How about this small thing--change the wording of the button add comment to add thoughtful comment.
In this way, ultimately PG determines the character of the site by spreading voting power directly and indirectly via his voting.
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.
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.
"Feel free to enhance the discussion" or "Feel free to add value to this thread"
Any other ways to word it worth considering?
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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.
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 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...
"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.
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 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.
At least in this case if people want to be strident or acerbic, they have to work for it.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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?
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.
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.
Okay that took nine.