Commenting, community deterioration, and Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Commenting, community deterioration, and Hacker News

jseliger.com

209 pointsjseliger114 comments

I hadn't looked at the comments on the story about the girl who died till now. I am so embarrassed for this community. I feel like this is the worst I've ever seen people behave on this site.

Here's some general advice: if you find yourself beginning a comment on a thread about someone who has just died with a disclaimer of the form "I hate to be that guy" or "I hate to write this," just don't say it.

I find comments that start off like that extremely disingenuous. Whenever someone says "I <some adjective>, but..." I see that as "I don't want to offend anyone reading this because I don't want to get into an argument and/or don't want downvotes, but I'm going to say this anyway because this is how I really feel." Things like "I'm sorry, but...", "I hate to tell you this, but..." or "This is a great idea, but..." sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) have good intentions (like pointing out flaws in a website or bringing up an interesting point in the topic) but to me they end up sounding quite pompous and, in this case, offensive.

I find that if you add a 'but' to any sentence you just invalidated whatever came before it. A good rule to keep in mind.

   "All colors are made of light, but black is the absence of light."

   "It looks like you covered all of the key issues, but you missed this one..."

   "I agree with everything you said but this one thing..."

   "I am not a lawyer, but it looks like it could be interpreted..."

I think you guys are just making these rules up, but maybe it is still good to keep them in mind, even if they aren't always true.

Would you consider adding that general advice to the official guidelines? The problem with "Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation." is that there are plenty of people in life (maybe just in hacker circles, but my sample is thoroughly biased) who would say outrageous things that they would start with a disclaimer in a face to face conversation.

Actually I feel one of the benefits of the internet is that one can say things that wouldn't go down well in a face-to-face conversation. Not everything that makes sense is easy to accept.

The conversation about this is virtually identical on Slashdot, including the reflective thoughts on moderation and community.

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/01/15/1937259/progra...

Perhaps it's valid to note that the story provoked polarized reactions and thoughts, and thus better avoid putting each other down for those reactions.

Sadly, we're reaching the limits of the karma system.

I'm working on an upgrade, details (or lack thereof) can be found lower on the page.

Those comments are lamentable. However one of those you mention was made by an extremely active 4 year old account. The other was made by a relatively young one.

These are examples of 'bad' comments, rather than just 'noise'. However I think they both have the same immediate cause - community acceptance. For some reason the posts with little content are being rewarded. Discussions on how to change this (via the voting system or otherwise) have happened many times but I think more needs to be done.

As to why the community accepted such a negative comment I have no idea - and fixing this may be much harder.

Quickly checking in to respond, as the "extremely active 4 year old account" in question...

The comment was clearly poorly phrased. When I made it, there were no negative comments on the story, and it was really just intended to question the "programmer prodigy" aspect, not to criticise the deceased or imply that she was not an impressive young person.

I hate (!) to discard any part of the english language; I think all expressions have their place, including "I hate to be that guy, but" - however, in hindsight, the net effect was to lump my relatively neutral comment in with all the haters on the thread, so, in practice, it was proven to be a poor choice.

That said, I do dislike the habit of idolising deceased people as perfect in every way. It reminds me of the "HN Salesmanship hero" story (where I commented that he wasn't my hero and I resented this attribution, for which I got badly downvoted). This person was clearly impressive without making stuff up about them. From all the comments and interviews, it in fact seems that her programming ability, far from being prodigy-like, was in fact the least impressive of her other personal traits.

To conclude: had I known that there would be a pile-up of hateful belittling following my comment, I wouldn't have made it, or if I felt the need to ask that question, I would have done so in a much more carefully phrased way. I fully take the blame for not realising that this type of thread could descend down to that level, but my intention was certainly not to belittle.

Death is generally a touchy subject, if you were commenting on someone that had not just passed away I don't think the comment would have come off nearly as bad.

I agree with the post about thinking before you add something and not being mean for the sake of being mean. I think we also have to be careful here about a culture of groupthink and censoring alternative opinions via very negative feedback.

>it in fact seems that her programming ability, far from being prodigy-like, was in fact the least impressive of her other personal traits.

I dont think its a good idea to make statements like that on someone who is not here anymore to defend herself.

Since I am boing downvoted I would like to add that we must not forget that she was 16 years old.

I dont want to make assumptions about everyone, but she was definitely a far far better programmer than me when I was 16.:(

An interesting quote from the half-beast, and slightly-insane Joseph Stalin -- "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."

Maybe a little bit more understanding is due all around. If I can divide the world into two caricatured groups, we have:

"I can never stop feeling, but sometimes I'm too tired to think" -- rallying around the asinine "prodigy" headline.

"I can never stop thinking, but sometimes I'm too tired to feel" -- rallying around the emotionally tone-deaf responses.

I think we all tend to identify with one side more than the other, but instead of rallying ourselves on either side of the issue, we should see each side as a vital aspect of being human that each of us has, with one side often gaining the upper hand and then getting out of hand. If we want to measure the supposed "decline" of Hacker News by the fact that one side gets out of hand and provokes a response the other, I think both sides need to be held to account. Glurge begets callousness. A pervasive environment of callousness makes glurge seem like a welcome relief. If we want to avoid either, we should avoid both, and that means ignoring offenses instead of responding in kind.

>These are examples of 'bad' comments

They weren't bad comments at all. The circle-the-wagons "we're better than this" reaction is worse.

While a death is usually a tragedy, made magnitudes worse when it's a child, the title of that post was absurd, and it was a giant elephant in the room that simply had to be rationally diffused. Like others I went into that story primarily to read how she was a programming prodigy.

Tragic death. Not a programming prodigy. The misrepresentation was noticed by all, and it will be a sad day when social convention means we all have to carry forward the lie lest we offend someone's sensibility about death.

Upvoted - this [groggles' comment] hits the nail on the head.

PG, given that you gray-out comments that get torrentially downvoted, perhaps you could bold-face (or render in green?) those comments that get a certain number of upvotes, or perhaps those comments that exceed X% of the aggregate number of upvotes for the thread.

I'm really very sorry to hear this.

When I joined HN I decided to do an experiment. On reddit and slashdot, I go under a pseudonym except when I need to make an announcement. But on HN I always go by my own name. The result is dramatic: I'm much more careful and considerate on HN. It's a clear verification of Penny Arcade's famous theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/).

I think that the elimination of anonymity is ultimately the only thing which can keep HN from the inevitable slide toward 4chan that all comment sites are on.

One thing a lack of anonymity forces you to do is to present your entire feelings about a story, instead of the one point that you feel is missing or needs correction. When people present points in isolation, it's easy to get the wrong impression about how they feel.

I didn't comment in the thread under discussion, but if I felt there was one point that needed to be added to the original story, it was the one made by many posters, roughly, "This smells like glurge, and when people are mourning for an inspiring little girl, it's common sense not to take what they say about her at face value." Of course that wouldn't reflect my whole reaction as a human being.

And that's the difference between reacting as a non-anonymous human being, where you are careful to present your whole feelings about a topic, and reacting as a member of a message board, where you're like to dismiss most of what you think and feel as commonplace and not worth mentioning.

Like any problem in communication, it's a problem of readers as well as writers. Reading a message from "asdf1234" or "prgrmrd00d4u" (not real names AFAIK) and reading it as representative of a human being's feelings doesn't make any sense, but it's irresistible for a lot of people. If the nerds on Slashdot and HN can't resist parsing comments that way, I think it's time to give up and accept that as human beings we can only see each other as whole human beings and not merely as contributors to a conversation. So the burden of solving this communication problem is on the writers to act like whole human beings.

The primary psychological resistance -- and believe me, I do rebel against being "human" on a discussion board with every bit of my being -- comes from the fact that most of us would prefer to sound more like scientists than like politicians. Scientists say, "Here is my tiny marginal contribution." Politicians say, "This is who I am." Geeks roll their eyes when a politician answering a question about tax policy in a debate spends all of his allotted time talking about how much he loves his children and then caps it off with half a sentence stating his position on the issue. We hate that and don't want to be like that. We want to hear how he differs from his opponents. We don't want to hear everything he has in common with everyone else. We want the diff.

Our humanity is what we have in common, exactly what is excluded when we present ourselves as a diff. If you read the original discussion and read every comment as a diff, then you don't see comments by inhuman people. You see whole human beings whose common humanity was redacted by the diff filter running between their brains and their keyboards.

Maybe the need to relax that diff filter a little bit so we all sound like human beings needs to be part of a FAQ somewhere....

Facebook knows my True Name, therefore I'm so careful there that I don't say anything controversial or substantive at all. It just gets a bit of cheerful pap, and mostly I don't use it at all. HN get what I'm really thinking about precisely because it's pseudonymous.

Can you explain why you believe this story was appropriate for Hacker News? What discussion was this supposed to generate?

I didn't post the story.

I thought about this for a while and realized after sleeping on it that this quality problem seemed to occur only after points visibility was removed from comments. People can and should be able to say what they want, but if the only public feedback is greying out downvoted comments (negative) then you're losing the positive feedback cycle and hampering the ability of the cybernetic system to regulate itself.

From the discussion here, I conclude this quote is widely accepted among those who provide quality discourse: "I try to comment when I have useful, unique, original, or non-standard things to say." This represents a desire to deliver a certain promised value. When you post on a forum, (or send an email, for that matter) you are making an implicit claim: is worth the audience's time to read your post.

For users like me, there is friction in posting because I have to convince myself that I've satisfied the implicit claim. For others, I assume, this friction is absent. So add it artificially: somehow make the claim explicit.

Maybe require posters to select from a list of categories (e.g. Useful Information, Insightful, Civil Disagreement, ...), explicitly claiming their post meets that criteria. Or, less restrictive: a required checkbox that simply reminds you of the claim you're making with your post.

I think we've reached the stage for an "Ignore" button. Clicking it would make that user invisible to me in the future.

There are some people who I am never going to agree with. Their comments are invariably ignorant or proselytizing or cruel to my eyes. I'd rather not have that.

This is just the type of blog post that we don't need on HN. People said some mean things in that thread, they basically all got downvoted and the top comment is one admonishing them (so do we need it to be dug up again by this article?). Isn't that the comment system working well? Isn't that the proof of where the balance in the community lies? It's a forum open to anyone, not some elite club; if it were a invite only real-name club the voting would hardly be necessary. If it gets to the point of reddit, where ugly things (often disguised as or put inside jokes) are upvoted, then there'd be a point. But it's not at that point and this article is just moral high horsing, performing moral purity in front of an audience.

I see one annoying meme comment per HN session (so maybe 20 comment threads/2-300 comments), and that's only when I choose to highlight the down-voted text myself usually. In an open pseudonymous/anonymous forum that's a pretty decent signal-to-noise ratio. Use the voting system, ban repeat offenders, keep calm and carry on.

I think it's just a matter of numbers. HN links have, on average, always had relatively few comments, so growth is more obvious, even if there were no other difference but numbers. The comment counts number in the dozens to the low hundreds - reading a typical full comment thread doesn't take long.

So if HN doubled in users over the last N months, then even if 95% of the comments are non-abusive, that means the story that used to get 20 comments and have 1 abusive comments now gets 40 comments and 2 abusive comments. And when it comes to mean, shitty stuff like this, 2 seems like a lot more than 1. And that's with 95% good-guys. When a bigger story happens and gets 240 comments, at 95% positive comments, that's 12 worthless or mean or needlessly sarcastic comments. Ugh.

There is only one possible way to solve this problem that has a shot at working and I'm developing/testing it as quickly as I can.

It requires a combination of crowdsourcing and machine learning (NLP is cool, but optional).

It is part rating, voting, tagging, reputation, recommendation and more.

It sounds complicated, it isnt for users (~2 clicks from ~10% of readers) but is for me to build (3rd week with rails, so relative).

It is mostly still theory at this point but the math checks out and user tests have exceeded expectations but are very early stage.

If you've read this and think I'm crazy, you're right (best to accept it).

If you think I'm naive, it's a possibility that's kept me up many nights over the past year.

If you are interested in learning more on the off chance I'm right, you can reach me at (Mat . Tyndall at gmail).

I am in San Francisco working on this full time after dropping out from grad school.

I will tell you in excruciating detail in person or via Skype how it works and why.

I have not slept very much in the past week so I have no idea if posting this is a good idea but I doubt I'll get even 5 votes or any takers but thanks for reading.

I must admit you've made me a bit curious, though I have a feeling that whatever it is you're proposing will probably just go straight over my head anyway.

Since you're in SF though, have you thought about holding a small group discussion about it over at noisebridge sometime? People there are always so insightful, friendly and willing to help, I'm thinking that holding a think-tank at a place like that might help you get the sort of 'back-and-forth' feedback it seems you're looking for.

As for the prototype going over your head, first order it looks pretty simple, second, third and fourth, ... Hey, even I'm not sure I've mapped out all the possible dynamics but the possibility is unquestionably there.

Noisebridge is cool, hung out there a few times. I'm super busy now but maybe in a week or two though I am a sucker for coffee chats (hint hint). Basically I suck at writing and would rather connect through any other medium.

Also to add a few details, I'm doing this as a startup (Tagbax, don't mind the landing page, I'm really not trying to drive traffic yet). Community comment moderation isn't necessarily my first choice to apply the tech $ wise (I really ought to drop by disqus one of these days), but it was designed specifically for user-generated content.

Before you lose any more nights losing sleep about this idea you have and its third or fourth iteration, maybe you should just release the idea in its original form and see how people react. I'm sure your idea is great, but I worry that it's a perfect solution to an imperfect userbase...meaning people value worthless, soundbite comments more than well thought out responses.

It's kinda like how people complain about how politics are only about soundbites. Sure, it's great to argue that among friends, but who really spends the time understanding the facts about every issue a candidate debates?

The solution is to align the interest of the individual with the group. I've run this past hundreds of people, it's pretty solid as theory but coefficients matter so it's gotta be tested.

Consider another, simpler way to solve the problem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753 . Self-organizing, no extra steps required, and mostly transparent to the users.

I have an unfounded theory that SOPA has acted as a tipping point in the trickling in of redditors looking for answers. SOPA is a big deal for the Internet and its communities but I find the discussions on those threads particularly shallow (moreso I think than most political-leaning threads here). Obviously the discussion in the mentioned thread above was far more shallow and outright mean, but I think those are the new extremes in this new environment.

I bring this up because I also have a theory on how to handle it. Temporarily restrict the number of political and hot-topic stories in HN through coordinated flagging. I realize this may be controversial (even borderline xenophobic), but I think it would dissuade those looking for a home here who don't want to adhere to the guidelines. If the hot-ness of the material on the front page decreased for a while, I think it would sufficiently bore those looking for spicy discussions until this SOPA topic fades.

[Disclaimer: I regularly comment on SOPA threads]

I believe the primary cause of comment degeneration is celebrity. Which is to say the more 'popular' something is the more likely there will be people saying things just to have said something that they are sure someone else has read.

When I was competing on BattleBots I was amazed at how it magnified people's immaturity in their efforts to 'be on TV'. That really made me stop and look at the folks around me on the other teams, and at the show, and there was a very large difference between people who didn't care that they were possibly going to be on TV, and those who mostly cared that they were possibly on TV.

I tend to think of it as the 'celebrity' effect where someone gets their gratification from others noticing them. They troll popular newsgroups (back in the day), they make outrageous comments on community web sites, they seem to be trying desperately to prove somehow, someone, will know they exist. There is a lot of anger there too.

So they come places like here at HN and they comment poorly. They are particularly vocal around topics for which there are no definitive ways of measuring correctness, topics that are more emotion than reason. They are emboldened by anonymity.

Mostly they seem to want to be heard, to know that someone heard them, and ideally to be acknowledged as being heard.

Keeping them isolated, in their brokenness, makes for a better experience the community. But it also makes the broken ones more bitter and angry. I cannot see a way, in an anonymous, or psuedo-anonymous community with little face to face contact, to bring them through their insecurity and into a better place.

It is a problem worth solving though.

HN is still the only place where I'll often read the comments first, because they're very likely more valuable than the article. I'd rather have it than my RSS reader.

Having said that, there is some room for anti-jerk improvements. Maybe very high-karma users can downvote further than the general minimum, or they get a special "really, don't do this" double-down-arrow to use in special occasions.

Sadly, people can accumulate pretty high points just because they post articles every hour or two. Therefore, maybe extra superpowers have to be invite-only.

HN used to have a common response to one-liners, that was not a counter-attack or put-down, but a gentle challenge that invites and guides:

  Can you elaborate?

Interesting- in spirit, though I suppose the danger in having a "standard" response is that by using it consistently in that particular context you're shifting its meaning over time to something like "You're being lame. Did you know that?". Probably better than "standard response" as a phrase, would be a standard response being calm socratic irony- a response that requires some thought and substance on the part of the writer, rather than just a quick "can you elaborate" boxed one liner that becomes a cargo cult.

This story really provoked poor reactions on Slashdot, Hacker News and other supposedly "meritocracy"-oriented communities.

I don't have the evidence to support this, but my educated guess is that a proportion of it is driven by the fact that it was a Pakistani (and presumably Muslim) girl.

The meme pool for Pakistan and Muslims in general is driven by the terrorism / fear narrative; masking one's prejudice and engage in a self-satisfactory public bashing is easy when we also have a competing meme (Microsoft as borg) that can be used to mask the ugly aspects of it.

The other alternative (that people really do hate Microsoft so much that they would make these comments about a dead child) is so childish that I can't bring myself to believe it. It would be morally equivalent to.. well, cheering for people dying without health care. IE: A small group of people so wrapped in a narrative that they can't bring themselves to see how abhorrent their beliefs have become to the majority around them. Are those people us?

Pure speculation: I don't get the sense of racism at all. I think the age was the provoking factor. A younger girl who was able to accomplish something (Microsoft Certified Professional) and become noteworthy in a site filled with people (and businesses) trying to become noteworthy. Jealousy.

Don't label people "jealous" or some other negative label based on pure speculation.

I'd say the attempts to diminish her coding abilities were driven more by the affiliation with MS than with her ethnicity or religion. But that may just be speculation on my part.

That's the weird thing. What she did was genuinely impressive, but only because of her age. For an experienced adult to do the same thing would be a mark against them, because it conveys they're probably a dud doing something distasteful in the hope of polishing a lackluster résumé.

I'll have to agree with thebigshane's speculation. Extrapolating from my own experiences, I think a lot of people here were doing great things (programming, writing, art, etc.) at a young age and didn't get nearly the recognition that they wanted. In my own childhood I saw people around me getting more recognition for less and poorer work, and others who got no recognition for excellent work.

There are at least two ways to approach this situation: the first, taken by the negative commenters on the other article, is to allow jealousy to take over. The second is to look at a lack of recognition as a simple problem to be solved, and learn from those who receive it. Let's quit whining about not getting the attention we wanted when we were programming at whatever young age, and try to learn how to market ourselves better. Above all, let's show some respect.

It seems that jealousy is becoming popular here. Looking at comments to this recent post about the guy who owns just 15 things[0], the top ones (hence the most voted for, I guess) mostly complain about ways in which he ‘cheated’ in counting his possessions. More or less constructive discussion starts at the very bottom.

Not sure what might be the reason of that, except jealousy.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469927

I really don't get that impression.

I do think it's just use of the term "programming", when (while what she did was very impressive for a young girl, from her culture) she didn't appear to do much programming.

Obviously it's misdirected. People should be saying "What lousy reporting, celebrate what she actually did!"

Hacker News has its good days and bad days. It also is going to evolve as the world of technology evolves. For some, that means it gets worse. For others, it gets better.

There will always be people that think it used to be better, because it's easier to remember the good feelings than the bad. This happens on every online community all over the entire Internet and it's been happening since the Internet started.

My only advice for solving the problem is to stop feeding the trolls. Dextorious obviously is trying to get a rise out of people. Ignore it and it goes away. Anything else is just adding fuel to the fire.

One site that I think deals with this problem quite well is Metafilter. The comments are full of thoughtful and well reasoned discussions between the readers. Sure, there are problems: sometimes someone posts something that's mean spirited, or there's a few too many one liners in the comments thread, but, on the whole, these problems are rare.

In fact, the quality of the comments are so high that there's even an Ask Metafilter sub-section, where readers post, often very personal, questions and do so without fear of the kind of reaction they'll get.

What's most interesting about the Metafilter model is that there's no up- or down-voting, only favouriting.

So how do they ensure the quality of the comments? Well, to become a member you have to pay a one off $5 charge. It's not much, so almost everyone can afford it, but it seems to be enough to discourage drive-by comments or anyone who's not serious about contributing respectfully and substantively.

There's also the possibility for posts and comments to be deleted, and for an account to be banned completely if someone fails to follow the guidelines. I don't think this happens often.

http://www.metafilter.com/about.mefi http://www.metafilter.com/guidelines.mefi http://www.metafilter.com/newuser.mefi

As a MeFite: even the favouriting isn't necessary. It can polarise discussions and turn them into a back and forth where each side tries to get higher scores. I'm hiding those, and idly wish they hadn't been introduced.

I'm jumping in a little late to this discussion, but I'm sort of required to comment here.

First off, as of early last year, I noted [1] that there is in fact quantitative evidence that HN is deteriorating in terms of positivity. I really need to re-run that analysis and bring it up to date, because I believe that we will see a sharp dip in the last 9 months. Between SOPA, Jobs' death, and all the other calamity that's happened, I certainly imagine it is getting darker here lately.

Secondly, I've put forward a few attempts to combat this. One approach is to change the way the karma system works [2], so that it rewards people for consistently being upvoted instead of the sort of lightning-bolt comments that tend to yield an exponential or maybe even bimodal distribution.

Another approach is to detect and flag anyone who is frequently rewarding malicious comments [3]. The system I put forth could be done either by manual flagging or implicitly by looking at co-occurrences. It was originally designed for articles, but as I noted in the post, it is trivial to adapt it to comments.

Now, in all these cases, the articles were on the front page and a lively discussion ensued. Yet nothing. Ever. Changes.

PG explicitly said he was "considering" the honeypot approach. I don't know if he's actually implemented it, since it wouldn't be visible to non-admins. I will guess that, since he's a busy guy and we still have these discussions periodically, he has not. Fine.

Why would you expect things to change course then? Or if you didn't, why are you all acting surprised now?

A site growing at super-linear speed is going to be very prone to these affects. If you do not put forth an effort to combat the influx of lower-quality comments, then you will see your site slip away.

[1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/05/31/do-social-news-sites-...

[2] http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/08/23/how-karma-should-be-mea...

[3] http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/10/28/hackernews-needs-honeyp...

I think there may be a relatively simple solution to the problem: filter the comments so that the comments of low-karma commenters initially only appear to themselves and high-karma readers. As they get upvoted, they gradually appear to lower and lower karma readers. Maybe make them initially visible to the contributor of the post or comment they are responding to as well.

This would create a self-organizing system that would rob trolls of their audience (high-karma readers would likely downvote them without response) while still encouraging newbies to post.

I'll get buried for this, but I don't see HN as a community. To me reddit seems to be able to foster a sense of community with meetups, fund raisers, secret santa etc. HN is just a link aggregator with comments.

I think you are right that community is the core issue. I don't think reddit is really a community though, there are certainly some communities that communicate using reddit, and the site does engage in 'participation' activities, but I would guess that the majority of the interaction they create ends up being shallow (on the other hand, I'm sure at least some people have made new friends and such...).

I don't really see how any reasonably open group of several thousand people can ever interact as a community (and I wouldn't be surprised if the limit is in the hundreds, e.g. Dunbar's number).

I would call myself a long time lurker on HN and have recently started commenting on stories. There's no real reason why I started, I think I just finally felt like it.

That said, I have been reading the comments for some time and I think the quality has changed when it comes to items that crack the front page. Beyond the first 30-40 items I think the discussion has remained far more useful than not. That's not to say that discussions worsen as stories move up, I think the volume tends to increase which invariably brings less helpful comments. This is not hard and fast, just my anecdotal observation.

I want to be perfectly clear: I'm a relative newcomer here. If you want to stop reading on account of that, go ahead. I won't accuse HN of being reddit or digg. But I do want to give my perspective as someone on the fence about staying "active."

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, because I had to make a decision as to whether or not to be a part of this "community." Aside from some speech-and-debate oriented forums in high school, I've stayed away from online communities. They just don't seem to have high quality discussions, even at places where tech thrives, like xkcd. I suppose I'm lucky to have a job where I get to work with a lot of stimulating and highly intelligent people, with whom I can have conversations that last several days, so maybe my perspective is somewhat anomalous, but I doubt it. In any case, I stumbled upon paulgraham.com a few months ago, and what I enjoyed most in his essays was the reserved, focused quality, so I figured a forum/news site run by him might be interesting. I've also had an interest in open/accessible science via web-based applications, and becoming a good enough coder to write some of what I do on a Cray machine at work [1]. I am not a hacker. I learned Visual Basic in high school, and can get around basic web design/javascript/rails tutorials and stat scripting languages we use at work like R and Matlab, install Ubuntu and use Vim daily. This seemed like a good place to learn better techniques.

I've learned a lot, and I won't go on about that. Many of the comments have been thoughtful and informative, particularly the ones that point to relevant places to get more information (I've noticed user Joakal does this a lot [2]), or the ones that disagree substantively.

But the most frustrating kind of comment I've encountered on this site isn't meanness, or blatant stupidity, but the Hard-Not-To-UpVote kind. Most people can tell a troll, and most trolls get down-voted to the point of white-out. Most stupid one-line jokes get voted to the bottom of the page as well, or just ignored. Today's discussion[3] was extremely embarrassing, so much so that if I'd seen that discussion first I might never have joined the site, but the meanness was not among the most up-voted comments, and even though there were a some annoying individuals who felt the need to prove how unremarkable someone was, most were rather positive. And the rest of the community rallied around upvoting jaquesm's comment, and downvoting the inappropriate ones to oblivion (though not soon enough).

One unfortunate thing I've noticed: a lot of the very popular comments are sometimes of a "fluffy" quality. I'm a "scientist" and I get to sift through a lot of hype on a daily basis; what I appreciate most are focused rational arguments, even if I ultimately disagree; I don't like fluff, even if I've used it from time to time, and certainly I've fallen for it. I remember reading a few months ago a great passage in a PG essay:

The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.

Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.[4]

I think this applies to some comments I see here (maybe some comments I've made). Quickly shot off, and easy to judge, the ones that make you feel guilty not upticking. I don't know what to do about it - I have upvoted some comments of dubious quality because it's hard not to, but what I appreciate most is substantive disagreement. My favorite things to upvote are comments that disagree with me, even if my mind isn't ultimately changed. Comments I can't stand (and feel guilty for making at times) are the ones that say "great point!" or offer an emotionally charged appeal with nothing interesting or unique. I can't say my perspective is unique here, but I do think it's an unsolved problem.

PG actually submitted an Ask HN several months ago regarding what you mention[5]. I'm curious if anything came of that. I don't know how to make it work. In real life, when people I have discussions with consistently detract from the value, they get left out to some extent, or if I'm in a group where fluffy comments are prioritized, I leave, and eat lunch with other people. I have no idea how to make this work on the internet. This would be sad, because I don't know anywhere else on the internet that has this level of discussion.

[1] http://beagle.ci.uchicago.edu/ [3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3466925 [2] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=joakal [4] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html [5] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696

I've found similar thing. What surprised and frustrated me sometime is my "shallow" one liner got a lot more upvotes than my longer, more thoughtful comments. It seems people have extreme short attention span and won't bother to read the longer ones.

This is simply because long comments very rarely provide more value than short ones. In fact, I would wager that shortness is a good quality that shows the poster tried to condense his point into its true essence.

Example: The parent post could be ~ 5 lines and contain the same point. I really like the way 4chan handles this sort of thing: The so called "green text". On 4chan it is unspoken rule that nobody cares about you. In order to make your text interesting enough to be read, you have to make it as short as possible while still carrying your point across.

The inherent problem with this is that certain posts simply cannot be made shorter without omitting useful information. When users are expected to write short comments, you'll quickly find that one-liner jokes and the like are the most upvoted, not the ones with actual content.

While 4chan may be a fun way to pass time, it's hardly the place I go when I want to read/join intelligent discussions or learn new things.

The degeneration of HN is likely due to the influx of new users from 4chan and Reddit, where comments are very short and often appeal to the lowest common denominator.

[S]hortness is a good quality that shows the poster tried to condense his point into its true essence.

This is often true, but I think the value of brevity comes mostly from the context, a threaded comment page. In that context, users expect a discussion, not a monologue. They're not just looking to passively absorb information by reading, they're looking to sharpen their own understanding by actively articulating a response. That's harder to do when you're trying to respond to a comment that makes multiple points. Better to break a long-form comment into several more tightly focused short comments so that people can more quickly pick out the topics they want to respond to.

I've noticed this too. Unfortunately, my two most upvoted comments recently have been of the "throwaway" variety. Not mean, not trollish, but a couple of easy-to-agree with quickies that I banged off on the bus ride to work. One[1], perhaps legitimately upvoted so that the response would be more visible, was a simple statement that the submission was a couple years old and it would be interesting to see some newer data. The other[2] was a cheap, throwaway anti-SOPA line.

The danger here is that the easy-to-upvote throwaway comments become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like it or not, karma is social validation. A long, thought-out reply that gets no upvotes is somewhat depressing; it makes you think that, even at your most thoughtful, your thoughts are unappreciated. Contrast that with a cheap and easy line that gets 40 points, and the social feedback is clear: your considered opinion isn't valued, but your cheap lines are.

It makes me think that the karma system itself might be fatally flawed for its lack of scalability. What works for a small, mostly homogenous community breaks when that community becomes larger and more diverse. We can deny it all we like, but I'm sure most people feel pretty good when they log on and see their karma significantly higher than it was the last time they checked. It's an ego boost, and few people are immune to enjoying that. When playing to the lowest common denominator gives you that fix of social validation, and a more thoughtful comment doesn't, it's pretty strong positive reinforcement for the less-desirable behaviour.

I'm not sure how to combat this in a scalable manner. It's difficult to think of examples of community-moderated forums maintaining quality in the face of rapid expansion. My previous suggestions of weighting the votes of those who consistently upvote quality comments higher than those of people who upvote fluff has met with little traction, and I can see some pretty big potential weaknesses there, myself.

In reviewing this comment, however, I have had a thought of something that seems ridiculously trivial, but might just work: pg has stated before his belief that comment length is a relatively good indicator of quality. I notice, however, that the comment box is relatively tiny. It makes a long, thought-out post appear, prima facie, no more substantive than a 3-liner. I would be interested to see what the result of making the comment box significantly larger would be. Would people, upon seeing that much empty space surrounding a throwaway comment, be likely to reconsider posting it? Are there easy cues like this that can be used to hack the behaviour of commenters? I'd be interested in seeing the results of running an A/B test on a seemingly simple change like this: Make half the users' comment boxes two or three times as long. Leave it that way for a few months, then take a random sample of the resulting comments and see if there's a difference in quality. I wouldn't be surprised if there was.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458644

[2]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462700

I don't know that this social problem has a technical solution, but you're right that the "points" system encourages shallow comments. Unfortunately some people will always see a number as a score, and start gaming the system to increase it.

The problem with many submissions recently has been they are taken directly from reddit, and have content that sits well with reddit but not HN. The "Programming prodigy passes away at 16" story is a good example: it's tragic news, but the fact that someone has died is not necessarily a good HN submission. Although much of the discussion about Erlang and Haskell went right over my head, I think this site did better when those stories were oft-submitted, if only because it tends to push away the people who would prefer fluffy "human interest" stories. I personally have no intention of creating a startup but find pointers to useful technical ideas and tools here - more of those, please

So I think we need to concentrate on the submissions, removing stories of marginal interest to hackers, and being diligent in upvoting good stories and comments, and downvoting crufty comments.

I didnt spell it out, but I'm working on a solution, see my comment lower on this page.

Yeah, submissions may be where the solution lies. I'm not sure if it's just me but has anyone else noticed that the New page gets completely saturated with spam? I have show dead turned on and I used to see a handful of dead stories. These days it's not uncommon for me to see 5 live stories with the rest having been killed. A month or so ago there was a discussion about HN's rank on Google. I'd be happy to see it close to the bottom of the first page if at all.

"It makes me think that the karma system itself might be fatally flawed for its lack of scalability."

The motivation to be part of an online community should be the enjoyment at the discussions and not the number of points.

I hate the points, and I hate it, that I look after them. I think that just the presence of a karma system has a bad effect on the quality of the comments. You're getting what you ask for.

It's symptomatic how often I read 'Please don't downvote me' or 'I hate to say this, but' in the last time.

Personally, I try not to spend too much time on HN (sometimes I enable noprocrast), so I need to quickly decide whether it's more worthwhile to read a single ten-paragraph comment instead of ten shorter ones presenting different points of view.

Usually, if the first paragraph is not absorbing enough and there is a risk that the rest is going to be rambling, I simply stop reading without any regrets. For me it's not an attention span issue, it's a limited time issue.

This is a good point - one aspect of some political topics is the urge to upvote stuff you feel Very Strongly about. "Yeah! Go! You tell 'em!". That does not lead to good discussions though, and thus I feel those topics are best avoided here.

A great community is built by a focus on positive actions, on growing in a positive direction. To that end - let me take a stab at the definition of a 'value-added comment'.

I would define a value-added comment as lucidly conveyed viewpoint based on a simple set of logically-consistent principles ... that flies in the face of commonly-held understandings of the subject matter at hand. It's not enough to offer an opinion, or an adversarial opinion - it must be clearly stated and supported, so that the emotional weight of its disagreement prompts a healthy discussion where some measure of truth is found, where some insight is gained where there was none before.

This rests on the premises of intellectual honesty, trust, and emotional maturity within all involved, but I nevertheless think that kind of discourse is what would grow HN, and what we ought to focus on. Calling out non-value-added comments does nothing to create a culture of value-added comments.

This is not a new phenomenon. When I first found HN, I conducted an experiment: Along with ordinary attempt-to-contribute comments, I made a couple of content-free remarks whose only attractiveness was the shared premise that "startups are awesome". They immediately received nearly an order of magnitude more upvotes than anything else I had written.

That was all it took to convince me that Giles Bowkett's original critique of HN was entirely correct, when he said several years ago that this transformation was inevitable: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...

I just checked, and my last comment was 906 days ago. This phenomenon is not new, and any reaction predicated on the idea that this is a relatively recent, relatively sudden decline are unlikely to succeed. It's a structural problem, possibly with human nature, and the best we can do is slow it down (at which HN has been successful, but that's probably only because it's not a business, and so explicitly does not share other sites' preoccupation with growth).

I wouldn't say that HN is not a business. It brings a lot of exposure to YC and its startups.

So, in some ways, your free speech is moderated by private interests. This is not a critic, just a valid point I think.

It's definitely business - back around the time Gawker got banned from YC for being trashy, there was some amount of opinion that TechCrunch stories should get the boot too - but it was never going to happen because of the exposure TechCrunch gives YC startups.

PG is not going to do anything that increases the quality of news.YC if it in any way could negatively impact YC's bottom line.

the Hard-Not-To-UpVote kind.

I think this is why Slashdot added the "Funny" upvote option. It doesn't add any karma points to the poster, but the voter still feels like they recognized or validated a clever comment.

I've noticed this with my comments too. My hypothesis is that if a person wants to optimise comments for upvotes, they need to be quick one liners because the discussion and therefore the eyeballs move on very quickly. If you write a high quality comment it takes time but less people read it because the top of the bell curve of the huge wave of eyeballs following the stream of the discussion has passed it by.

Humans are social, we have a need for acknowledgment from our peers so we can measure or opinions against others and to help develop our thinking on a particular point. As you suggest above, karma points are a crude replacement for the nods of agreement that you would get in a face to face conversation that signify that you or I are saying something interesting. It's a not a nice feeling to think you are saying something interesting only to find you are talking to yourself. Therefore, there is a strong incentive towards pithy one line comments that get seen quickly and appeal to the masses.

The trouble with karma points is there is no differentiation between the nods you get in drunken agreement from your friends when you say something funny in a bar and the nods you get from your colleagues when you say something insightful. We would value these differently in a face to face situation. On the internet it's just a competition for generic human recongition points where the short fast comments that 'press peoples buttons' are at an advantage.

The trouble with pithy one line comments that press peoples buttons is that they are hard to get right, not many people can strike the right balance. What's meant to be a pithy one liner actually just ends up saying nothing, something offensive, illogical or merely just voicing tribal agreement with Apple or Google or whatever.

Maybe it would be better to be able to see other peoples upvotes but not out own? What about a mandatory 1 hour before a comment appears, perhaps just display a '...' to signify that someone is preparing an answer? I don't know what the answer is, but I also miss the more challenging technical articles.

That's s disappointing. I usually spend less time on one liners than anything and thought everyone else did the same. I had no idea that one-liners got so much attention. But for all the people who express sentiments like yours and all the people who read it and all the people priding themselves on being the smartest people in the room, somehow stupidity still slips by under our noses. How? And, just as a hypothetical, you can find a comment much like yours then look back through that person's history and see they're a chronic fluff contributor. How is it that we know not to do something, speak out against it, and then do it anyway?

Also, I don't like your proposed solution. It assumes the worst in people. I tend to believe that if you cater to the lowest common denominator then that's what you get but when you assume the best in people they'll try to live up to that expectation. Of course people will be people and it's inevitable they we disappoint from time to time but... Well, but nothing. That's how it goes I guess.

Did you mean you spend less time on reading one liners? Yes me too, but there are lots of one liners now and not so many well written comments.

Regarding your second point. At the scale of HN now, I think we have to consider people not as individuals but as a swarm of actors; perhaps analogous to particles in a CFD analysis. Then ask the question 'what design changes need to be made to change the direction of these actors'. I don't personally assume the worst in people but I don't think people are naturally moral actors. They won't 'do the right thing' without any incentives. People are driven by the positive and negative consequences of their actions which they measure from the reactions of their peers. In the case of HN our peers are the crowd sourced 'off the cuff' opinions of a random sample of a few hundred thousand random people. Some people are horrified by the idea that morals don't exist and it is a bit of a scary concept being surrounded by potential monsters, but really I think it's just nature and lots of natural things are scary but can be mitigated by design.

I've noticed the same thing. Here are two comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3414355 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460773

The first is a veritable essay that compares how the failure of an ancient Swedish warship was directly comparable to the failure of the space shuttle Challenger. I think, out of all the comments that I've posted to Hacker News, I'm most proud of that one.

The second comment is essentially a throwaway criticism of the positioning of UI elements on the new Duck Duck Go search results page. It's not terrible, but it certainly took less critical thinking for me to write than the first comment. And yet it received 5 times as many votes.

How can we fix this? I don't know, but I do think that taking away comment scores was a mistake that exacerbated this issue. Now, when I see a long form comment such as yours, I have no idea if its score is +1 or +100. All I can tell is that the score is above zero, by the color of the text. This makes it harder for me to judge whether a comment is "underrated" (i.e. it has a score that is below what I'd expect for a comment of that quality) or "overrated" (i.e. it has a score that's unjustifiably high). I think bringing back comment scores would help fix the problem of long-form analytic comments being underrated.

What about, instead of comment scores, if the comment is among a top percentage of comments in the thread, the user's name is a different color, like orange? Kind of like how a new user's name is green.

I was baffled that the below got 25 upvotes where it's pretty clear (barring vote ring or anything insidious) almost nobody bothered to look at the Course links on the university page (1 times out, 1 404's, 1 has only German language content, but looks interesting

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468210

Maybe there should be a comment rate limit based on your avg score. The higher your avg score, the more comments within a certain time period you can make.

This depends on current data for avg karma vs rate of comments which is not publicly available (to my knowledge). This also depends on whether users with the highest avg score actually give great constructive comments but I have not been able to find a way to list those users -- http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20612/list-users-...

I do not think this would work very well. I can't speak for others' habits, but my posting comes in bursts. Usually I post rather infrequently--just answering some comment or espousing my views on some moderately interesting subject. However, when I find something really interesting (like a Haskell article :)), I am likely to post in rapid succession.

However, I think that my posts on such subjects are the most beneficial for the site--they're the ones where I have a decent amount of knowledge and direct experience; I am much more likely to contribute something insightful on a CS article than on a sociology one, for example. Rate-limiting would make it harder for me to post about my strongest subjects without changing how I post about random articles.

Perhaps one that takes into account the categories you do post in and have a high karma for?

Then you have the nontrivial problem of trying to categorize all the posts.

I'd note that one of the people who's behaviour was exactly the kind of behaviour that should be discouraged ('I hate to be the guy') has very overall high score and quite high avg score.

I think conflating comment score and article submission score is a mistake because of this kind of thing.

"Please don't feed the trolls"

I've always liked that motto. I feel the (well intentioned) linked post is kind of doing that.

It's true that we want to develop a "mature" culture at HN. It's true that there should be guidelines for that. It's true that new people should have some way of "assimilating" into the etiquette (which is very simple and straight forward etiquette).

But.

People who want to, learn by observing. So if we don't feed the trolls (ignore them) and instead simply do our best to write good posts I think we can preserve the culture.

People who just want attention, why, they LOVE whole blogposts dedicated to them.

Many people here mention comments. I'm interested in story submissions.

Please, which submissions have you made that you felt deserved more upvotes? And which do you feel got too much attention?

I was surprised that "Invention of Waterloo (Canada tech triangle) got over 100 votes.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3440469)

I was gently surprised that some of my other stories got no up votes at all. The Electronic Landscape in 1986 - while being really poorly formatted for HN, would have been interesting to people born after that era; "Wait, what? You had these online communities who were not part of the Internet? Who were trying to compete with the Internet? And then they offer Internet access as a bonus feature?"

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3087928)

On topic: I comment too much, and I'm reigning it back. ANd I'm trying to increase the signal.

I think you are being a bigger jerk than dextorious. You are just angry because he called you a hipster.

I checked his history and he is far from being a troll. You on the other hand wrote a content-free rant full of self-praise ("I try to comment when I have useful, unique, original, or non-standard things to say") and then posted it to HN too.

My impression also - this was just somebody taking his grudge from a discussion here to his blog, and then back here. Just couldn't let go.

- Herding people seems to be a very difficult problem, but on the other hand i am not aware of scientific approaches to it. There's only assumptions that things like karma, upvotes, reputation increase the likelihood of a comment being useful. Can anyone point to relevant literature?

- In the end, i don't think it's possible to stop people from commenting, people just feel the need add a comment when they have read an interesting post (Just like this very comment in fact). Having a rule that says not to means nothing. Having your comment under an interesting topic is a modern way to say "Hey that caught my interest and i think i should participate in the group that discusses this topic, even though i don't have anything insightful to say". It's mostly an emotional reaction.

- As this is a threaded discussion, many people will post just to start a conversation (because they want to spark that conversation), or even start an argument.

- IMHO, the quality of the comments is directly related to the quality of the frontpage links. HN frontpage is heavily moderated that's why it's (for me at least) the best internet frontpage for technically-minded people. Not having a financial incentive is a big plus as administrators dont have to worry about readership.

- As a consequence of the frontpage quality, people who want to waste time don't stay long enough to add comments. Otherwise, i don't think there's anything special about the comment section here.

True about the threaded discussions, i always felt threaded conversations lead to worse quality discussions. Mostly because of the "argument"-thing. I don't think people intentionally want to start an argument many times but since you are always replying directly to someone it can easily be perceived as offensive or defensive even if you are just adding another neutral fact into the conversation.

Actually "conversation" sounds wrong, because there is no conversation or even common red-line of discussion, just replies to individual comments changing order several times per day based on some rating instead of time. Try returning to a threaded conversation a day after you first read it, you will have to reread almost everything again to get back into the loop again.

Flat comment system can also deteriorate quickly when you reach enough users and everything is just lost into a stream of junk like on youtube. I think stackoverflow has a good model with only one level of threading, not sure how well it would work on a discussion forum without strictly right or wrong answers though.

Hmm. There's a lot to unpack here.

First, I'm still on the fence in regards to the quality of discussion here. I think there's a tendency for familiarity to breed contempt (the more familiar you become with HN, the more aware you are of things like mean discussions, and the more rose-colored your glasses will be when considering what it was like "before"). There have been a few attempts to objectively measure any degradation of the site, and so far they haven't found anything conclusive, as far as I know. So, it might not be as bad as you think.

Second, you start out with a really general point, but then halfway-through fall mostly into a single example. If that's the example that got you thinking about this, then you've let yourself turn a wasted moment reading a pointless comment into quite a large waste of your time. The friendliest way I can think of to respond to that is that it is a very silly thing to do. :-)

What are you even doing online, anyway? I mean, for me, at least, being online makes me feel pretty miserable afterward, especially compared to anything else I could be doing. I'll look at my threads page sometimes and the older my most recent comment is, the happier I am with myself. That means I've been spending time on better things -- and anything other than commenting on a website is a better thing. I don't want to chase you off, but at the same time, sometimes I sit back and think about all the time wasted worldwide since the invention of the online forum, and how little real positive impact there has been from all of that, and it kinda bums me out. I must've blown entire months on Slashdot way back when, and all I remember from that now is ... uhm ... Hellmouth? ... and ... hmm. I forget the second thing. I am literally a happier, better person, for every moment that I'm not online.

Thirdly, although your intentions are good, you are criticizing behavior which leads naturally from the design of the site. How much thoughtful discussion is really possible on a site like this one, where most threads come and go after just a few hours, never to be read again? Hell, I wrote about this 9 months ago (http://robsheldon.com/conversations-online), submitted it to HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423975), where it got a little bit of discussion, and then that was it.

Forums like this one are designed to be topical, not thoughtful. With the invention of internet points -- yay, karma, and all that other nonsense -- people have had more incentive than ever to quickly bang out a single-line joke, get a point for every chuckle, and move on. (One of the things which has gotten me the most yummy internet points was a joke -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102126 -- and, although it was pretty funny, it wasn't nearly as meaningful to me as, say, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132576).

HN is not a good place for thoughtful, meaningful discussion. It maybe says it wants to be, but the most important things about its design say otherwise. So at some point, you have to ask yourself, "What am I doing here?"

...Every time that I look at this comment for the next few days, I will be ashamed of myself, because I will know that I wasted 15 minutes writing a thing which would be read by a few people for a few hours and then never again, and I could have played a good game of Go instead.

I disagree when you imply we shouldn't expect thoughtful discussion. This is the only place on the web where I contribute at all and I do so just for the thoughtfulness. Ive always held HN up as a place where people smarter than me hang out and talk and where I could, and really have, learned a lot. Just because the topics don't stick around very long that doesn't mean thoughtful discussion can't be had. It's all over the place around here! I do feel there's been a decline in not just comments but submissions in general but so far it hasn't gotten to the point where it's even close to any other forum or whatever you want to call it.

And you didn't waste your time. I read what you wrote. I enjoyed it. It sparked a discussion, see? But I am going to bed now so I guess that's over... But had this been any other time of day we may have gone back and forth a bit and others might have joined in too. Hours are more than enough to be thoughtful.

You never know. What if your post leads to a tantalizing but cryptic offer of a solution?

Okay, I'm done seeding responses, time to sleep like the dead.

I don't think that forming part of an online discussion is a bad use of time per se. In fact if done well it can be enlightening and stimulating to people beside yourself. It is in pursuit of this standard of excellent conversation that people join certain communities (like HN). If the standard falls they will leave. Many comments are not worth making, but that does not mean that we shouldn't strive to write comments that are.

Like crcsmnky [1], I've been reading HN for a while now but have contributed little. The extant comments from domain adepts generally precludes my ability to add anything constructive to these discussions.

I too have noticed a shift in the timbre here lately. The degradation of civil and apropos discourse is marked. Criticism based on logic and rhetoric (ad hominem, straw-man, etcetera) has lost some ground to internet-acronyms (IANAL, IIRC, and such) Since culling sources takes work, this warrants addressing for risk of losing this relevance.

I've been thinking about this problem recently in the face of web searches that yield forum discussions. I'm begun to avoid forum results, due to endless threads that lack a solution to the specific problem (even sometimes incorrectly marked [Solved]).

Curated Q&A sites [2] address this successfully by putting the correct answer above the fold. But community discussions don't have a correct answer, so the problem here is not quite the same. I don't have a solution, but even revising sort order might do. I'd hazard to suggest an additional degree of community-based voting and editing should be added.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469618

[2] http://www.question2answer.org/

[edit] formatting

One of the things I've learned on HN is that if a comment can be misunderstood, it will be. So if you post insightful, brief comment A, you can count on getting replies B,C,E,E, and F that completely miss the point.

This leads me to believe that some -- perhaps not the majority, but some -- of the comments here that we consider snarky or noise might actually be pretty good comments, we just misread them. And then respond.

In my own experience I have found when I am tired or not mentally functioning very well I tend to misread the intention of comments. Assuming this holds true in the larger community, there may not be a way to fix the extra problem I bring up. Or any of these related problems, for that matter.

I mention that to say this: the community can only go so far talking about a topic in any direction without a lot of emotional push-back starting up, and emotions win over logic. So if the subject is "businesses that sell to poor people," at some point, somebody is going to start making a case that businesses shouldn't be allowed to "exploit" poor people. Those folks are not being snarky; to them they are simply making a stand that needs to be made when the subject has gone off the rails. Likewise, if the subject is "writing your own OS to make a fortune," at some point somebody is going to start beating the F/OSS drums. If somebody posts yet another "Young inventor conquers known universe" stories, somebody is going to point out the trope.

These folks are not trying to be snarky or trolling. They are simply trying to provide useful feedback. But comments like this have a tendency to snowball. Once you let one comment in that says something like "enough with the young kid inventor stories that are overhyped!" then the next commenter feels like he has to out-do the first. And a lousy thread is born. If you do not let these comments in, then you are saying you want a board where people must react to content in a completely non-emotional fashion. That's not going to work either. In the terrible example of the deceased programmer, probably 2 or 3 percent of the audience did not feel sympathy for the story. Out of that bunch, maybe only 2 or 3 percent felt the need (?) to express criticism. But in a community the size of HN, that's enough. Once those comments were put out, the rest of those folks who felt little sympathy were empowered to go along with the thread, drawing in fence-sitters in the process. After all, they were simply being dispassionate! That's what we ask for when we deride most bad comments, right?

All abstractions are leaky, and language is very slippery. With tens of thousands of readers, written comments and articles simply are too leaky to scale.

So we have yet another terrible example of HNers performing poorly. I don't have an answer. What we see is mob behavior at work, the human social animal. Written communication is much different than vocal communication, but we naturally try to use them both the same way. We are performing as designed. It's probably a feature, not a bug. :)

EDIT: Please don't take this as an apologia for poor commenting or what happened yesterday, just my attempt at explanation. One of the worst comments I ever made was in reply to a long-time HN'er who was basically asking "Why are you loading up my HN feed with this useless obituary crap?" when somebody posted about a somewhat famous person passing away. I told them to shut their pie-hole. And I'd write that comment again in a heartbeat.

The guidelines state that "HN is becoming reddit" is a subject that should be avoided unless you have something really interesting to say. This article has something interesting to say and, I suppose, there has been other similar interesting threads in the past.

Aside from this article, what are the other past submissions that are worth reading to see how community deterioration has been felt through the years?

In the age before the Internet, the exact same thing happened to music subcultures - hippies, punks, ravers etc started out as small groups of pioneers, consciously trying to do something new. Over time those scenes became flooded with posers and wannabes, most of whom had no idea that what they were doing was counter to the original principles. The original pioneers moved on to something new.

The same lifecycle seems to be a property of online communities, except at a much faster rate. The phenomenon even has a name (Eternal September), named for Usenet's annual flooding with college freshmen who did not understand the rules or culture of the community. Eventually the irregular floods became a torrent as Usenet opened up (via AOL and Google Groups), and the community died.

Are online communities destined to have a limited lifecycle, either stagnating or collapsing under the weight of their own popularity? What can (or should) be done to maximize valuable conversations?

The problem is simple: cynical, jaded, unemphatic disrespectful people like cool things just like the rest of us.

Hacker News is cool. It's full of enriching discussion and useful links and insight into the industry. It's a great web page to surf to and it doesn't bother you with adverts or anything like that. Unfortunately, this means it's now attracting those users we'd rather not have to deal with.

I don't think there's a solution to this problem, except maybe somehow make the sight less user-friendly and less familiar to users of SlashDot etc., so that those people who don't value maturity get fed up and leave.

Hacker News used to stand out as being so much more mature than other sites on the internet... that has definitely started to slip I think. Possibly the endless climate of political contentiousness is also contributing to it (SOPA, healthcare, the 1%, financial crisis etc).

What HN is an ignore list.

Let the trollers post whatever they want, anonymously. But each HN reader can have their own ignore list, and eventually no one will even read the troll's comments. He can troll to his heart's content, but he will be ignored. The problem with downvoting is that the troll gets the pleasure of knowing he pissed off X number of people.

With an ignore list, it's passive, and the troll gets no feedback. A growing number of people will stop reading his posts, and when the troll gets no more responses, he'll leave. He can change pseudonyms, but the same effect will occur, and he'll get bored. It's pretty much as simple as that. It's the equivalent to the NYC subway system painting over graffiti as soon as it's painted. After a while, the vandals get frustrated, and they stop doing it.

This seems to be an issue in every online community, whether news-oriented or not.

I'd like to try an experiment with a less open online geek news community. Social trust-based. Very hard to get an account that can write comments. Must be invited or voted to have that privilege. Very easy to get perma-banned. Though, to avoid appearing as Skull and Bones or some other private club, all comments would still be public. Even as a lurker, the insightful comments are often the most valuable thing on a site like this.

There are successful examples of these communities as simply forums in other fields like video game programming, cars, medicine. I'm a member of one for video game developers and one for car computer tuning. There ought to be a good way to apply it to peer-voted news.

What if you disallowed people from upvoting until they had received X upvotes? Would that force people to assimilate the culture before being allowed to affect it?

Alternatively, or additionally, has any thought been given (maybe something like it is already in place) to weighted voting? By which I mean more power is given to the upvotes and downvotes of community members who have been upvoted a large number of times. If a trusted member recommends something should it be given more weight than a recommendation by a newcomer?

Just a couple thoughts by a relative newcomer who has nonetheless observed and participated in online discussion for years and is interested in the problem of scaling a valuable community...

I run a much less successful site than this and have dealt with and thought a lot about comment issues. HN does a brilliant job, for the most part, in handling comments. I would say that some people are unfairly hell banned (I see dead people) or slow banned, but it's for the greater good of the community and you can always get a new account.

My one possible suggestion would be to make HN more social. That way all the people who like to be trolls can troll each other and people not interested can unfollow, etc... Although, the Google+ Hacker News Circle has basically done this for me, and I like it a lot.

I don't understand this post at all. If I read the comments on the thread about Arfa, I see mostly positive, interesting and insightful comments. A few comments were bad and were downvoted.

In any thread, it would be surprising to get no bad comments at all. They'll always be there and you can do nothing but ignore them, even when they get upvoted. Just keeping adding your own insightful comments, ignore the other ones and I wonder whether things will deteriorate much further.

Interesting post, and certainly a valid issue to discuss; however, although I can see where you're coming from and needing examples to draw on, the way it is written hard to read it without feeling like it's specifically bashing certain users. That's not to say I don't agree with the point you're trying to make, but maybe it would be more effective not to list user names specifically in the post.

I agree with the problem analysis and I've read similar sentiments before here on HN for a while. However, I have yet to find an article that methodically explores the solution space, or even just suggests practically achievable improvements.

It would be said if we start to sound like Karl Marx, who provided well founded criticism of capitalism but was never able to come up with anything better.

I read Hacker News on a delay so that the best comments have had time to be posted and to be floated to the top. It used to work well -- mean comments have generally floated to the bottom. But on this story the mean comments have floated to the top: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469927

Pratical approach: How about adding a link to the Guidelines from the "new comment" page? And maybe putting the most important part right next to the submit / reply button, like "Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation" or "If you have nothing of value to say, don't say anything"?

(making this into a separate comment since it's a different, related idea)

How about having a "flag" link for comments with a drop-down list of points from the guidelines that the comment violates?

It would reduce the noise from other replying to the comment stating why they think it's inappropriate, and would still let the commenter know what they did wrong while burrying the comment.

There is a spanish Digg-like site, Menéame [1], which offers this same option. I think it works pretty well as it keeps the site clean of news which don't obey the rules. Despite that, people will still reply explaining why they flagged the comment (and I think this is the correct way to behave: you should explain why the comment is wrong and how to improve it in order to improve the community)

[1] http://www.meneame.net

One of the most powerful things that HN enjoys is a vital, continuous and active meta-discussion about the quality of HN.

I'm going to take a different approach to this. If you look at the comments in the thread in question, there's really only one person who's behavior is lamentable, and it's clear by his continuous statements in the topic that he isn't even aware of it...Dunning–Kruger is spot on. I was even so pissed I took the bait and fed the troll when I probably should have thought better of it.

However, looking back at the thread a day later, I see that the community policing worked. That vast majority of the really despicable comments were downvoted into negative territory. The poster's statements were tossed out into the trash they were.

The truth is, we shouldn't extrapolate the behavior of one attention starved malcontent to the entire community. I'm personally impressed with the community. To me at least, the community worked hard to keep the discussion appropriate and positive, elbowing out the bad sort of folks who shouldn't be participating in a forum like this.

Yeah sure, there were a few other questionable top level posts, but nothing entirely inappropriate, most of the ugliness centered around one person (I'm including myself regrettably as a participant in responding to this troll). So it's no the community that necessarily behaved badly, in fact the community behaved quite well.

edit Something I thought I'd add after reading through a few more comments discussing how the quality of discussion here appears to be going down. I have to disagree. I'd say that the comments and discussions here are extremely strong, better than they were about a year ago (or whenever pg turned off comment voting). At that time, HN seemed to be suffering from an outrageous echo chamber where a select group of superstars were automatically the top comment in every thread they participated in, the cult of Apple was going through all kinds of absurd egocentric narcissism, a Haskell and a Daring Fireball post was guaranteed to be on the front page, and any comments pointing this out were mercilessly downvoted and their users flagged - and comments supporting the echo chamber group think were guaranteed karma earners.

Since the simple switch to turn off comment points, this trend seems to have dissipated. Superstars no longer squat at the top of the mountain, Haskell no longer dominates the front page, we still love Apple, but only as a product company that makes cool stuff, not as a cult, and dissenting opinions and reasonable debate seems to have returned. The front page is dominated by tech tips and business ideas most days, even in the shadow of SOPA. In short HN has returned with a vengeance.

So.. person A annoyed person B. Person B made a blog post about it and tied it into how the HN community is declining as a whole. Person A makes a few comments in the thread, and makes own blog post about the initial blog post.

I thought high school was over.

Maybe a "report abuse" link next to each comment (with its attendant functionality) would be useful.

You could have made an awesome point but you ruined it. I agree that there's been a decline but the examples you pull out to support it don't help you much. The comments on the young girl who died were deplorable but I think that's a very rare case and I wouldn't say that happens often around here. But even that doesn't hurt your point as much as going after Dextorious like you did. You make a good case for him being a great example of the problem but this article comes off as you being disgruntled by him and going off on a personal attack. I don't think it's right to name names like that unless the person being named has a certain degree of notoriety. You could have left his name out of this, still used the quotes, maybe pull out some more quotes from other users exhibiting the same pattern and then this article would look far more like the commentary I'm sure you meant it to be rather than Mr. Siegler getting pissed off at and attacking someone. I'm disappointed. I'm not disappointed in your opinion, because there's a lot of truth to it but I'm disappointed in the way you approached it. Hopefully most of us will see past the flaws and really dig deeper into your real point. Other than that, I thought you were right on.

Which comes first, the troll, or the heavy-handed mod (or community downvote waterfall, in the case of HN)? I've often found that the least moderated forums yield the strongest communities, which is somewhat counterintuitive.

I think the author of this blog post was simply combative in his own responses to the offensive commenter, and could have been far more engaging in a way that builds community. This blog post strikes me as a sort of passive-aggressive way to win a silly Internet argument and get validation.

(yes, I realize that the above paragraph itself seems combative, but really, I think you could have done a better job handling the situation)

To throw a couple of ideas into the "tech solutions" pile, I wonder what would happen to the quality of comments in a community if a mandatory 1 minute delay was put in before the text area would appear. This would I think have two benefits: 1. it would for commenters to think about what they were saying for at least a minute. 2. It would raise the barrier of entry to the point that posting a worthless one liner doesn't seem worthwhile or satisfying.

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