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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Well, now that you're outed and running the place, let me tell you exactly what I think you should do:

1. Click over to whatever textbox allows you to edit the site guidelines.

2. Clarify the "what's on topic" clause.

3. Add a "criticisms must be constructive", perhaps deriving it from Paul Graham's "colleagues working together to uncover the truth" wording from the Pending Comments announcement.

Start by spelling out the norms you want to see here, and we can all work to move the site in that direction without having to nail down the statutory language or figure out what 100 lines of lisp will best implement them.

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Great idea.

To avoid Wiki-style lawyering (as noted in other comments), I think the guidelines could really be kept incredibly small. I think pg's "colleagues working together to uncover the truth" line covers 90% of what HN discussions should be.

I'd also add "no comments that don't add information/low signal comments", to avoid "+1" style comments and humour. I'm not sure most of the community agrees with me, but I don't like such comments here. Reddit optimises for fun being on Reddit and reading comments, HN optimises for getting the most on-topic information in the least time.

Wikipedia's wikilawyering culture generates and maintains the extensive guidelines there, instead of the guidelines generating that culture. (Like with most projects, people don't read the documentation first.)

It'd be great if a tiny set of guidelines were enough for HN, but that's very optimistic about people being able to pick up on implicit rules & values. A well-written set of reasonably detailed guidelines would make explicit what the majority of decent HN commenters already agree that HN should be.

100 lines of lisp? That's like, a billion lines of C? ;-)

I agree with Thomas(!), clarification of the guidelines would go a long way.

There are certain topics that bring out the flamewars more than others, and those should get particular attention. Most things political, sexism, nutrition (weird but true), and so on. Most of all I think it's important to reinforce the idea that you can disagree with someone even on deeply held beliefs and still be civil about it. Moral certitude does not make it ok to be mean.

Every pessimist imagines their negativity to be extremely constructive and the "best" possible response. See the comment I just replied to above :)

Most pessimists aren't being overtly un-constructive. But there are some very common species of negative comments that are clearly that: for instance, glib or sarcastic dismissals; and uncivil, hostile, or accusative criticisms.

True, those are a good target. I'm thinking of the more dangerous types though, where the person genuinely thinks that their negativity is highly valuable, when it isn't. Those are everywhere on the "Show HN" threads. Elsewhere too. The Internet loves to hate.

Hmm, seems like I'm being all talk. I'll just put my demo online, within the next couple weeks.

Yes, we need more detailed guidelines. I was talking about this over in one of the pending comments threads (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304), but "be civil", no name calling, and "no classic flamewar topics" are also way too vague. They're not a clear and enforceable code of conduct.

Wikipedia has some norms that, if imperfect, actually do seem to impact the site. "Civility" is a norm that seems to have a significant impact, and it's hard to think of a case in which incivility --- which is prominently featured every day on HN --- is ever worth hosting here. "Assume Good Faith" is another norm that seems to cut pretty closely to what Paul Graham was trying to say with his "collegiality" norm.

Yeah, that's an interesting example. Wikipedia spells out "civility" in great detail - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Avoiding_in... has friendly human-readable advice to prevent incivility, like "Not sufficiently explaining edits can be perceived as uncivil" and "Other people can misread your passion as aggression". And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Civility#Identifying... provides a reasonably comprehensive list of types of incivility, to help identify what breaks the guideline. And then there's a stated process for dealing with serious problems.

Wikipedia's impressive documentation goes hand-in-hand with a Wikipedia community problem --- lawyering. Spelling norms out in that level of detail risks making a sport of out spotting and "enforcing" the norms.

Wikipedia's problem-solving mechanisms are impressive and effective for a project with a single coherent goal, but they aren't good at fostering community. In fact, they do the opposite thing: they artificially factionalize the community, which holds together despite and not because of those mechanisms.

Sure, it gets messy to try to comprehensively document all types of incivility and only enforce what is described there. HN would benefit from a friendly middle ground between that legalistic style and simply saying "be civil".

Honestly, people do not need multiple pages of documentation for behaviour guidelines.

"Don't be a dick" covers most of it. "Don't attack the person making a point. And don't be vicious when you attack their point; test it, probe it; destroy it; just don't be vicious".

Sadly having extensive documentation about what is or is not allowed leads to destructive bike shedding and comcern trolling.

I wish everyone understood what "don't be a dick" means, but sadly, a lot of people don't get it.

Adding the small extra details of "Don't attack the person making a point" and "don't be vicious" would be improvements on the current guidelines.

Also, for example, adding "sarcasm is not helpful".

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