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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 and over time has been replaced by an emergent tribal system, wars, etc.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whose desire for a kind of interactivity is no longer satisfied by the voting system; for them, pile-on voting has been replaced by pile-on posting (albeit often in the more thoughtful HN style).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!)

> 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.

"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.

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.