Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

Are spam and irrelevant comments really a huge issue here? I have been on here for over two years, and if it is a problem, it is one that I am blind to.

I don't see myself or many of the others with 1000+ karma as the kind of people that would enjoy acting as HN police, and it seems like it will introduce internet politics to a community that has managed to avoid it. The net effect of this, IMO, will be that very few comments get endorsed and the quality and breadth of discussion will diminish.

Finally, while we are talking about new ideas, I would love it if HN would track and display not only the net points a comment receives, but also the actual number of upvotes/downvotes. A controversial comment may have 1 net point, but may also have had 50 upvotes and 50 downvotes. Being able to see if a comment I posted was really interesting to people but opinion was divided, or that no one voted and thus the comment simply wasn't that interesting to others, would be be great.

Likewise. HN seems already to have some of the highest-quality discussion on the internet, and I attribute that to a lot of other factors besides the gamified mechanics of voting/endorsements/etc.

The sites that attempt to overstructure and gamify discussion to excess end up suppressing the capacity for emergent conversation and undermining the development of coherent community. I almost never visit StackExchange sites anymore, because interacting with their convoluted discussion mechanics is too much of a chore to be worth the constrained, limited payoff. I really hope HN doesn't go that route, because there's really not much else like it on the internet.

I am curious what you think is so bad about SE? Are there people that contribute only for Internet points and prevent healthy communities from developing by doing so?

SE sites are heavily straightjacketed. There's way too much procedural cruft that makes it very hard to just have a straightforward discussion: arbitrary standards of topicality, complex voting mechanics, distinct answer-acceptance mechanics, distinctions between comments and answers, reputation badges, multiple types of reputation scores, convoluted hierarchies of participation privileges dependent on those scores, excessive moderation, etc.

By attempting to heavy-handedly shoehorn discussion into a very narrow Q&A paradigm, SE drastically limits the kind of open-ended discourse that makes online communities worth participating in.

And the reality is that I can find answers to specific, objective questions just as easily on Reddit or the myriad topic-specific discussion forums across the web, without having to jump through hoops to do it.

Threads on.. particular.. topics tend to generate back-and-forth flamewars that I think this endorsement system may be effective at battling (if the endorsement thresholds are set high enough).

A lot of discussions I've seen that seem superficially to be back-and-forth flamewars actually are instances of intense but substantive debate, and I'd really hate to see even rough-edged but worthwhile discourse suppressed just because someone who gave it only a cursory glance felt put off by its style.

What I'm really tired of is that off-topic, nitpicking discussion threads are often on top. I have to wade through a lot of comments to find the good ones. And I say that as someone who has myself fallen to the "someone is wrong on the internet" syndrome.

What I would like would be to have a tagging system on comment threads, so that I could filter out comment threads with rough edges if I didn't like them, or threads with endless back and forth nitpicking, or threads that have been covered endlessly before. Something like the old slashdot "Informative" or "Funny" system. Then the ones that wanted could troll and flame away to their hearts content, without disrupting the general discussion of a topic. The "no censorship" crows could turn off filtering alltogether and get HN exactly as it is today.

People have different standards of what levels of detail are worth debating about, and on more than one occasion, I've found myself going down what I thought was a rathole with someone who insisted on arguing trivial details, only to realize that those trivial details were key elements of a chain of reasoning that led to an important point which hadn't occurred to me, and which substantively changed the direction of the conversation.

I think a tagging system is a fantastic idea, especially if users can assign different weights to different tags for sorting and filtering purposes. I haven't seen a discussion system, apart from Slashdot's very limited implementation, that allows comment tagging, and a broader implementation might be wildly successful. You could have a voting mechanic that assigns a score to the comment, then allow users to assign different coefficient values to each qualitative modifier to build their own view. No need to limit it to a small set of predefined tags, either; users could define their own tags a la Delicious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com