To my fellow Hacker News contributors | Hacker News Reader

To my fellow Hacker News contributors

raganwald.posterous.com

226 pointsraganwald103 comments

We are all going to nod our heads to this post, but as 'raganwald knows, nothing is going to change as a result. The inoculations against tribalism and tribal drama are cultural. Whatever vaccine HN had against this, it's worn off.

My take is, flag these topics off the site. Cut them off like a gangrenous limb. We want to keep the leg, but even more, we want our heart to keep beating.

But then, a vocal subset of HN users is offended by the idea that story upvotes don't mean it's OK to debate libertarianism vs. liberalism here, so don't misread this comment as prescriptive. We're not going to fix this problem. I'm also fine with that.

Ed's right too, of course. Are you here to hear what the average HN'er thinks about Steve Jobs? No, you're not. I read HN in two ways, both of which still work for me:

* I scan for stories I have something to contribute to, and

* I read a shortlist of users whose presence on a thread have been reliable signifiers of quality. (The list is on my profile.)

Try doing that. You'll miss a lot of HN; a good thing!

It's funny that you write this b/c I hadn't read any of those threads myself. I have a filter where I don't often read the comments on stories from major media that make it to HN. There's rarely anything much to discuss and you're absolutely right that I do not care what anyone on HN thinks of Steve Jobs.

As a side note, I'm happy about the removal of point visibility on comments... but I wonder if perhaps increased tribalism might be a result of users in search of social meaning... which used to be easier to obtain via points.. and over time has been replaced by an emergent tribal system, wars, etc.

My first impression of the lack of displayed scores was that it was triggering slightly more short, redundant comments of agreement or disagreement, as people scratched an itch for public display of assent/dissent.

I suspect you're right that a change in tone and increase in the use of tribal-loyalty-signifiers might also be a side-effect of invisible scores. An upvote or downvote was only ever a coarse grunt or shake of the head, but in many social situations, there's a feeling one must send such signals to be 'present'.

Often when one outlet for a behavior is closed, the behavior flows elsewhere. Perhaps no visible point-effect means more signalling via tone and word choice: publicly upvoting via fanboyish tone, and publicly downvoting via snark.

It's a theory!

I think you're spot-on. This has to be a part of it. Whatever its issues, the visible point system was a way for readers to interact with the site in a way that produced a response for all to see. Whether this encouraged herd behavior or changed the shape of discussions in an unfavorable way is another issue.

Comment-dimming notwithstanding, that feedback has been removed. There's a class of reader whose desire for a kind of interactivity is no longer satisfied by the voting system; for them, pile-on voting has been replaced by pile-on posting (albeit often in the more thoughtful HN style). Which in turn begets more such posts, and thus a more polarized conversational shape.

I think you guys are falling in love with a clever narrative about voting and comments and socialization and aren't remembering all the pointless and objectively stupid arguments we were having about transient down and up fluctuations in comment scores when we could see them all.

Perhaps -- but then it was about points and not about ideologies.

I suspect at least a part of increased tribalism is that, without visible comment scores, people aren't being shown as clearly that "that's not the HN way" and "this is the HN way".

On the rare occasions that a tribal comment gets downvoted to gray, this is often misinterpreted as "tribal downvotes", and therefore the tribe responds by upvoting (a power even new users have). As long as the comment gets back to 1, it appears the same as comments at 5, 10, or 100 -- so the tribe doesn't see how differently tribal and non-tribal comments are treated, and therefore doesn't learn the community standard.

I think visible comment scores would help. I also think it would help to aggressively flag such comments, and to respond to such comments with "this sort of tribalism doesn't belong on Hacker News" (especially if that response was, visibly, upvoted to 10 or 20 points!)

"We're not going to fix this problem. I'm also fine with that."

Just thinking out loud here in terms of potential ways to stem this although perhaps this is futile.

What if HN had a checkbox for ad-hominem and/or off-topic comments?

Check boxing a comment as an ad hominem would add to your "ad hominem" score (separate from karma). Likewise for off-topic. This wouldn't stop a person from posting ad hominem or off-topic comments, but the idea of accumulating points for bad behavior could dissuade (some) people from making too many. Who would want to be branded the off-topic or ad-hominem gal?

Perhaps it wouldn't work -- but at minimum I think it would be an interesting experiment in promoting civility and thoughtful discussion.

Because we're a community of geeks, these threads always fill up with random technical countermeasures. I am dubious that any of them will work. I think showing other people's comment scores was a bug and I'm glad we fixed it†, but I don't think we need more features to address the cultural issues.

I do think we'd benefit from more guidance, but 'pg is pretty hands-off on this stuff. Graham could say today "no Apple vs. * debates", and about 100 people on HN would immediately start actively shutting down pointless Apple debates.

But he doesn't want to do that. I'm sure there's a reason for it. Part of it is probably that no matter what the ratio of light to heat, YC benefits from having HN active and perceived as open and unmoderated.

† Not interested in debating this; take it to 'pg

The system he is suggesting is exactly what /. had, and that didn't work out too well. I have a theory that the decline of any great community begins with a conflict. In the case of /. when the SCO matter started, the issue was so black and white that there was no need of discussing it - and the community itself was so homogeneous in their opinion on this matter that there was no real discussion going on. In the case of HN, I think we're seeing a variation of the same thing - it's Apple vs everybody else, and the issue is so polarising that the discussions are almost never real discussions, they're just a bunch of people trying to prove they're right. And that is where the rot starts.

I am as guilty of this as anybody else - since I find myself rarely able to comment on any technical discussion on HN, most of my posts have been on these topics, where one does not need any more than an ideological standpoint from which to talk. Perhaps the recent precipitous decline in the quality of the comments is directly linked to the kind of stories that we've been discussing, and the kind of people who tend to comment on them.

> Graham could say today "no Apple vs. * debates", and about 100 people on HN would immediately start actively shutting down pointless Apple debates. But he doesn't want to do that. I'm sure there's a reason for it.

Yeah, because having a bunch of righteous do-gooders flagging topics as inappropriate isn't as much of a feature as you'd think.

I think we should all have the ability to add arbitrary meta-data to other posts and to write/tweak our own scoring system to recognize the pieces of other user's rankings we saw as useful.

So basically implement a system like Slashdot?

I think that the vaccine HN had was size. Just like a modern republic vs. ancient Athens, HN has grown to the point where the obvious answer just doesn't seem to work. I think that Slashdot has already had to deal with these growing pains, and HN(and reddit) chose to ignore /.'s problems and pick the obvious solution. Unfortunately the behavior of mobs/tribalism tears this choice down.

Which limiting yourself to a set of must-read users and not consuming all of HN might not be a replacement for that vaccine, but it sure helps keep the plague rats at bay.

I'd very much hope it's not just like Slashdot.

Any strict voting/counting based system is going to be biased to highly popular (vs. interesting) articles.

A Likert-scale ranking system (vote on some scale, usually 1-3, 1-5, 1-7, etc., occasionally even (to exclude uncommitted median votes), and including a multiplier (log-based) for popularity) seems to be one of the more reliable ways of meaningfully indicating general interest in content.

Tracking the variance / standard deviation in votes is also helpful in identifying whether an item is of low interest (or disliked), vs. polarizing.

> My take is, flag these topics off the site.

I'd like to do this. I tried doing it a while ago on the new tab. I spent 20 minutes each day flagging off topic posts.

I didn't mind doing this as it was my way of making the community better.

Sadly the flag link seems to have gone away:(

> Sadly the flag link seems to have gone away

You have more karma than me, and I can see it.

Speculation: it may have been taken away for "abuse", either automatically or by an editor who disagreed with too many of your flags.

> Speculation: it may have been taken away for "abuse", either automatically or by an editor who disagreed with too many of your flags.

Hmmm I guess no good deed goes unpunished:)

For me, it only appears if I click on the 'link' link.

Mine disappeared too after I started using it extensively in the 'new' section for dupes & spammers, it came back briefly but it's been gone for weeks.

Thanks for the list. It's been a while since I've spidered HN into another good daily read, but I've got a good candidate in http://www.corante.com/, via 'idlewords.

I try not to pay attention to articles about Apple here, because it really does bring out some strong emotions. Logic goes out the window and everything reads like a love sonnet written by a retarded monkey. It's stressful and unfun.

Reddit solved this problem, kind-of-sort-of, with subreddits. If all you care about is programming, visit the programming subreddit. Unfortunately, the comments on Reddit are extremely low-quality (even on /r/programming), so it's not actually worth visiting. But maybe this could save HN for a few more months.

I have a friend that says an addiction is something you do not for enjoyment, but because you have to. I sort of feel this way about HN now; I come here out of habit and feel weird if I pull away, but most of the articles aren't that enjoyable. The ones that are are easily ruined by jackasses (someone called me "an internet toughguy" for suggesting that he might be misusing the debugger).

It's probably time for moderation or something like Stack Overflow's editing and flagging system. It's too easy to post bad comments (look at my history, I do it), and while one bad comment is OK, 100 bad comments is not. If we could just kill the flamewars or edit them to be nicer, the would could be a better place. People will whine about the integrity of the site, but you know what? Who cares. We already have too many users. I don't think anything else will save HN from becoming another Reddit.

Or, maybe HN is "done" and the cool people have already found another place, and we just aren't invited.

> Reddit solved this problem, kind-of-sort-of, with subreddits. If all you care about is programming, visit the programming subreddit. Unfortunately, the comments on Reddit are extremely low-quality (even on /r/programming), so it's not actually worth visiting. But maybe this could save HN for a few more months.

I think there's a very simple solution to this problem.

First of all, I feel that Reddit has an excellent codebase - for example, it is much more feature-rich than Arc (HN's codebase). So I'd recommend using the Reddit codebase for a site that fixes these issues, but that's a minor concern and can always be changed later.

Now Quora has taken the approach of removing anonymity, which I feel isn't correct because it can stifle discussion. A better approach would be to simply charge a nominal fee (a few dollars per month) to enable posting, which would make it much easier to keep track of and ban trolls. Moreover, if the community were to grow large enough, this money might actually be useful in terms of maintenance costs, etc.

Of course, just like Quora, viewing the site should be possible for anyone. The aim should be to set a high enough standard for discourse that people are willing to pay requisite few dollars per month to access the site.

Edit: I don't know if this would be a good idea (haven't really thought about the repercussions), but perhaps adding a "penalty fee" to the next month's monthly fee if one accumulates a large number of downvotes would be another way of stopping trollish comments. And perhaps doing the opposite as well - reducing the monthly fee for users who generate a large amount of insightful discussion.

Metafilter charges you $5 to gain the ability to post. It's a little better than Reddit, but ultimately the discussion software is so bad it's hard to tell if this works or not. Threaded comments encourage back-and-forth and nitpicking over details. Sometimes these become flamewars when people start calling other people names. On the other side of the coin, there is flat commenting. That tends to become one-liners and "like!" instead of anything valuable.

The problem with community sites is that communities are not good at enforcing what they want. Stack Overflow is a good example of this: ask a question like "What's your favorite food to eat while programming", and you get a million karma points. Solve someone's super-obscure bug and provide a detailed answer, you get one or two points.

I think my ultimate solution will be to return to blogging, and when I read an interesting article, write a detailed response. Then I will ignore the rest of the discussion.

> Metafilter charges you $5 to gain the ability to post. It's a little better than Reddit, but ultimately the discussion software is so bad it's hard to tell if this works or not.

I had forgotten about Metafilter. It's been around since 1999, which is probably the reason for the poor site design. But that also shows that it's possible to create a social news website that doesn't turn to trash within 5 years.

I'd say that it's worth giving a Reddit clone with a Metafilter-style pay-to-post system a shot. I'd do it myself, but I don't possess the requisite time or non-technical knowledge. Hopefully someone does, because I could see myself paying $5/month for a social news site that can indefinitely restrict itself to intelligent and on-topic commentary.

> I think my ultimate solution will be to return to blogging, and when I read an interesting article, write a detailed response. Then I will ignore the rest of the discussion.

I like this option as well, but primarily for a different reason. It's a well-known fact that our brains are plastic, and I've noticed that my shift from reading and writing long-form, thorougly reviewed pieces to short-form comments (like the one I'm writing right now) has severely affected my ability to hunker down and concentrate on detailed work.

Perhaps it's just that my expectations aren't that high, but I don't particularly share the OP's commiserations regarding HN. I still think it's a nice site that provides me with news and corresponding insightful commentary on the latest in the startup/tech scene. However, for the sake of my intellect, I probably need to start cutting back on the internet in general and return to reading more books.

Unfortunately, the internet is quite the addiction, so it's a bit of a struggle to take the first step ;/

Love the dig, in response to a post lamenting emotional and inciting comments and topics. By the same token, I could say that I avoid the Google posts here for the same reason. Except I don't, because I recognize that it's human nature to defend and glorify the groups you "belong" to, and I don't take it personally.

I take it personally. We are supposed to be a group of smarter-than-average people; we should be able to put tribalism aside and discuss actual details.

People use any Apple article to bash Android. People use any Android article to bash Apple. If we could stay on topic, we could avoid a lot of discussion. An article about the iPhone 5 is not the time to complain about the App Store submission policies. An article about the new Samsung tablet is not the time to complain about some API detail in Android's ListBox control.

The reason I stopped reading Slashdot many years ago is because every discussion seemed the same as the last one. In terms of Apple vs. Software Freedom or whatever we want to call it; there's nothing more to add. Either you like Apple's tight control or you don't. It's been discussed and it's boring and emotional now. So there's no point in bringing it up anymore, right?

Anyway, we need to be more aggressive about staying on topic. Digressions are fine if new territory is being covered. But if you have to post the same comment in five different articles, You're Doing It Wrong.

I mean that I am making myself feel worse for reading HN...

That's a signal that your focus has shifted a little too much from your own work to HN. Take a day off and invest that energy back where it belongs. We'll be here when you get back. Promise.

</lightHeartedAttemptAtEmpathyAndEncouragement>

EDIT: Added tags (Lighten up you guys).

Rather than interpreting his essay as a sign of HN becoming too important in his life, I think it's more accurate to say that he values HN and feels that a blog post is a good way to contribute useful ideas back to the community.

Correct, but sometimes it is best to just ignore what is happening and accept that these are just opinions. Once you let it go once or twice, it becomes much easier to just ignore threads that add no value.

Yes, but it's also reasonable to say that HN is a distraction, and the more time you spend on it, the more you tune in to the various tribes and trends and stuff -- whether they actually exist, or not.

(Every attempt so far to objectively measure any decline in discourse on HN has failed, so I try to remain consciously skeptical of any claims to that effect.)

I do this as a conscious self-correction now. Any time I find myself getting wound up by something on HN -- which, fortunately, isn't very often any more -- I try to leave it for a few days, or more. When I come back, it's magically a better place.

Not that I want raganwald to go away for a while. His name is one that I appreciate seeing in comment threads. :-)

>That's a signal that your focus has shifted a little too much from your own work to HN.

Amusing that to be the only reason is significantly oversimplifying.

The HN community is at best corrosive to the reader that is looking for technology and some buisness discussion. I made the mistake of assuming thats what I'd find here; once I got rid of silly notion, I found I no longer had a ill feeling when I went back to work after my lunch break.

Yeah, it's hard to say what - if anything - to do about this. Like you say, if you post a reply to a comment that you downvoted, you are - arguably - just adding more noise. But, then again, people always complain about "ninja downvoting" and say "if you're going to downvote me, at least tell me why."

But the last time I left a reply to something I downvoted, my reply in turn got downvoted pretty quickly (although it eventually go voted back up to a neutral score of 1), which left me questioning the wisdom of doing that. And the sad thing is, the comment in question was one of those that centered around one of those possible "group think" scenarios... so I don't know if I just got downvoted by members of the "other camp" or by (more or less) neutral observers who don't support leaving replies explaining why you find a comment troublesome.

Uuugggh.... there's no way to win. Maybe we need /. style moderation so you can tag a comment as "off topic" or whatever when you downvote...

As to the bigger question of eliminating the "tribalism," hhhmmm... I wish I had an answer, but sadly I can't say I do. Maybe your post will at least raise awareness of the issue and will help a bit?

>Like you say, if you post a reply to a comment that you downvoted, you are - arguably - just adding more noise. //

Personally I think HN has degraded vastly since we lost scores. I see far more downvotes for disagreement and apparently less interest in supporting good argument.

It's really hard now to read HN and get much from it unless the topic is one you want to read every single comment on.

I hope I'm not dragging things away from the OP main point but I feel this is not unrelated to it.

I agree, invisible comment scores add noise, because if I read something I agree strongly with I feel compelled to show my approval. In the old days clicking the up-arrow would show a suitable quantum of approval, but nowadays I sometimes feel compelled to add a comment which just says "I agree" and perhaps adds some minor extra point.

While typing this comment it occurred to me that this comment falls into that very category. Whoops.

Going even further and showing the actual voters, in addition to the score (like kuro5hin does) can also sometimes remove the need to post. I especially miss it here at the end of an exchange, where I want to say something like "good point" or "well I still disagree but your argument is a good one". On k5, I'd just vote "3" on that comment, which they would then be able to see I upvoted. Here it feels like I need to post an acknowledgement, or else it feels like I've rudely just ignored a good criticism or went off in a huff, because there's no silent way to signal that I'm breaking off the conversation amicably.

I also find it useful as a way of recognizing names. If a comment of mine gets 10 upvotes here, I know that some amphormous subset of readers liked my comment, but I don't build any recognition of who.

I'm not sure I care about the voters per se but perhaps about the filtering ability that one gets by taking extra note of recognised voters. I think that I'd prefer to be able to, say, give a bonus to votes by people who I've also upvoted ... the more I think about it the more I'm thinking how good slashdot's voting system is, OK I wouldn't adopt it wholesale but it's vastly superior to what we have here now I think.

Is there any reason I can't have something vote numbers and vote inflation whilst others have only flagging with no vote scores?

I strongly agree as well.

I have always felt that visible scores helped provide extra signal, and argued against removing them.

The problem is that you're having a difference of opinion with someone, who uses the downvote to disagree with you in the strongest possible way. As long as HN allows up/down votes this problem will exist. They are two fundamentally flawed tools that result in quarrels and mistrust.

I've read so many meta articles (including ones I've written) that I'm beginning to get a bit lost. Didn't raganwald already write something like this? Maybe a couple of times?

I float in and out of the community, sometimes being gone for a week and sometimes checking everyday. For many years. As we all know, meta commentary is not new here.

Yes, the magic sauce has worn off. People who spend weeks working on things are treated with easy criticism -- there's a reason PG asked for us to "be nice" to the new bunch of YC guys. People who post fluffy group-think are rewarded. What this leads to is more and more fluff, less and less real work that we can help with by commenting. Since we are more likely to be emotionally moved by things that are higher on the list, we feel as if we must comment [insert self-serving reason here]. This leads to comment-bloat, especially as traffic numbers soar.

I wish I had some secret formula to make it all better, but the way the site is structured, emotional response rules, not quality. When you vote up, you are saying "hell yeah!" not "my logical brain has deduced this to be of higher quality than average" -- at least in the aggregate. So the site is performing exactly as it should, sadly.

Doesn't this post simply contribute to the problem, though? I mean, if Raganwald wants the community to be more focused on content, rather than pointless meta-discussion, shouldn't he or she post content? I mean, all this post serves to do is give even more attention to the hipsters and trolls.

My recommendation? If you see a comment that's clearly off-topic, vote it down if you're able or ignore it if you're not. Even if you disagree with the content of the comment, don't respond to it. If its a thread; scroll past it without stopping. If enough people do this, the HN algorithm will push these off-topic threads to the bottom, where they'll slowly wither away.

Only works for top-level threads though. A bad response to a highly-rated OP will continue to hang out near the top of the page.

It's a genuine problem, what do you do with bad comments? The average bad commenter is a fifteen-year-old boy with strongly held yet poorly developed opinions. If you downvote them without replying, then you wind up with an angry commenter who thinks their opinions are being shut down by the community, and they'll probably feel compelled to keep posting them LOUDER and MORE EXTREME. But if you reply to them and explain why their comments are bad, you start a rather boring thread.

Neither option seems particularly good.

This problem is easy to solve. Downvote bad comments and bring in active moderators whose job is to message users that show a pattern of writing bad comments and help them do better. If the user doesn't improve over time, ban. There must be a hundred competent people who would be willing to assume this position.

>Only works for top-level threads, though. A bad response to a highly rated OP will continue to hang out near the top of the page.

Yeah, this is why I wish HN had collapsible comments (like Reddit, or even Slashdot). In that way, you could simply collapse irrelevant comments and ignore them. Having comments that can't be collapsed makes this much more difficult, as even a comment that's been downvoted into oblivion still takes up space and forces you to scroll more in order to get to the stuff that you are interested in.

If you're using Chrome, check out Hacker News Collapse: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bbkfcamiocfccgmcjn...

Two problems with this post: 1-it severely exaggerates the personal attacks 2-it ignores the comments that led to the 'ad-hominem attacks'

The comment that started the 'attacks' was: "Steve Jobs touched people lives in a way no other can, sometimes at a very personal level". I find this comment completely ridiculous. I own an iphone and use a mac, I'm not an apple hater, but I do hate irrational fanboys. Comments that drip fanboyism and go well past rational discussion should be downvoted, not people posting responses. The responses were slightly aggressive, but they were responses to a terrible comment.

I agree with the sentiment but here's the thing...

The type of person to post an insult or an ad hominem is probably not the type of person who would read this post much less care what it has to say. Because for someone to read this they'd have to care about the impact they have on the community and there's no way an insult or ad hominem can have a positive impact on the community. They are, by definition, expressions of pure negativity so their intent is unquestionably negative.

(and don't even get me started on the people who upvote such posts)

So you can't just say "lets all get together and fix this" because the people who would answer your call aren't the people causing the problem. Then the question becomes "how do you deal with the people causing the problem".

The only answer I can see is banning. Because said group is made out of two types of people: Those who don't care about the community and those who care about the community but care about expressing their own anger more. So the first group just won't care and the second group can't help themselves.

But then the question is "Do you really want Hacker News to be a place where people get banned on a regular basis?". First I don't think pg even has the time for that and second I think most would find that off putting.

So (and pardon me for the long comment here) we end up where we started. Trying to be civil and interact with the civil members of the community while trying to ignore those who don't care about civility.

I would love there to be varied flag options for comments. i.e. you click "Flag" and it spawns a dropdown with:

"Off-topic" "Rude" "Ad Hominem" "Straw Man"

If enough flaggers agree on the lack of value (and the reason for it), punt it AND ALL OF THE REPLIES.

Agree 100%. I'd add it should be a separate score too... No one would want to be a high scorer in these areas...

One thing that StackOverflow does really well is penalize you for downvoting: http://stackoverflow.com/privileges/vote-down

Each downvote costs you karma. You have to have "X" karma before downvoting is enabled for your account. This incentivizes you to downvote cautiously as it costs you. That subpar comment you're clicking the down-arrow for must have really earned it.

I definitely share this experience, for instance in many of the recent "Groupon is a scam" threads, or anything having to do with Android. It becomes a disincentive to participate in conversations about certain topics.

I think one thing that might help, and that often spurs relatively useless chains of comments, is to clarify exactly when a post should be downvoted. I think some people use downvoting to express disagreement, but since downvoting not only compromises someone's reputation (via karma) but also minimizes the visibility of the comment, the effect is punishment for that disagreement, which again motivates me at least to avoid controversial topics where I seem to hold an uncommon view.

I find that the worst area of discussion is intellectual property law.

>I find that the worst area of discussion is intellectual property law.

IP discussions are a veritable oasis of circumspection compared to "Macbook Pro gets new battery" threads.

My suggestion is to upvote all that you find here that is thoughtful and helpful. Upvote a comment (or story) that makes you think. Upvote a comment (or story) that "gratifies [your] intellectual curiosity." Upvote comments that ask other commenters please to provide information backing up their opinions. Upvote other comments that provide other thoughtful guidance to the discussion or new information beyond what is already posted in the submitted article or in other comments. Upvote to mark and thank the good. Since no one has the time to read the site exhaustively, not even any one of the curators, mostly ignore the bad and crowd it out with the good.

Sorry, but I don't see this as a big issue. Discussing Apple is disproportionately interesting because of the reactions it invokes.

Whenever there is a major story about Apple, there will typically be a tribal war because Apple has positioned itself as a tribal artifact (e.g. think differently, I'm a Mac, dolphin shorts v. grey suits)...

And forgive me for being a cynic, but it wouldn't surprise me if Job's resignation had been sitting in a can to be used in the case of fire...and yesterday morning, Apple's security incompetence regarding OSX Lion had all the makings of a major PR fire which has now been swept off everyone's radar screen like so much anthrax after 911.

I wonder what this would look like in a two-column view, with one column for discussion, and a smaller margin to the side for metadiscussion. Maybe some kind of mechanism to boot a single comment to one side or the other, and an option as a reader to ignore metacommentary.

I don't know how best to moderate or otherwise encourage better HN participation (or how to improve forums, or mailing lists, or tweet streams, or whatever they invent or rename tomorrow), but I have a thought.

Can we apply a "who cares?" ethos/filter to our comments? I.e., if I am about to post a comment, before I do so I ask myself "who cares about this comment?" If the answer is Probably Nobody, then I don't post it. Simple, right?

I do this all the time. I probably write and delete five comments for every comment I post here.

A second question to ask the question is, is my comment adding anything to the discussion that isn't already glaringly obvious? If it's obvious, but I want to nitpick or clarify...maybe just sit on it for a while and see if the urge to comment fades?

With smaller communities, we don't have to apply such harsh filters because hey, who cares, there's 10 of us. We can hash it out amongst us. But with a huge community like HN, if 9999 out of 10000 subscribers resist the urge to comment but just one does, that makes what, 50 comments? 500 nowadays? 5000?

What I'm saying is, I think HN comments would be a great deal better off if everyone just sat back and said "hey, do we really need yet another armchair CEO quarterbacking on Monday (I'm not going to bother getting those idioms right) about Steve Jobs' legacy and the future of Apple, from the wizened perspective of another college student (or in my case, .NET dev)?" Even I'm following the Book of Graham and disagreeing properly and writing well-formed sentences and generally making my points clearly, am I just adding noise? Does it matter if anyone reads my comment?

HN would be better if everyone just, just resisted the urge to comment and let the real experts talk. Most of us already do, but there's just too many of us now for "most of us" to be good enough.

One approach would be to separate content-based comments from meta comments, and create a culture where if you post a meta comment in the mainline, you're likely to get down voted.

Metafilter seems to have a fair amount of success with this strategy ("take it to meta"), but often it requires the moderators to intervene and remove a few comments. I suspect that having active moderators and a clear procedure for handling "off-topic" posts is key.

Do it algorithmically like a flag -- if enough people click "move to meta" it gets moved automatically.

Yeah, I think that would work here. Might not on MeFi.

Have read the article, and read through all 97 comments that had been left here as of the time of this posting. And this comes back to something I know has been discussed at least a few times before. Essentially that many good sites started with a high Signal to Noise ratio. Then more folks found out about them, and they added more signal, but variety started to creep in, and what is signal to me may be noise to you, and vice versa. Which means that there may actually be MORE signal to noise now, but for the average user/reader there appears to be less because the signal they are interested in is diluted.

There have been a number of answers to this, and each of them can be found to have evolved essentially from UseNet News and various simple BBS and/or FidoNet BBS programs. Not a one of them is perfect (obviously or the discussion would be unnecessary).

I "personally" think the best answer is to have a site where the "main" board is run by a benevolent dictator, who also has to monitor other boards off the main board but has no similar moderation on those boards. Allows the main board to develop a personality that you can rely on, while insuring that differing views get their day in the sun, and allow for the growth of new moderators over time.

I used to run a C64 BBS and wrote and ran an Amiga BBS, and so have at least some experience to validate my opinion. I suppose if I'm serious about this being the answer I should be willing to set such a place up and see if people would actually like it. One person below mentioned a Metafilter $5 to "subscribe" to post model, but I'm not sure how that would work as a long term model - though I suspect I would prefer that to having something overrun with ads.

Anyway, there's my .02 cents. <- Actually that might be an answer worth looking into too. The postal service once looked at offering e-stamps to give you guaranteed delivery and some level of authentication per message. Perhaps if folks had to pay for each post (even nominally) that would be another option. For your consideration...

Is it really that bad? HN is still an oasis of civil discourse in a desert of internet trolls.

More important than the civil discourse is that HN discussions are generally intelligent due to the high number of really fucking smart people who participate. That along with the karma system keeps much of the trolling in check.

I think it eventually becomes a question not of "is it better than the alternatives?" but "is it good enough for me to contribute my time?".

I've seen two general solutions to the flamewars problem over a quarter century's exposure to numerous online (and offline) fora.

The first is to keep a group small and tightly cohesive. It may be apparent to some that this solution Does Not Scale.

The second is to have a well-designed, equitably and expeditiously utilized content moderation system. It may be known to some who've attempted same that This Is Hard.

Berating people may have certain effects. They tend not to be long-lasting or particularly scalable.

Ultimately, if HN wants to maintain a high S/N ratio, it's going to have to improve its community (by exclusion), its tools, and/or its policing of comments ultimately overseen by a trusted oligarchy (though general inputs may and generally should be used).

Most likely a mix of all three.

As communities grow they need to fragment. Without fragmenting, how a story does becomes sensitive to initial conditions and subject to information cascade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade). We still don't know how to manage this gracefully.

I used to read HN because as an engineer it gave me some insight into startup culture, of which I'm not a part. Now I'm close to giving up on HN because of what raganwald is describing.

In some ways HN is becoming like Usenet, which I still sorely miss, but without the ability to have different groups. A large chunk of HN commentary squarely belongs in the x.y.z.advocacy bucket and the fact that we have voting but no comment scores gives us the worst of both worlds.

The only reason I'm still reading HN is because it's HN, not because of the actual content.

There's an opportunity to use the user base and combine it with a tag and user based algorithm to create a custom view into content. Not sure how hard it would be to implement but if I could pick the users I like and the tags I like, give each of them a specific weight and see a sorted view of topics and comments I'd be happier.

"But here's the thing. It's a big world. Like a democracy, you have to go along with where everybody goes."

I don't agree with how this sentence is formulated. Most of the time I haven't personally really liked to go in the same direction as everybody else. It's just boring. Most of the time I prefer to take a path that hasn't been walked by anyone else and discover something new for myself.

Of course, in the context of the article the sentence is to be regarded narrower and the point is illustrating is to have a HN Community that's organized and follows some rules.Which I agree with. But the way it's formulated illustrates this mindset that in this big world we should all embrace whatever the crowd likes, which IMHO is just wrong.

The only thing that really worries me is that some of the content-free negative remarks about Gruber/Apple/Groupon/et actually seem to get upvoted rather than buried these days.

I always felt HN as a community was a little too strict by even downvoting some genuinely funny remarks, but it seemed to work in keeping a high quality of discourse. It baffles me how the same community can nowadays upvote ad hominem attacks. Something about HN's ability to police itselfs seems a bit broken lately.

I hate it when mum and dad argue.

We all have our respective ecosystems wherein we do our business - iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, people who want you to know where they are right now, people who don't. So we suckle at the teat of our respective vendors, hoping they'll ruffle our hair and feature our app in their app store, or pat us on the back and whitelist us for their streaming API. Or buy us a pony, and buy us.

But right now, as at various points in the history of the computing industry, mum and dad have locked themselves in the car, turned the radio up, and started yelling at each other at the top of their voices. We might not understand why grown ups get angry about patents, or whatever else they argue about, but we love mum and dad, and we can't emotionally process what's happening between them. So we get angry too. And we lash out at our brothers and our sisters who grew up just trying to do the same things we did - be strong, happy, successful. Kids take after their parents, and right now the adults in the tech industry are fighting loudly and emotionally.

Let's hope for a reconciliation soon. At Macworld 1997, when Microsoft and Apple renewed their vows, and both emerged stronger than ever. It can happen again, we just need to try and not tear each other apart in the meantime.

HN members' opinions of themselves are inflated and entertaining. I really enjoy the stream of sometimes-interesting links posted on the front page. I also get a kick out of the navel-gazing, the smug self-congratulations, the herding, the tempests in various teapots, while kettles are black. The content contributors think the site is about them, while it is really about maintaining a halo effect for a startup incubator.

>>> MrMan 14 minutes ago | link | parent | flag

I don't mean to be condescending, but you do know that you just proved his point, right?

Comment down/up votes have to go. People should be adult enough to be able read a post without someone telling them what's readworthy or not. Life is not a popularity contest where you tally how many points you've gotten for playing the game well.

Members should, however, be able to flag comments that violate the guidelines so that the mods can deal with spam and other transgressions.

Not everyone looks at it as a popularity contest though. A lot of people look at it as "holy shit, there are a hundred comments in this thread, I don't have time to read them all, and I'm glad I can see what the collective opinion is about which ones are worth reading first". The "popularity contest" aspect of it is a problem, but the "popularity" aspect of it isn't.

Just to prove my point, I'm getting downvoted for the comment above :) Some people simply cannot handle the downvote.

What the downvotes probably indicate is that your argument is not well supported with detailed rationales and relevant examples. In other words, downvotes are a sign that your post could benefit from additional editing in the near term.

Taking downvotes as either a failure to communicate your ideas, or as the price for saying what you feel you must is the healthiest approach.

BTW, I didn't vote on it.

This isn't really the sort of thing that can be supported with relevant examples. It's just an idea. And I think it's an idea worth discussing -- what might happen to the discussion if moderation were removed completely?

But I happen to disagree (for reasons stated elsewhere) and suspect that the folks who did downvote this also disagreed. And that's the other problem with invisible comment scores -- I think it's legit to downvote something merely for disagreeing if it has +30 karma, but not if it has just +1. But you can never tell.

If it can't be supported with relevant examples or detailed rationales, then what is it contributing? And if it is not contributing, then isn't downvoting appropriate?

And a comment score debate is pulsu equus mortuus.

Yes. Even if I partly disagree with you, I upvoted you. Actually, I find myself upvoting comments that are in a negative territory and that present a valid point more often than good comments that are in a positive territory!

I believe we need upvotes for the reasons hugh3 mentioned. Regarding downvotes, there should be a cost, like with StackOverflow where each downvote costs you one reputation point.

Another orthogonal dimension to voting could be agree/disagree. I saw this on a national news forum and it's quite useful (e.g., 5 people agreed, 100 people disagreed).

I like this idea. Four buttons: "good comment", "bad comment", "I agree" and "I disagree".

Agreement vs disagreement would be displayed but would not determine comment position or commenter karma. Comment quality would determine comment position and give the commenter karma, but it would not be displayed.

I don't know if it's right for HN, but I'd like to see a site which did implement this kind of two-dimensional voting.

PS. Good comment, I agree!

I disagree, but am upvoting you anyway because you were in negative territory. Comment scores are necessary because:

a) Not everybody has time to read every comment on every thread, and

b) The scores provide a slight psychological reward for writing good comments, thus encouraging that sort of behaviour.

Forums without comment scores usually wind up looking like a complete mess.

Yes, either scores or scrap voting. I don't think this middle way works at all.

My sense is that the threads of discussion raganwald mentions have increased since losing the comment karma score. The absence of a number next to each comment has made it impossible for me to instantly filter what's worth reading and what isn't. When I see a long thread of comments responding to a low karma comment, I know it's a debate I can probably ignore.

The last poll pg ran asking if people wanted karma totals back demonstrated overwhelming support for them. That was months ago, so there must be some compelling reason they're not back, but I certainly think they would go a long way to making HN comments more readable. At least, they do for me, and I'm the only one I can speak for!

Would be cool to A/B test the comment scores. All HN readers would see identical frontpage. Half of HN readers would see comment threads with scores. Other half of readers would see comment threads without scores. After a day or so the most active/interesting threads would be compared. How did threads with comment scores evolve vs. threads without comment scores?

The results could be interesting. My opinion is that comment scores should be absent (like the current state). I think they lead to snow-balling effects. Lazy readers just go with the group's opinion instead of forming their own.

I'm having a similar thought, there may be a UI fix for such things. While I dislike reddit, one of the features I miss is the 'collapse thread' - sign. Once I realize a thread is unlikely to contain useful info, I collapse the whole thing and move on to the next thread.

On HN, i have to scroll past the rest of the thread and do visual/mental work to figure out where it ends.

I think people expect too much from hacker news (or any similar site). Every post isn't going to be scintillating, or every comment insightful. Some of that is the posts, but a lot of it is what we bring to reading them -- we are all different, in our desires/tolerances/history. Your "funny" might be my "trivial" or vice-versa. A repost that bores you might be news to me.

So, my answer is to mostly just skip conversations that bore/irritate me. I'm not perfect; sometimes I forget and jump in. But little of use seems to come from that. It's more effective to just skip them and look for something else interesting to do.

Unfortunately the Apple x non-Apple discussion is spreading all over the internet. I avoid almost all discussion about Android or Apple topics because of it. Engadget became an unbearable flame-wars hell and I really, really hope that HN don't follow this path. As someone who like both sides, owning android phones and mac computers, I really don't understand why some people are so fiercily defenders of one of this sides instead of trying to find the best from both.

I see the potshots, but it's mostly confined to threads spawned from potshot bait.

I think the issue is that the potshot bait is starting to overwhelm the first few pages like a lazy bacteria. And we just ran out of antibiotics. I know I've been reading HN a lot less over the last several months. It might not be reflective of any real reality, but an idea can turn real if enough people start to believe it.

I wonder how the site (or a similar one) would work where there was a fixed number of memberships, say 5000. If the max number is reached, new people can only join when others leave, like a club. If you don't use your membership for a period of time, you are automatically unregistered. Spammers and others lowering the quality will be unregistered as well.

Find a place on the internet where discussion of Apple doesn't erupt into controversy. I also disagree with the sentiment that something needs to be done to fix civility on HN. This entire meta-discussion is a self correcting mechanism in action, we'll see a wave of civility for a week and then things will go back to normal.

As mentioned in the article, one problem is that people use the down arrow to disagree. Perhaps there shouldn't be a down arrow. Instead there should be a few buttons, such as "Off Topic" and "Offensive". I think presentation can help guide those people who aren't consciously being cynical and combative.

I was hoping that the OP would use that post as a chance to discourage "disagreement downvoting".

To my fellow Hacker News contributors: Use downvoting on comments that are in bad faith, do not add value, are ad hominem or are otherwise low quality. Do not use downvoting to disagree.

I downvote any comment containing the word "fanboy", and I encourage my fellow readers to do the same.

I'm voting you up.

"Fanboy" is the most destructive meme to rational discourse ever to emerge on the Internet. In a single word we reduce any debate to YouTube-style mudslinging. The concept of "fanboy" has some limited utility in that people do clearly blind themselves to flaws in products (or ideologies!) in order to avoid cognitive dissonance and protect their own identity, but any tiny value in expressing this concept is overwhelmed by the destructive nature of its use in discourse. The fact is everyone has blind spots, and "fanboy" is just shorthand for "your opinion is meaningless noise, but I'm going to respond to it anyway with my own meta noise." Furthermore, the word is most often used by people who are equally as irrational as the one they are accusing.

Downvoting any comment calling someone else a "fanboy" is a good idea, and I think one concrete action that can help HN if only in a small way.

I suggest we use the word "lemming" instead. If someone is willing to walk off a cliff to obtain a new phone, it seems like the right word to use. Also, you can press that button at the bottom of the screen and they all blow up.

instead. in-stead. Okay, if you absolutely must go ad-hominem then I suppose "sheep" or "lemming" is less vapid. But seriously this sentiment is way overused.

I have nothing to add other than I agree with the premise of the article, and I expect this thread is going to be very meta.

edit Raganwald, your voice here is generally one of the better ones. I really don't get this hangup on DF posts. So I say the below with much respect.end edit

I mean, if the problem is thread noise, how does adding comments complaining about noise lessen the noise?

There's four ways to lessen noise and increase signal:

1) Not posting the junk links to predictable and uninsightful DF posts is the best.

2) Flagging till removal is a close second, and increases signal.

3) Writing a blog post full of the same kind of meta-comment noise that just shows up in the comments, then posting it here is a distant third.

4) Barring that complaining until it goes away works as a fourth.

I haven't flagged the last couple that made it to the front page because they were genuinely interesting or insightful. But I'm one of those that swears that I will flag any DF posts where Gruber weaves a fantastic tale of twisted circumstances where Apple should be the villain in that tale, but Gruber finds some ridiculous and transparent angle where he believes they come out smelling like roses.

Here's the relevant thread between us on this

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2890855

It's not the triteness of Gruber's Apple fanboyism, it's the ever present front pagedness of these predictable bizarre posts of his and the subsequent completely predictable pages upon pages of comments pointing out that his post is predictable that I think lessens the value of HN and do not further the conversation.

According to the guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

These types of posts by Gruber fail this test. They aren't interesting and they don't gratify anybody's intellectual curiosity.

"What does Gruber think about this potentially bad thing about Apple?" always has a knowable answer. There is nothing to be curious about.

Another guideline

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

These Gruber fanboy posts serve no purpose but to spark a possible flamewar. Like I said above, they are predictable and the response is predictable. There's no reasoning over his posts.

Apple could fuel their next generation of mobile computing devices with the still beating hearts of Tibetan orphans and Gruber would find a way to spin that into some bold and brilliant strategy where Apple is helping pull Tibet into first world-dom by eliminating their orphan problem.

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

This is the point where everybody here is basically going against this guideline. Flagging is the appropriate response and less complaining about yet another Gruber fanboy post is the best course.

In fairness saying you will flag them is a powerful signal to stop posting these things and stop wasting everybody's time and improve the signal-noise ratio.

Groupthink is a consequence of karma based non-anonymous discussion systems. You can't do much about it.

This post has absolutely nothing to do with technology news.

It's entirely meta.

My head is exploding.

More meta.

Recursion

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