Ask HN: Why are all the Eich posts being deleted?
Are they being flagged or have admins decided it's not what they want here? The subject certainly seems relevant to the audience.
There are also penalties for flamewars. Originally I turned up the penalty because the discussion was so horrible. Users pointed out that a story of this magnitude needs to be on the front page, which was a good point, so I lightened the penalty.
By "horrible" I mean violating HN's values of intellectual substance and personal civility so badly as to be irremediable. There are some topics the community here has empirically proven itself to be incapable of discussing without that happening. I resisted this view for a long time—ask tptacek or davidw, my adversaries in this debate for years!—but my position either was wrong or at some point became so.
I don't know yet what the long term solution is, but the status quo is untenable, especially because these things aren't static—they get better or worse, and the trend has been worse.
I'm not sure what options the moderators have right now, but perhaps you should consider adding a three-strikes policy for users making clearly awful comments, with a simple "warn"-UI button for mods.
I don't think you should ban people for that. @dang is right to just demote it.
In the worst of these threads, people don't even disagree; they just don't agree with each other the right way, or don't agree as fiercely as they'd like. No matter; they'll still yell and spit at each other.
The number of times I stopped myself from "yelling" at people that they weren't even disagreeing or that they had simply misunderstood each other in the last two days....
Thinking about the threads as bandwidth and too many posts as congestion, then the solution would be some form of rate limiting. Maybe weighted maybe not.
It takes time and effort to write a thought-out comment on contentious issues and if I invest that time only to find that the post has been flagged off the front-page then I'm much less likely to invest the effort next time.
It'll essentially mean good comments are driven away from contentious posts resulting in a downward solution.
Flagging should be focused on bad comments and not on the contentious stories themselves.
I think part of being a good HN commenter is avoiding contentious discussions. That's not the same as avoiding contentious topics, but recognizing that the tone and tenor and volume of a comment thread is hopelessly bad. Stories are bigger than a particular submission.
Objectively, the submissions for the Eich story are low quality by HN standards, and the submission for something like Eich isn't the story. The story is a hydra and over time the heads which grow back look more like this than a retweeted press release and the discussion is becomes more that the reactive tweets.
What is unique about HN are headlines like "The Inside Story of Eich's Resignation [2014]" that will make the front page in 2018. To me, there's nothing wrong if people are forced to go elsewhere to passionately opine on breaking news as it breaks. Threads with 100 comments in the first hour are mostly noise and noise attracts mostly more noise.
None of this is to say that the Eich story doesn't touch on deep important issues, or that I would not prefer that HN could handle such stories. But the problem with the comment threads were not caused by individual behavior but by group behavior. It's not a few bad actors but the collective result of group interaction.
"Just catharsis" is an excellent phrase for that. Precisely so.
I doubt that, because some attention-getters only seek high-value targets. But even if you're right, the disadvantage is more than offset by the benefit of marginalizing lunacy. We're not talking careful pursuit of the truth across honest differences of opinion here; we're talking ragefests.
Nor is it story content we're seeking to drive off the front page. The stories in question are all on-topic (or they would already be buried), so the stories aren't the problem. The problem is that, like evil catnip, they drive HN mad.
Newcomers treat the front page—stories and threads—as representative of HN. I don't think they're wrong to do so. But if what's de facto representative routinely flouts HN's values, then our values—intellectual substance and personal civility—are a joke. Our values are not a joke.
Often major issues are contentious; the interplay between personal and professional life is a major issue and one that many HN contributors deal with on a daily basis (for that matter many personal comments on HN result in professional relationships). If we can't discuss contentious topics in a reasonable manner then we're already in trouble.
If you look at Usenet or Digg historically even minor issues often burst into flamewars (remember Emacs vs Vim wars?) - it's not the issues that cause incivility. It's the people.
If we can't discuss contentious topics in a reasonable manner then we're already in trouble.
Precisely—and it's clear that we can't, and that we're in trouble. I regard this as, perhaps not a crisis, but certainly an existential issue for HN. Because of it, the site has drifted away from its values: intellectual substance and personal civility. Those values are why I'm here. They are our priority and not open for negotiation.
But everything else is open. There's nothing we're doing right now (including these feedback comments I've been posting) that isn't just an experiment. If we get better data or better ideas for genuinely improving HN, nothing would make us happier. We don't claim to know the answers—it's all about seeing what works.