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Comment by SV_BubbleTime | Hacker News Reader

I would suggest categorizing the quality of comments by its content and not its creator. Oh, nevermind, that’s a silly thought.

Challenge my core belief? Well… I could rationally evaluate that, or, I could just use a tool to block it from my vision! Bubble thickener.

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There are some trolls in here that seemingly evade getting banned despite their moronic comments...

Also, many comments just take a wrong premise and attack you (e.g. that not wanting the slaughter of innocent people equals supporting terrorists who want to slaughter innocent people). They don't offer anything more than that, so that IMO taking the time to consider their mostly one-note opinion is just wasting said time.

> There are some trolls in here that seemingly evade getting banned despite their moronic comments...

As moderators we can only judge comments according to the guidelines, and can only ban accounts if they repeatedly breach them. You're always welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) about an account that has been continually breaching the guidelines.

I don't have the name(s) off the top of my head, but can't you do a query of users whose account age are greater than (some threshold) but whose median comment score /amount of flagged to death comments is past some other threshold.

Mathematical quality scoring doesn’t work well for moderation of human behaviour in a community. Context matters a lot. Feelings influence people’s conduct and perception of others’ conduct a great deal. A user may get huge numbers of upvotes for comments they make about a technology or their profession, but then attract many downvotes and flags when they're commenting about politics. This is particularly true when political topics involve war or other life/death matters (which is a major reason why those kinds of topics are difficult on HN – they can bring out the worst in otherwise very positive contributors).

Sheesh. I meant that as a step 1 to get a list of suspect users, and then you read the users comments to see if they're all breaking the rules. (The same thing you'd do if you get a report of a user being "moronic" over email)

We already go further than that: we try to look at every single flagged comment, and for any that are egregious, we look further into their history and consider banning them. In this discussion, however, you’re asserting that there are many accounts that should be banned but aren’t, but you won’t name any. We can understand feeling that way, but we can only respond to concrete examples and actionable suggestions.

Plenty of users help us by emailing us about egregious accounts that they notice, and you’re most welcome to do that too. We can take action or reply to you explaining our interpretation of their activity in relation to the guidelines. We’re always happy to explain our thinking once we have a specific example to discuss.

I think that's the point though? Plenty of things not worth engaging with also aren't technically violating any rules: but wasting the brainpower on them also isn't worth it in a reliable way.

That's where an ignore system is useful.

Sure, I was just addressing the apparent dissatisfaction that some accounts remain active despite posting “moronic” comments, and pointing out that we can't moderate HN according to our judgement of someone's comments being “moronic”, we can only apply the guidelines that everyone on HN implicitly agrees to follow. (To expand on that: “moronic” will mean different things to different people depending on their worldview; whereas the guidelines and our application of them need to be defensible, regardless of the position.)

We hope that people will take the opportunity that HN offers, to be exposed to different points of view, if only because it helps you to become more knowledgeable and confident about your own positions. We understand not everyone is here for that!

I have emailed HN before when I spot really terrible things and they have been quick to effect change.

There are enough bad-faith commenters on HN that I personally would find this very useful.

asking this out of curiosity due to recent reflection on similar - what's stopping us simply not responding to those arguing in bad faith ?

For me, the little red dot is a reminder of "this user has made bad faith comments in the past, I probably shouldn't engage."

As always, the real question is who decides if it's bad faith or not...

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