their taxes, or promoting their own blog. For a while there, we were even getting almost daily front page reposts of Wall Street Journal editorial psuedoscience.

I suspect there's a big chunk of us here who really could not possibly care less about getting rich quick.

I think there's a fine line to walk. "Hacking", if that's still what this place is about, means an intense curiosity to understand, the joy of discovery, and an equally intense desire and joy in creation. I don't see HN reflecting that as much anymore.

I think you were seeing what you wanted to see. As an example, I came here because of the great Entrepreneur community, twice as long ago as you came here for the comp sci.

I have the exact opposite experience. When I started reading here maybe 2 or 2.5 years ago, it was mostly about starting and running software businesses - all aspects of it, from interesting programming problems to HR and taxes. It was a refuge from the JoS 'Business of Software' boards when they started going down the drain.

Nowadays, it seems like there are much more people complaining about how articles about economics or making money aren't 'hackery' enough. It's what I dislike about Reddit for the few time I read it; HN is (used to be?) full of people who either run or want to run software businesses, and want to provide actual value with software (and have it validated by getting people to pay for it) rather than doing some code experiments for the fun of it with no other users than themselves in mind. There are many 'programmer' forums, the amount of 'software business' forums is minuscule.

Okay, point taken. But now ask yourself whether the following are things that you're looking for in the "software business" forum you describe:

advertising, or "SEO" in various guises, people selling their useless web app, pushing their own affiliate links, breathless chortling over the lastest gray areas to investigate for reducing their taxes, or promoting their own blog

- advertising: yes (I'm assuming this is 'how to do advertising', not 'advertising for someone else's product)

- SEO: yes (same)

- people selling useless web app: this is just how you look at it; in many cases, it's people who want feedback on their experimental ideas. Which I think is fine.

- ppl pushing affiliate links: no, but they didn't used to be here, either

- tax optimisation: yes

- blog promotion: as long as they're blogs on the topics of the forum, yes

Many things on the list are described in a negative way, so it's only natural that they're undesirable. But I don't see them that often (like affiliate links - they're quite rare as far as I can tell) and I used to think that Youtube was useless, too.

Out of curiosity... since HN is a news forum attatched to a capital investment funds' webpage, then why shouldn't it be entrepreneur focused?

How about showing a short list of the key guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) below the comment box whenever someone wants to make a comment?

A quick visual reminder that is "below the fold" - ie below the reply button, so easily ignorable for frequent users, but very visible for new commenters that may not have read the guidelines...

Could have a list of the key guidelines, or show one of the key points at random, or even set it based on what you think is one of the main issues affecting the type of comment on the site.