Sometimes I Think About Reinstating the Comments System | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I Think About Reinstating the Comments System

warrenellis.com

46 pointscitizenparker22 comments

What follows is a pretty standard lament about online communities

In my personal experience, the comment sections I've found on any web site eventually fall into three painful and unsatisfying categories:

- Ghost towns: the blog or forum has so little audience, nothing gets said.

- Worthless hole: enough people have become involved that there is no way to have a discussion without trolls trying to derail the conversation.

- Benevolent (or not) dictatorship: moderation is strictly enforced to keep things civil.

There's often a period shortly after the Ghost Town attracts an audience, where an open forum may seem to be doing ok. But once it gets popular everything falls apart and moves into the Worthless Hole. I'm waiting nervously for this to finally happen to HN, as the community moderation doesn't seem strong enough to prevent it.

The strict moderation model seems to work in a lot of places (I particularly enjoy Scalzi's blog, and the Loving Mallet of Correction), but I'm not sure it accomplishes a real discussion of opposing views... It works better in settings where all conversations are one-sided or at least light-hearted.

I do occasionally find a mathematics blog or something which has a good stable of commenters and fun discussions, and persists for years. Maybe the secret is to confine your community to a small enough niche that the trolls are never attracted?

"Maybe the secret is to confine your community to a small enough niche that the trolls are never attracted?"

Seems so. Most of the best subreddits (imo of course) are niche communities.

In my experience on Reddit, this is definitely true. It seems that this is the only way to avert eternal September.

Or maybe the secret is to use a ranking system that keeps the trolls invisible. This is something I have been working on, if you are interested see this: http://www.thoughtocean.com/what/dilution

I would very much appreciate feedback.

Google the term "hellban".

No, seriously, google it. I'm not just giving you the name, unless I'm looking at an overpersonalized search results page, the result page is a fair gateway into both sides of the controversy around the practice as well.

The way that trolls are made invisible on Thought Ocean isn't really analogous to hellbanning; it's closer to how people who aren't your Facebook friend are invisible to you on Facebook. Thought it's still pretty different from that also.

That sounds like an excellent idea.

A thought; in a large enough site, new users need a way to find quality users they vouch for (imagine going to reddit's homepage and trying to vouch for users).

Yeah, that is definitely one of the main problems we face. A few things that mitigate this, however:

1. If you have friends who use Thought Ocean, they can be the first people that you vouch for.

2. If you see a particularly interesting post or insightful comment, vouching for the person who posted it is likely a good idea.

3. Thought Ocean has a feature that gives you feedback on why things get ranked the way they do (the "flow comes through.." feature on the flow tab). This makes a trial-and-error approach possible: just vouch for random people, keep the people who contribute to good posts and lose the people who contribute to bad ones.

SomethingAwful does the mod-dictatorship thing pretty well. It's a two-step process to get banned (you're probated first), it's a three-step process to apply a ban (roughly: user reports, moderator applies for a ban, admin approves), comments are clearly marked as being responsible for bans, and there's a complete, public log of probates and bans complete with justification and which mod/admins were responsible for requesting and then approving the probate or ban. The watched watch the watchmen, so to speak.

Reminds me a bit of bars/clubs. They're often either dead, overrun with idiots, or at the sweet spot. Commonly, that sweet spot is in the early stages when the place is still novel and cool but yet to be discovered by the meat-market masses.

Maybe the early adopters have some contact and relationship with the bar/site owner, so they treat the place with a reasonable amount of respect. As that contact diminishes, hordes with no interest in preserving the community dominate. In bars, they damage things or start fights. Online, they troll and abuse, pushing the more reasonable types away.

I definitely agree about niches--in my experience, the best comment threads are not due to the forum but to the commenters. All other approaches weed out poorer comments; you can only get actively good comments by attracting the right sort of commenter. In practice, attracting competent people in a certain niche is easier, and most trolls aren't very interested in whatever particular topic you're discussing.

As far as your three categories go: the first two are really bad, but I'm also very put off by the last. Most places I've seen with a single "dictator" have the same problem: posts are moderated not only based on tone and presentation but also on content. I'm happy if a troll or overtly offensive comment gets removed, but seeing reasonable comments that may not follow the "dictator's" ideologies removed or ridiculed annoys me more than an inundation of poor comments, even if I agree with the "dictator"! I stay away from most "dictatorship" style boards just as much as from the "worthless holes".

The best solutions outside of narrows niches are either truly impartial moderation (usually by people apathetic to the issues at hand) or some sort of process-oriented moderation based on voting or a set of clear guidelines. The former requires having the right sort of people run the site while the other requires having a reasonable audience amenable to moderating themselves. Neither is a silver bullet, but both are much better than the three alternatives you listed.

Coincidentally, I still think the best moderation system I've seen was on Slashdot. I don't go there very often any more, but the highly rated posts were always good. If anything, it went too far the other way--too many good posts got buried. However, even with that misgiving, the end effect was still basically the best I've seen. Also, classifying posts into categories like "insightful" or "funny" also really helped especially for skimming through longer threads.

EDIT: Also: I think having very simple rules for moderation is the best approach. The best rule I saw was simple: "no personal attacks".

This is trivial to enforce fairly (that is, both removing bad posts and not removing good posts) and manages to get rid of most "bad" comments without stifling minority opinions. It also keeps the discussion much more civil and pertinent, which is very nice. And, ignoring everything else, personal attacks never contribute to the discussion anyhow and should not be condoned.

Keep in mind, the "Worthless hole" designation is subjective.

I think one thing people often forget, is that you don't always get to choose what "the community" does with your comments/forum/website(/cafe/bar/restaurant/social club/sporting team/whatever).

There's clearly some "worth" to the people trolling and derailing the conversations _you_ would rather turned out differently.

(I'm on the cusp of "giving up" on a web community I've been involved with for ~14 years, partly because they've changed - but truthfully at least as much because _I've_ changed…)

Sturgeons law: 90% of everything is crud.

At Internet scale, 99.9999% of everthing is crud. Hey! We're six-sigma compliant!

What's necessary is a comment moderation/surfacing system which can cope and scale. And yes, occasional gems do surface.

I don't think anything new or especially interesting has been said about comment quality, but the author displays such a wonderful command of swearing that I enjoyed the article immensely. It's refreshing to see such eloquent profanity on the web!

I think the invitation into the home analogy Warren Ellis uses works pretty well here so I'll extend it slightly and stay away from the piss aspects. What you do with a comment system is try to host a salon on a topic, which may or may not go well. But then you leave, maybe for a few hours, maybe for a few days. When you return you are surprised to still find a whole bunch of people milling about your foyer having completely insane conversations. All the reasonable folks have left a while ago, but these folks are making themselves at home.

Perhaps when the participant selection process is, well, non-existant (e.g. on twitter you select with whom to engage on a case-by-case basis, you can safely ignore the rest) such a comfortable environment is not optimal.

When you return you are surprised to still find a whole bunch of people milling about your foyer having completely insane conversations. All the reasonable folks have left a while ago, but these folks are making themselves at home.

Interesting. I wonder if a comments section could be more resistant to going to hell, if the author always closed comments as soon as they were done with it?

And that's why you make the comments threaded, collapsible, voteable, and sorted via the Wilson interval method.

Just cause you insist on flat comments doesn't mean commenting systems are hopeless.

Here's the thing: I think threaded/collapsible/sorted comments are good for technical discussions, or for discussions which break apart into sub-conversations you want to be able to ignore. I know that's a very natural model for me, and for people accustomed to computing or other "hard" sciences.

But I know a lot of people in humanities, arts, or social sciences who hate threaded comments because they view a complex, interleaved conversation as the best result. I'm not sure they're wrong, either... I certainly have more trouble following those discussions, but they also seem much more broadly connected. And back-and-forth flame wars between individuals are (slightly) rarer.

In small or restricted communities, that can definitely be the case. But I've never seen a large community with good comments that didn't have some or all of the above features.

Have you?

The one that comes to mind immediately is MetaFilter. Not huge, but a pretty decent-sized community and above-average comments. No threading or non-chronological sorting involved.

John Scalzi's blog Whatever also has a pretty large pool of commenters in a standard Wordpress setup.

The thing both of these have in common is active moderators.

Ars Technica's comment threads are mostly useless due to lack of threading and peer moderation.

I've often wondered how big the impact is of the text "comment" or "post comment" we see on the button below or next to a textbox. I think it's part of the problem, acting like a red cloth on a bull. English isn't my mother's tongue and "comment" has a negative connotation.

Anybody know of another implementation that funnels intent differently? E.g. buttons with "contribute", "refute" or "criticize". Could make an interesting A/B test.

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