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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Sadly true. HN now gets 40k uniques a day, and I am starting to worry about the character of the comments.

The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up.

The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site. A zippy one-liner that a year ago would have languished midway down the thread now becomes the top comment.

So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and more dangerous decline I've been seeing.

I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix.

View on HN

In the wake of my disillusionment with the way reddit has devolved, I've been thinking about this problem for a while.

I think the best way to handle this is to apply a sort of social equivalent to the PageRank algorithm to users. Thus, when a user votes up/down an article, its points change as a function of that user's karma level. Consequently, users with greater karma have greater direct input into the community.

Eigenvalue centrality is a fascinating algorithm that provides such a use case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Eigenvector_centrali...

Another benefit of such a system is you would no longer need to enforce karma thresholds for downvoting, as this sort of meritocracy arises naturally from the algorithm.

That makes a lot of sense to me. It ensures that the older users have more power to keep the site the way it has always been. (I really shouldn't be talking as I've not yet been a year on HN. However, I commented to ensure you that at least one newer user is not opposed to having his vote worth less than that of an older user.)

I'm a relatively new user too, but for me HN is one of the few refuges for rational discourse online, and the last thing I would want is for it to become another digital ghetto.

same goes for me; been reading this site for ages. Made an account not that long ago when I finally gave up on reddit, after giving up on digg. Both for the same kind of reasons.

With popularity comes the masses and that will always lead to lowest common denominator winning out. Hopefully there will never be any lolz cats on here!

Great job btw pg.

I doubt we will ever have lolz cats on here. They would be flagged immediately.

I think using karma as a proxy for good judgement has its own inherent problems. High karma can easily be attained by karma-whoring behavior or by obsessively and excessively contributing to the site. Both of which imply poor judgement of one form or another. Not all high-karma users fall to those categories of course. I think if you combined it with an admin-controlled visible-only-to-admin override flag the high-karma filter might work.

It would be interesting too because over time as a user's karma rises or falls it would change the current score of all the articles and comments he's voted. That would be interesting for two reasons: 1. It could cause old, interesting articles to bubble back up onto the front page months or years after they were originally posted and 2. It could help alleviate people's anxiety associated with their own karma score-- it would be something that you know bounces around in an out-of-your-control manner and not something that monotonically trends upwards. The loop between user's karma, article and comment points would be closed. We could use our fancy math to analyze the stability of the system and figure out the proper controller to insert in the loop to prevent positive feedback making it all go to the rails. It could be beautiful.

That sounds more complicated that Google's page ranking system. That said, it sounds like fun to program.

Well, PageRank closes the loop too. But I've always seen it presented as a static analysis. I don't know how they actually implement it. This would need to be inherently dynamic. I think it's the dynamic aspect of the thing that makes if feel different. And also why I started thinking in terms of dynamical systems and control theory.

Simply making a bot to submit articles based on the home pages of some technical news web sites through screenscaping the external link URLs would be sufficient to increase the Karma score to unnatural numbers. So, some solution may be needed to stop this.

That's easily solved by divorcing submission karma from comment karma, which pg should do anyway.

Systems similar to this have been proposed in the past -- probably repeatedly. For example, although you probably wouldn't want such a system to be purely karma-based, you could still implement it by selecting a handful of the users that you thought represented the kind of community you wanted.

You could establish influence as a factor of a user's "distance" from the community's founders: you'd have the founders, the founders' friends, the founders' friends' friends, and so on, each with diminishing influence in community moderation.

However, this and other suggestions are not new, and pg doesn't tend to comment on them.

So in the end it's all a waste of effort.

Restrict suffrage.

edit for additional explanation: Democracy is another name for the tyranny of the mean. You can try to educate the mean all you want, but at some point it's a losing strategy due to the sheer weight of the numbers.

Further thought: stackoverflow is an example of a community that has implemented an incremental rights model successfully. Universal rights are cleaner and more elegant, but ultimately give a community over to the mean.

If we make three reasonable assumptions about HN:

- The community of readers will keep growing.

- New readers will continue to find it easy to comment and participate.

- New readers will mostly enjoy and prefer the kind of content PG and many older users want to discourage (not a big reach, since there are tech-oriented sites with millions of readers and participants having pretty shallow discussions.)

Then we have a different problem; we're trying to suppress the majority of users and rule with the minority. Incremental rights with a simple "karma" model won't help us in any way I can see, because the majority will vote up people who contribute the kind of content we don't prefer, and those people will have the karma to perpetuate that content.

(As I understood, that was your original point here, but I don't see how incremental rights is a good way of tackling that issue, at least not the way SO does it.)

Minority rule will discourage the kind of content that you posit new readers prefer and old readers dislike. If new readers need to sit through hard tech articles for a period before they can influence content, this will keep away new readers that don't like hard tech articles. They won't be able to simply reshape the community to their preferences instantly.

Imagine a 30-day waiting period between joining the site and being able to influence content. You won't stick around unless you like what is already there.

yeah, i agree with this.

pg, you've done a hell of a job thus far. i've never seen an internet hangout get this big and this old, yet remain this polite and civil. but as external forces conspire to drag the site down toward the mean, fighting them off will require increasingly severe countermeasures.

>The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site.

If you don't want the character of the site to change then don't allow new users to vote. It annoyed me on StackOverflow at first, but now I see the wisdom in it.

How about this small thing--change the wording of the button add comment to add thoughtful comment.

Some research (probably see Cialdini) shows significantly improved compliance when a question is asked that requires confirmation from the subject. So it would better as: "Will you add a thoughtful comment?". How that can be best realised in a web context is something for further consideration . . .

Here's something that is more likely to work: PG gets more voting power than anyone else. Moreover, his voting gives/takes away voting power to/from submitters/commenters, and their voting do likewise, and so on.

In this way, ultimately PG determines the character of the site by spreading voting power directly and indirectly via his voting.

I don't know, that sounds like a Monarchy to me.

If you wanted to go that way why not make a user's 'voting power' be based on their own karma / time on the site. This rewards users who have been around longer and have been 'peer reviewed' through their karma.

I'm not sure this is evolutionarily stable against an invasion of new users multiple times the size of the original population.

That wouldn't necessarily work because the next person below PG would be likely to be more willing to upvote someone who wasn't as focused. They in turn would be willing to upvote someone else who was worse and so on.

I think it makes more sense for voting power to be associated with karma level.

> I think it makes more sense for voting power to be associated with karma level.

This could be gamed, or lead to runaway karma effects within a small, incestuous cabal.

If I were pg, I would handle it similarly to amichail's suggestion, but instead of voting power going to submitters of articles that I like, I would have it go to voters of articles that I like.

In other words, I would restate the problem as, "I can't be awake 24 hours to moderate every single submission, so instead, I'll assign invisible voting power based on how reliably a given voter's running and recent preferences match what I would want to see on the front page."

I would add some random jitter to the algorithm, to mildly penalize people whose votes are too similar to my own.

The bonus to consistently good submitters would not be better voting privileges, but better submitting privileges (better initial placement and/or slower decay).

And I would silently give voters and submitters whose patterns negatively correlated with my preferences corresponding penalties, and use their poor taste as valuable data on what not to put on the front page.

This would be like non-binary whitelists that have multiple levels. I like it.

I would love to see if this works.

"Feel free to enhance the discussion" or "Feel free to add value to this thread"

Any other ways to word it worth considering?

Yes, this simple change could really work much better than all the fancy solutions. This is a social solution to a social problem.

I would suggest one additional thing, which is a little bit more invasive. After a user submits a comment, show a confirmation question like "Are you sure you are making a positive contribution to the conversation? [Yes] [No]"

I'm afraid that won't work for long. People will read it once and then comply. Maybe the second and third time they'll stop to think about it for a few seconds, but after that it'll get enshrined in muscle memory, without people actually reading the statement, let alone think about it.

I believe the posts are only part of the problem, though. The post obviously needs to exist, but it's the votes that make a comment insipid or insidious. Votes are multipliers: nobody cares about a stupid comment with few upvotes and a great comment with many upvotes is an even greater comment. It's when the votes are distributed the other way around that problems start.

Furthermore, a poster that gets downvoted will probably learn from the experience whereas if he gets upvoted, he's encouraged.

The problem and the solution therefore probably lie in the voting system. There's a few options I can think of right now:

* Giving high-karma individuals more voting power. Maybe tiered or maybe on an analogue scale. This has the problem that not all karma as it is now is deserved. (Take mine: I seem to get most upvotes for snide remarks and snarky questions, not for the posts where I want to make a point.) That said, karma probably still is an indicator of quality of posts, so it may work.

* Make upvoting cost a bit of karma. I don't think this will work well, since you'll end up with a closed economy where only the top X% of the users can really participate. And X will be decreasing when more players come in.

* Give a certain amount of points each day to spend on votes. (I'm not a user of that site, but I believe Slashdot uses it. Is that correct?) This will make upvotes a scarce resource, making people be more careful what they upvote. Of course, if unused points get deleted at the end of the day, people may try to spend unused points on things they wouldn't normally upvote.

* Up the current karma-limits. Right now you need X karma for feature Y, but with the influx of new users, karma has inflated somewhat. It's much easier to get to X if 10 people read your posts than it would be if only 1 person read it.

Just a few things of the top of my head. I'm not the smartest guy here, so it may not be a whole lot, though...

Great points.

"I'm not the smartest guy here, so it may not be a whole lot, though..."

Please don't ever think that. 'Smartness' is just a function of few things which are in your control, at least in the long run. Thinking "I am not smart" is self-fulfilling.

High karma at the very least represents a stake in the site. Not every high-karma comment is worth anything, but virtually every high-karma user cares about the culture of HN.

True this. When I joined, I quickly found out that the people on the leaderboard tended to be the people whose names I remembered throughout threads.

I'd also place a bet that not too many people with lots of karma are flippant spammers; even the ones I think can be jerks sometimes (myself totally included) at least are putting in an effort.

I actually was going to start a new thread about making Karma a currency. Happily, I searched this thread first.

I would also add one item to the list. Make all comments cost Karma. If you are saying something that you do not think has the potential to be upvoted, just don't say it.

This may be a dumb idea, but how about requiring some minimum length of comment? Are there circumstances when someone legitimately should just use 8-10 words? I don't know what that minimum length would be though.

At least in this case if people want to be strident or acerbic, they have to work for it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466373

You advocate verbosity to the author of arc?

I'm trying to make this a zingy one liner, because it wouldn't be such a good comeback unless it also fitted within the 8-10 words that the parent post was complaining about.

It is supposed to reference the idea that there isn't any intrinsic merit in verbosity, and that we often prize writing that is pared down and says only what it needs to - prose or code, and as a group prize languages that allow conciseness with joy going to Ruby, reverence to R and J, and fear and loathing to XML.

Particularly PG who has written more than once about Lisp and how it allows dense code to express a lot, so much so indeed that he reduced function creation to 'fn' in the language that backs this very site on which you are suggesting longer comments are the answer.

(See? Not so insightful, sharp and cool now, is it?)

It's not as sharp and cool, but it's equally insightful, and it provides a lot more material with which to actually have a conversation, rather than just shoot back a counter-opinion.

It's just this sort of zingy one-liner that hurts HN. You are playing into the cult of personality, your comment does little to further the discussion, and it's basically just an inside joke. Surprise, surprise... you have thirteen points at the time of this retort.

Instead, you should debate the merits of the idea. I was actually not so much advocating the idea as I was bringing it up for discussion - you can tell by the tone of my comment. And, while I questioned myself for even bringing up the idea of a length requirement, your response makes me lean a little bit more towards the idea.

I am playing to the karma, which is one reason I advocate my suggestion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936306 where people could agree with my zing yet still bury my comment as a bad contribution.

When voting, I vote up for "interesting point", for "you put a lot of effort into this reply" and for "I agree" and "ha!". I feel conflicted downvoting a comment I like even if it's not contributory, and I don't want to upvote a comment I disagree with even if it's a good contribution. Split the two up so the conflict goes away.

You are playing into the cult of personality

It's what the site's design encourages - usernames are prominent, vote scores are prominent and tallied as the main measure of a person, popular comments get votes. Big thoughtful comments and deep discussion get squashed into nesting and pushed aside by the ever increasing flood of new submissions. "Furthering the discussion" as you put it ... what does this mean to you? Who is supposed to benefit and how, and does the site design encourage that?

I think furthering the discussion in this case means talking about the pros and cons of adding a comment length requirement.

Since the site owner pg is in on this thread, the community may benefit by Paul getting some feedback and ideas on how to improve the site.

The site's design does encourage conversation of course. Comments are threaded to encourage back-and-forth, and voting moderation promotes good comments and helps to keep the discussion civil.

I too like to get some karma, but I'll sometimes write something that I suspect may be down-voted (or even that I may not believe) just because I like to discuss things. Karma doesn't really matter on this site or affect your experience (other than being able to down-vote comments), and I think that fact encourages people not to treat it very seriously.

The arcticle is blogspam. The right one is here.

Okay that took nine.

I think it would just end up with trolls pasting in Lorem Ipsum or something after their trollish comment. Having trash text in low quality comments might make them easier to identify as low quality and the need to post comments of a minimum length may possibly discourage some people from posting "zingers", but I don't feel it would be a net win overall.

I don't think so. I think the vast majority of users will down-vote and/or flag comments intentionally padded with nonsense.

I'd like to see a more sophisticated quality detection system - a learning text classifier of some sort. PG might have enough experience in that field of programming to come up with something useful along those lines.

I've thought of considering comment length in the sorting algorithm. There's definitely a correlation between length and quality.

Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.

Another possibility would be to implement a waiting period before people have the opportunity to vote. This may help with the issue of newer members upvoting the one line witty comments. However, I am not sure if the short comments are necessarily negative. Should users be required to contribute exceptionally long and verbose posts without the benefit of shorter posts in between? From my own perspective, I tend to only skim over 'wall of text' comments if they do not engage my interests from the beginning so the intermingling of short comments with longer comments to me is not a bad thing. The voting up or down of comments from those that may be deemed inadequate to accurately judge the quality of the post (new members) seems to be more of an issue. These new users may vote based on their opinions (as I mentioned in another post) rather than on the quality of the arguments or information presented so a probation period may be the solution.

(I was going to include this as an edit to my previous post, but it really needs its own comment post.) I created a site with a Karma based system. The Karma was actually transferred from person to person, though. Everyone started with 0 Karma, and only the administrator could feed Karma into the system. The users could transfer to each other, but as they gave Karma they would lose Karma. A potential benefit is that the administrator can feed Karma into the system by rewarding people that contribute based on particular topics as chosen by the administrator. I am not sure if this would be a good idea for this site, but I am simply stating it to get the ideas flowing for other solutions. I really like the way the site operates even if there are potentials for abuse or inaccuracies.

Also, not related to the topic so much, I find it funny that I often see people say "I do not care about points." but are also the most likely people to make suggestions about new ways to implement the points system.

Another option would be to have a hidden karma impact on sorting. Keeping a hidden score based on the log(karma) of the up voters might dilute the impact of people until they have been around for a while and help maintain the current culture without ignoring new opinions.

Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.

I think you are onto something here.

Hmm. Could do this for new accounts at least.

The comment fields on the MetaFilter sites have little admonishments underneath them:

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In the old days comments always had to be previewed in context (with a full refresh) before they could be posted. The "New Post" pages have huge search fields for dupe avoidance, dupe search on preview, stern warnings about what is allowed, and occasionally a row of siren.gif from the Drudge Report.

You should do what you've been doing all along. Provide occasional reinforcement: post items urging people to look at the guidelines, urging people not to upvote naked snark, and perhaps urging them to downvote snark that seems to be catching on.

One or two comments to the effect of, "I agree with this, but the way it was phrased is toxic to the site, so I downvoted it" can't hurt either.

I don't think yours is a problem that requires a technical solution. You've already got a critical mass of people who give you extraordinary deference. Just use them to to fix it.

Maybe the guidelines should be '0'th or the '1'st post once or twice a day.

If it is shown that often, it will lose its impact. Showing it only once, especially if the cause is listed, evokes a much stronger sense of shame.

How about if a comment is losing a significant amount of points then the author is required to view a simple guidelines page on the next visit to HN and sign off on it.

Like they sign the EULA for software?

Yeah kinda, but designed to actually be read :P

I was thinking it would contain the offending comment, a little message about it being flagged for not meeting community standards, then briefly list the community standards. A little word of encouragement and a button to show they've actually got the message- and off they go. I don't think it would need to be confrontational or make them actually agree to anything (since they might have good reason to disagree). But a gentle reminder about acceptable behavior could help new people get acclimated.

Aren't we discussing the problem that comments that should lose a significant amount of points actually get good scores? Moreover, it's easy to avoid reading bad comments with bad scores.

I spent a good amount of time lurking before signing up to get a feel for the culture. I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here, and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb.

With that said, I'm sure it has been mentioned before, but maybe restricting new users from commenting at all until they have held the account for a significant period of time would help.

Thus ensuring that HN never gets a comment from Rob Pike or Daniel J. Bernstein, ever.

Its a cost/benefit tradeoff and you are suggesting a black-swan sort of event as the benefit to compensate for a decreased signal to noise ratio. These events have actually happened, or at least we have had authors of various packages that get noticed and startup founders create accounts just to dive into discussions about their new hotness which we all noticed, so this benefit can't be dismissed out of hand but perhaps we need to think of some way to keep the possibility of comments like this open while raising the bar for most other comments...

Jason Fried from 37s comments regularly on stories that involve 37s. He wouldn't be an HN commenter at all if he had to jump through hoops to get here.

But forget about the "black swan" event of Rob Pike posting here on a Go story. Think about the Zappos redesign story. It's not black-swan-crazy to think the UX guy from Zappos might comment here. And lo, he did! There are lots of "normal" people who are close to the stories we post that have a moment to comment on them.

I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here

Don't be! Another way of looking at it...

Everybody is really good at some stuff and not so good at others. Use this community and its experts as your sand box for the stuff you need to work on. Better to practice here than out there.

and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb.

So what? The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach. Anyone who'd tear you up probably has issues of their own. You mustn't let that bother you. And even if it did, just log off and come back fresh later. We start over every day.

Glad you stopped lurking, heed. Welcome.

Why thank you edw519, glad to visible.

The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach.

That's a good heuristic for what a lot of us are looking for here: not necessarily agreement, but a chance to learn. Some comments promote learning more than others.

"So what? The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach."

I'm not so sure, if you say something uninformed about computer security I completely expect tptacek to tear you up, for instance.

On the other hand you'll learn some real stuff in the process.

I would not say restrict them from commenting but rather make their first fee post rather critical.

Kind of like a karma multiplier so you get an instant separation of quality and then you can look at penalizing those that take the down delta rather quickly.

Choosing to assume someone is guilty before they commit an offense would surly drive bright people away.

Anyway good comment and don't get to intimidated, many of us are just wind bags anyway, bright sure but wind bags none the less.

What about a pagerank type algorithm for ranking comments that weights the votes depending on the voters own karma?

eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score.

Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies.

(That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course).

I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments.

Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments".

Just an idea...

I don't think it'll work, I have like 19K karma, should my one opinion be worth more than 19,000 new people? Maybe if it's in tiers, 1-1000 = 1 karma point, 1000-10000 = 10 karma points, 10000+ = 20 karma points.

Also the whole downvoting thing doesn't even work half the time. I usually see the down vote button in only like 10% of the threads, the rest I can only upvote.

Sure, you'd need to make sure the scale was right, and maybe a cap at the top. Maybe max 10 pts per vote, distributed over the current userbase range of karma.

You might want to factor in karma density as well. Maybe something like:

    w = ln(k * m)

    w = weight of vote
    k = karma of voter
    m = median points per comment by voter

Instead of feeding into the post's score, it could also feed into the 'buoyancy' of a post (how long a fresh post gets to stay at the top of a page before beginning to sink to the bottom).

You will be very surprised to hear my suggestion: kill the off-topic articles mercilessly. No politics/economics and no fluff.

Right now an article about veterans is the #3 post on the homepage and has an enormous number of points.

Good luck with that.

I liked raganwald's post, agreed with it, and think that he's generally a very bright and interesting guy, but I still flagged the article since I thought it wasn't really hacker news. pg can just up and kill stuff though, and doing more of that would set the tenor of the site.

So, that makes two flags, it's still there. Similar sentiment on the flag by the way, it's a good thing he did but I feel it does not belong here.

I've been wondering for a while now if this flagging is useful or not, it doesn't seem to have too much effect, if any.

If I recall correctly, pg made an addition that if a submission has over X points, it won't be auto-killed by flagging.

Correct, but that means that an editor will look at it (as happened, see above) and has to decide whether to give the article a pass or not.

I wasn't referring to the 'auto kills', but to the editor kills.

I wanted to flag it for the same reason, but there wasn't a 'flag' link anymore...

I flagged that article, but I guess I don't have enough karma for it to matter yet.

I properly also triggered the spam filter, because I just went to the thread and downvoted all the comments.

> I just went to the thread and downvoted all the comments.

Now why on earth would you do that ?

I figure it's ok to leave up the occasional commemorative post, when it's by an old and respected member of the community, so I didn't kill it. I think I'm going to have to though; the comments show HN users can't be trusted with this topic.

I think the problem is that there are very few 'hops' between "trusted, respected person writes something intelligent" and "flame wars" when the topic is emotionally loaded/political/economics/etc... Fluff articles aren't quite so bad, but I think they still beget more fluff.

That's a very slippery slope, 'old and respected' should not matter when posting off-topic stuff.

I've seen content that was much more on-topic killed off ruthlessly, it creates a sense of class-justice.

Whoever posted it and how long they have been a member should not be the deciding factor in killing stuff or letting it be.

Anyway, of course it is your call, but that's how I feel about it.

Not surprised, and agree. HN isn't covering a nice natural boundary of topics, it's trying to fit a group of people's ideas for interesting topics.

If and when it isn't doing that, said group of people should prune away the topics they don't want - otherwise it will grow into a general discussion site. Like pruning a shrub or guiding a vine. Yes, it's a bit dictatorial and a bit undemocratic, and that's fine because it's not a popularity contest trying to target the majority of people.

Often when googling for a problem and finding a result, there's a languishing forum post that goes

"problem" "irrelevant suggestion" "irrelevant suggestion" "unhelpful but well meaning comment" "me too" "answer"

and I wish someone had enough care to weed out the drivel.

After a certain threshold is met, the average quality of voting seems to be inversely proportional to the traffic on the site. This trend, with different overall parameters, appears to describe a large class of aggregation sites. I'm thinking specifically of HN, reddit and slashdot.

I think code and culture can shape this curve in useful and beneficial ways, but fundamentally, once an aggregation site gets popular, its quality declines. And the site gets popular because it has high quality.

So we are thinking about trying to shape the curve with code and culture; that's good. I bet there's a more 'meta' solution though.

I'm not really proposing this, just throwing the idea out there. For a given site, once popularity starts pushing down voting and submission quality, make a new site. Obviously something as trivial as http://news2.ycombinator.com/ won't work. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it's interesting to think about.

From experience: the "News2" thing does work. The only problem is that after a few "NewsN" iterations, you come to realize that you're just basically kicking out everyone except for the same few core groups of users each time you make a new one, so you might as well just have the single site with the core users and lock it down.

Interesting; may I ask what was the example of 'News2' working?

Regarding the exclusivity of the core group of users, I understand that would tend to be the outcome. But I think the 'forking' method would be a little more dynamic than just locking down the user list. It would allow new, high quality users to come on board, if they really wanted to.

I realize how 'classist' this sounds, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable. But as we all know, good things came come out of dwelling on uncomfortable topics.

To limit the effect of one-liners, you can try making the maximum karma a comment can have be a function of the number of words in the comment. A simple linear relationship would mean that a one-word comment ("No") could never have a karma greater than one. It may be that a more complex function would be better, but something like that may help.

I doubt the correlation between length and value is that strong. Brevity is the soul of wit; let's not penalize high information density.

So the problem is that, at a certain growth point, growing the community and preserving the feel of the community become more or less mutually exclusive. New people will invariably bring their feel for things here, even if it displeases existing users.

Anything involving kharma or other metrics is also likely to fail, and will probably lead to lots of benign but likely popular posts so that people can get more "power".

Basically I think your options are to freeze the community (or make it invite only) or to be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them. I don't particularly advocate either of these, but generally believe less extreme measures are superior.

There's a fine line between trolling and radical new ideas and sometimes radical new ideas are a good thing.

be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them

No. If signal:noise gets too low, good people will leave.

The voting scheme should bring good to the top and send trolls to the bottom.

that's what people said about usenet. "just killfile the trolls." that didn't stop almost everybody from arguing with them.

usenet was designed in a more naive time, and it has zero defenses against disruptions. and that's why it died.

How about making upvoting power (e.g. votes per day (or hour, or whatever) accrue with tenure and/or karma? New users start with a low number of upvotes per period. At the start of each period, their count is reset to this maximum. (Unused votes do not roll over.)

The user's upvote count scales up per some formula, and beyond a certain point, it becomes uncapped.

I wouldn't grandfather anyone, either. KISS, and so that it also addresses the problem with the current population.

Potentional problems with this:

+ In line with the general policy of transparency that is practiced here, you may want to show users how many upvotes they have. But you may not want the load of additional profile page hits that might occur as people check their counts. Perhaps it would be a lower load to show that count in a fashion similar to how karma is shown in the banner next to the user name. However, I don't have a suggestion for a design that wouldn't make the banner look too busy.

+ A scarcity of upvotes might promote more low-value commenting. Perhaps a user's minimum time between comments needs to be defined and similarly throttled. (Simply cutting off comments when the count hits zero will merely result in people turning to comments before their count hits zero.

To take the glass half full view, perhaps such throttling would not eliminate participation, but would help people observe and become accustomed to the community's values before handing them the keys to the kingdom. And if they don't respect those values, it's going to hinder them from progressing to greater influence.

Including karma in the formula allows for high value contributors to progress more quickly. Tenure keeps a one hit wonder or clique of friends from gaining undue influence.

Similar: Perhaps make downvoting power -- as opposed to upvoting power -- proportional to age/karma? That would empower experienced (indoctrinated?) members to discourage the undesired content, without too heavily influencing the discussion.

Since it sounds like the problem is comments rather than posts, and posts are commonly flagged and killed, why not encourage users to flag comments that are inconsistent with the character of the site?

I only realized a couple of days ago that one can flag comments by following the comment's permalink -- why not make this more obvious and promote its wider use as an experiment?

As a new user, you should not be able to vote until you've read x number of posts or spent x number of days on the site to understand the culture.

This is not the same as just not counting the votes. Point here is by preventing voting you're explicitly communicating your expectations to the new user.

You could set up a karma threshold to vote, or perhaps allot an increasing number of votes per day based on karma. It doesn't depart greatly from the present karma thresholds and would limit the drowning of commenter votes by reader votes.

>> The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up.

How about using your ideas from your antispam series* to limit maximum karma points awarded to a comment? Would it trigger too many false positives/negatives?

I remember someone applying a learning network or something like that to filter HN articles a while back and it didn't turn out that bad.

*http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html

ooh ooh, time for me to dust off and drag out the suggestion for another set of vote buttons to separate "I agree/disagree" and "good/poor contribution"?

That way you can acknowledge the wit in zingy one liners and agree with political and ideological statements while still shoving them down to the bottom as being poor contributions. You still get the feeling of being able to chime in while not facing the "I agree so I don't want to downvote" dilemma.

How hard would it be to implement a 'classic' or 'noobs' controller (filter) for handling how different items are viewed? Easiest hack (from someone ignorant in arc) could be as simple as adding an optional view variable after each id.

Would it be difficult to integrate comment filtering for /classic and /noobs while they act as somewhat of a controller and items behave like views?

How about not letting accounts newer than, say, six months vote on comments? Perhaps you could also do something to ensure that those accounts are active (e.g. they click on links from time to time). It's a lot less sexy than eigenvector centrality, but I think it would have the intended effect. Most trolls don't have the patience to wait that long.

I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix.

Please keep us updated as to your thinking & actions. It has been consistently interesting to watch you manage HN's evolution and growth.

Expanding on the idea of the 'classic' link, you could add a user selectable/configurable threshold for who's votes count based on age of registration. Newer users up voting meretricious comments would not impact those with a high set threshold.

You could try and make membership a bit harder to achieve, similar to how demonoid will open and close memberships occasionally and have allowed them to maintain their unique culture (to say nothing of torrents).

Most important part of this article: pg is now talking about how the site has quality problems.

(For the noobs, I don't think this has happened before)

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