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Comment by rajanaccros | Hacker News Reader

The community should moderate itself. If a comment like the parent appears it should be downvoted by the community to hidden. The only reason for moderation is to remove things that are illegal. Therefore, all speech is acceptable provided it is not illegal content. A simple flag of "illegal" should be provided that will be marked as review by a moderator.

The problem with moderation is the same as the problem with representative democracy. Moderators become entrenched and yield power unilaterally eventually not representing the community. I can't tell you how many times I have been banned, shadow banned, comments removed, not allowed to participate, etc due to the fact that a moderator decides what is best.

Edited: to remove ambiguity

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Moderation is also essential to keep communities on topic and enforce a baseline quality level. It doesn't matter for a generic "funny" kind of community, but something like /r/AskHistorians doesn't work without someone ensuring that the guidelines are met.

Of course those can also be grounds for disagreement, and I'd be lying if I'd say that I have never been frustrated with a mod when I posted something that was removed even though it clearly didn't break the rules, but I think that kind of false positive is sort of the price you have to pay to keep a community on track.

I'd rather have that than have everything devolve to low quality and effort Threads.

I think the same logic can apply to your scenario. If it is off topic it gets downvoted by the community and disappears to hidden. The relevant data gets voted up to the top as again decided by the community.

This would inevitably reward first commenters, but that is the situation anyway with current thread voting. I think later commenters as long as not downvoted past a threshold would stay visible with an even(ish) vote count to give those comments the visibility to rise.

What about comments that people disagree with that are still on topic but controversial? Well, we are running out of directions so they should get a side vote. Downvotes to explicitly send to hidden as not relevant (spam, off topic, etc), upvotes for agreeable comments base on popularity, side votes for relevant but disagreeable.

Things that are off-topic and illegal aren't the only ones that get downvoted, though. HN is unusual in the sense that it's discouraged to downvote things you dislike; that's the effective status quo in most other communities. In your proposed system, you'll have some people side-voting those comments, and you're going to have others downvoting them.

it’s not discouraged. people flag and downvote things they don’t like as well. the difference is that newcomers don’t have the ability to until they get a certain level of Karma.

Hmm. I thought that was one of the things listed in the posting guidelines. I was mistaken.

The thing is thought that through discovery and feeds it happens often that a much larger amount of folks than the ones belonging to the core community flood in. Downvotes alone won't work because nobody knows how things are supposed to work.

If you have a costume party with 100 people and 10 arrive without costume, they are the outsiders that have to adapt. If 1000 people join your party you're the weird minority and your costume party will be over.

1: Spam makers can make far more spam than you would think possible. 1a: Spam makers can make far more spam accounts than you would think possible. 2: Moderators handle the grand majority of that spam before you ever even see it in addition to managing admin tasks. 3: I don't want to have to block 300 posts and posters to see 1 that I have any possibility of enjoying. 3a: In the best possible world, AI would handle the majority of that grunt work, but there's no telling how wrong it can go.

As far as I know moderators are not responsible for most of the spam that comes through. As you said it can be plentiful. I have been caught in spam (other) filters many times just for using tor browser (thanks HN!). We already have spam filters available with spam trends that are pretty discernable that can do the bulk of the work.

There are other ways to make this work through some heuristic that auto identifies a comment and starts it below a visible threshold. What spammers are not good at, is spending time to go edit comments and content to evade these filters.

My point is that moderation is extremely limited. Review illegal content flagged comments, check appeals for false positives of a spam filter. All other content should it make it in the thread can be moderated by the community.

The only time i see this works well is in r/manga, where active mod is only a single one for a fairly big sub. Almost everything that floats up and down that sub is by reader's discretion. Although it's an exception that proves the rule.

The sole mod has sanely make the sub stay open (also maybe because the sub is ad-unfriendly so it's actually more productive for the strike to have it open).

Sure. But not all venues go by the "all content that isn't illegal is acceptable" standard.

Also, how do I know content is being downvoted because it's spam and not simply unpopular.

For instance, when I say "COBOL is a better programming language than Python," or "I liked my Treo much more than any iPhone," what's to prevent people from downvoting it into oblivion?

I proposed a solution in another comment that had a "side vote" feature as the disaggreement/unpopular option (since we rand out of directions for arrows).

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