Ask HN: Has the HN Community changed for the worse?

A few months ago, I did a statistical analysis of all the HN comments and found that the quantity of comments in increasing while the quality of comments is slightly decreasing: http://minimaxir.com/2014/10/hn-comments-about-comments/

Although, after going through your comment history, most of the comments you've been downvoted on have been downvoted for ad-hominem attacks, which is a fair response. (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815489)

Out of genuine curiosity, is there a site whose community's comment quality is actually increasing?

I've raised the same concerns before, but PG's opinion on the topic is that the downvote arrow is there to indicate disagreement and if people want to kneejerk downvote something, they're right to do so.

This is the opposite of Reddit where, in theory, the downvote is not meant to be used to indicate disagreement but rather low quality comments (not that that works at all).

The problem is that both HN and Reddit hide comments that get too downvoted (dead/hidden respectively). And also re-ordered to the bottom (further hidden). That means that getting downvoted has a real consequence, so unpopular opinions are pushed out of HN's dialog and the site becomes a uniculture (just like Reddit).

Then HN has flag kills which are like "super downvotes." I've seen a lot of perfectly reasonable comments flag killed for no real reason (just turn on dead in your settings). In particular when they're flying in the face of the site's culture/popular opinion.

In an ideal world people who run these sites need to sit down and make up their minds, for real, if downvotes are for disagreement OR to flag "bad" comments. If they're just for disagreement then stop hiding/killing low rated comments, that makes no sense...

Also the karma score on your profile (and unlocking functionality) is a massive hornets nest that has many of the same issues described above.

Ultimately the point of the downvote and the punishment/rewards on the site are completely at odds with one another. People just haven't thought it through at all, unless their ultimate goal is to wind up with some kind of uniculture.

> Then HN has flag kills which are like "super downvotes." I've seen a lot of perfectly reasonable comments flag killed for no real reason (just turn on dead in your settings). In particular when they're flying in the face of the site's culture/popular opinion.

[dead] comments are different from [flagkilled] comments. [dead] comments are usually from accounts that have been hellbanned.

I've very, very rarely seen a comment get flagkilled.

Flagkilled comments are probably rare because flagging a comment is not an obvious option and the down vote overlaps the reasons a comment might be flagged.

This is the opposite of Reddit where, in theory, the downvote is not meant to be used to indicate disagreement but rather low quality comments

I'm not sure HN has changed for the worse, but this is the first time I recall someone suggesting that the cause of HN's decline is that HN is not enough like Reddit.

> someone suggesting that the cause of HN's decline is that HN is not enough like Reddit.

I claimed no such thing. I said the management of both places have stated opposites in terms of how they expect the downvote to be utilised.

However, in reality they're both used in exactly the same way (for disagreement) so what management wants and what actually occurs are quite at odds on Reddit, and quite inline on HN.

Would HN be better if PG pretended people weren't using downvotes for disagreement? I don't think so. It wouldn't change a darn thing.

However the site might be better if PG took that usage to its logical conclusion and stopped penalising downvoted comments. Popular and "bad" aren't the same thing.

In my opinion, this "Ask HN:" creates a context in which consent to its premises implies a belief that HN is in decline. I probably would have better understood your comment had it been prefaced with something like "I do not believe HN is in decline, however..."

Looking at the recent net negative comments by the person creating the "Ask HN", one achieved that status quite reasonably due to tone. The other began with "I would argue..", and consisted of a single sentence of disagreement without support of facts, examples, or rationales. It added nothing to HN and the best one could say is that it was undeserving of upvotes. That it wound up net negative is just a result of it being on a topic - the nature of vinyl - that is not subject to definitive conclusions and likely to elicit strong opinions from those interested in it. In this it is akin to religion or politics.

There are objectively bad comments. There are objectively good comments. In general the votes by HN's community correlate with each.

One little problem is that "I lack the background to understand this comment" serves as a sufficient facsimile for "I disagree".

> Then HN has flag kills which are like "super downvotes." I've seen a lot of perfectly reasonable comments flag killed for no real reason (just turn on dead in your settings). In particular when they're flying in the face of the site's culture/popular opinion.

Do you have any example flagkilled comments that shouldn't have been flagkilled?

The only interpretation that is worth having is #2 because it leads to better writing.

[My Standard Answer]

Take downvotes as editorial feedback. Perhaps your point wasn't clearly made and backed up with examples, references and sound rationales. Perhaps your tone was inappropriate in terms of the larger community.

Realize that even if you make your point clearly and with reasoned support, it may be directed at the wrong audience and that also prevents a comment from being well written and is something that can be improved.

It also explains why #3 isn't a valid approach. Yes there are more people with the downvote. That's just a fact about the audience [nevermind that there are even more people with the upvote to offset them when a comment is well written].

Looking at your two recent net negative comments. Both are poor quality.

Some tips:

   + When making a first comment, the word "argue" 
     should be considered a bit of a red flag. "As
     I understand your argument" is about the only
     thing that consistently turns out well.

   + Use "you" with caution.

As a final word, I try to recognize when I am firing something off in angry response to Another Stupid Thing on the Internet™. I often let myself complete the thought even though it's low quality by my standards.

Then I often delete my comment. It hits my average karma, but it makes me a better writer, I think.

I'm not sure why an interpretation which would lead to a better HN wouldn't also be worth having?

I just flat out disagree with your analysis of my first two "net negative" comments. But I doubt anything would be more boring to read than the two people discussing the quality of a couple of comments.

More good content including thoughtful and informative comments is what Will make HN better. Complaints about internet points don't. Despite drive by disagreement being in the better half of the set of all internet comments, it doesn't usually meet the norms for good comments on HN.

What I'm driving at is a product level change. I think some of the product changes like the addition of "Show HN" did come from grassroots requests from the users.

I could be mistaken but I see that given a certain product the quality of writing form the users is going to be relatively constant. There could be some influx of users (from some marketing, PR or viral effect) that changes the landscape but I don't expect anything like this to occur in HN in the near future. Therefore, I think to change the quality of comments the product needs some level of change. The product change would either have to change the motivations for the current users or attract other users who write higher quality comments.

I also thing you undersell the "internet points". Without some sort of karma system you would likely have something like 4Chan or the comments in Youtube. Further, reducing my statements down to a squabble about "internet points" is reductionist and inaccurate. The larger effect is that down-votes can literally remove a comment.

All in all, I think the current mechanics support passive aggressive interactions between users and penalize overt disagreements. I think most people would agree that the former isn't a good thing but the latter is where I would imagine there are widely differing viewpoints.

Yes, there is a fair amount of drive-by-downvoting. I sometimes comment on the political topics so I expect some down voting. Lord knows I have enough internet points as it is. :)

But it bugs me a lot when someone writes a detailed comment in a thread about a programming language (e.g Erlang) about its flaws (eg. poor Windows support) and its get down voted to light gray even if the content of the post is completely factual.

Such comments takes a long time to write (much longer than just writing your opinion on some political topic), so when people are down voted for that they become less likely to write such informative, technical comments.

Which is a problem for me because I read them with interest and I don't want people to stop writing them because of to much down voting.

I'd agree that down-voting has become more prevalent and is unfortunately often used to show disagreement. I think one problem is that HN is likely acquiring a lot of redditors where votes in general are not nearly as meaningful (especially down-votes).

Reddit is, in my opinion, a place mostly for fluff (humor, pop culture content, etc) while HN is a place we seek out for information and discussion. Disagreement only down-votes definitely suppress discussion so I'm all for seeing HN experiment with curbing down-vote usage.

I could see "controversial down-votes" being an interesting method for identifying people abusing their down-vote privilege. If a comment gets a mix of up-votes and down-votes its likely that the down-votes are disagreement driven so that could be an easy place to start.

edit: To emphasize the point, this comment has been down-voted at least once

Downvoting for disagreement is beneficial because it often stands in as proxy for an inflamed response. A down vote might be better for the community than a flame war or accusations of trolling or wasting energy trying to convince people that they are wrong.

There are times when the community is better for point->counterpoint and times when it isn't. When I suspect it won't be after I have written what I am inclined to write, I down vote. It's often the best among my alternatives after avoiding threads likely to produce crap comments, trolling, and everything I can find elsewhere on the internet.

Obviously, the downvote count on your posting cannot be caused by you having become more sensitive. Only if that sensitivity is reflected in some posting behavior: like editing your posting to complain about downvotes or whatever.

Good point. #1 was obviously wrong, I guess I just put it there to give more meat to the post.

IMO every community has changed for the worse.

Nothing is as good as it was last year, and as sites grow they fill with people who act different than the past members.

If anything less people downvote to disagree. There's a subset of users who strongly disagree with downvote to disagree.

It was better next year