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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of our time is spent trying to make HN more interesting and substantive. The problem with incivility is not that we care how "naughty" you are, it's that it destroys the capacity of the site for the very "increasing knowledge [and] bettering the community" that you claim we're not aiming at. It's a bit of a bummer, when you're working so hard at something, to have someone who ought to know better claiming you're not.

Your faith in the capacity of "uncivilized looking" threads to converge upon truth seems surprisingly naive. From what I see, they don't converge at all.

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> From what I see, ["uncivilized looking" threads] don't converge at all.

I'll have to agree. But it looks like there's a tension between individual satisfaction, and collective quality. I'm not sure this tension has to be.

Reddit implements different solutions, and so far it frustrate that HN doesn't try some of them:

Markdown support. HN only has star-based emphasis and naked links. Many comments would look cleaner if they could take advantage of at least citations and lists.

Inbox. Presently, I have to scroll down my "threads" panel to see if anyone has replied to me. New messages are not even highlighted, so it's easy to miss them. This, I think, is the biggest long-term conversation killer.

Inline replies. Presently, when you reply to an HN comment, you are kicked to a page where you only see the comment you're replying to. Leaving the current page is a hassle, and may discourage some type of comments —probably not the type you'd want to encourage here, though.

No damn "unknown or expired link". It's frustrating to have that one every time I type a long comment. Instead, I'd rather have some ninja-edit detector.

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Maybe you want to limit such back-and-forth threads, possibly because of their average low quality, but Reddit have mechanisms to deal with that:

Hidden stuff is collapsed. Here in HN, hidden stuff is written in very light grey. Still, it takes up screen space… In Reddit, hidden stuff is just reduced to a single line, on which you can click to expand the hidden stuff.

Hide entire threads. When a comment is downvoted below some threshold, the whole thread is hidden by default. One has to click to recover it.

Charge Karma for replying in a junk thread. That's a LessWrong exclusive: when you reply in a thread that's supposed to be hidden because of too much downvotes on a particular comment, your karma instantly goes down by 5 points. Just so people really think before they reply to trolls. (Those who replied before the downvotes occured are not affected.)

Hide long-winded threads. When a Reddit thread gets too long, the later replies get cut regardless of their quality. One has to click to see the end, so they don't get very public. I like this feature: you can do back-and-forth, but the other users don't have to suffer this little private flamewar.

Hide lesser-quality threads in stuffed comment pages. Sometimes, a real popular pages gets over 500 comments. For those, Reddit hides even some comments and thread that didn't get any downvote. The idea is to highlight the higher-quality comments.

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Now there are some features I like in HN that you probably want to keep:

Hiding Karma scores. I'm not sure why, but my average went up the very day this came up. It's probably not neutral. But most importantly, it seems to be a deliberate and tested feature. You probably know more than I do about that.

No downvoting thy replies. It's frustrating in Reddit when your reply is downvoted by just one point: you never know if it's the parent's author being a jerk, or if it comes from someone else, who is presumably more impartial. HN removes that doubt, so I find it easier to stay civilized.

Dead comments. The distinction between massive downvote and death seems to be working here. Not being able to reply to dead comments at all is probably valuable.

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That's about it. Now you have even more work to do. :-) Now I don't expect all the proposed changes would be a good thing. But I think most of them are worth testing.

We're planning to add collapsible subthreads, which will enable some of the things you're asking for.

Things like richer formatting support scare me a little. HN's nearly-plain-text design seems pretty core to the site.

There should be many fewer "unknown or expired link" errors already, and soon you should nearly never see them. If you still get one, say, a month from now when posting a comment, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.

Terrific. I'm looking forward to those changes.

So I'm scrolling back in my comments. Not all converge. Here is a long one where I learned something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8228967

Here is a rather deep one that later led to a productive offline conversation. We didn't converge to a conclusion, but we did figure out what data was needed to find one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219369

I know these threads are ugly, but I don't think they are unproductive. I have certainly learned quite a bit from such threads (about analytical philosophy, computer security, marketing), and have changed my opinion on a number of matters.

As for the suppression of naughty comments, it's posts like this one [1] that suggests suppressing certain discussion if it makes YC look good. I know YC has been targeted in the past, and it appears that Altman wants to head off future attacks.

I have no doubt that all else held equal, you'd like to make HN a better place. But make HN a place with better discussions but also a focal point of criticism for YC?

[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/what-ive-learned-from-female-found... Specifically this comment: "And we're working on something to improve the quality of Hacker News comments."

Neither of those two threads are uncivilized in the least, so it's hard to see what point you're trying to make. For an example of an uncivilized thread, try "Why Doctors Are Sick Of Their Profession" from today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246760

They are long, but not uncivilized. That's the point - HN goes to significant effort to avoid long threads, and in my view a lot of our best information is contained in long threads.

If lack of civility is what we want to avoid, maybe we should target that directly.

No, HN doesn't avoid long threads. Incivility is what's being targeted.

The post I originally responded to was discussing various ways HN discourages long threads, at least relative to reddit. HN also explicitly penalizes stories with comments >> upvotes, and makes it difficult to reply to longer discussions via exponential backoff procedures (I know you can work around it by clicking the "link").

The reply-timer is not aimed at long discussions per-se, but to avoid quick-fire, heated back-and-forths between parties. The idea is that such exchanges are correlated with noise.

It's not relevant what it's intended to do, but what it does. If it makes long conversations hard, that's a con. (OTOH, if it avoids heated exchange, that's a pro. I don't really have a strong position one way or the other.)

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