Ask HN: How Can We Help Make HN a Better Online Community?

Does this comment contribute something to the general discussion rather than just trying to prove that someone else is wrong? If so, [add comment]

then it might stop me from making some of my more bone-headed and offensively off-topic comments.

Imagining HN as a large round table discussion full of very smart strangers that I was lucky enough to join in with seems to help. Only say something that adds to the discussion, moves it along, or points out a seemingly missed but valid and contrary point of view, and don't be so rude as to mention that guy's stutter, the foreign guy's poor pronunciation, or be a boring pedant. If it gets boring, go to the next round table.

I'm a little concerned by the "citation please" two-word comment below someones long contribution for some reason. Not everything needs to be peer-reviewed here, there's plenty of room for well-formed opinions based on one experts own experience. I guess the problem is when they are crowded out by the poorly-formed opinions or dogma. A balance, like most things, I guess.

Hacker News is a startup community which, and more recently users seem to be forgetting this. .

Which is why, I believe that along with the ban on "fluff" as highlighted in PG's Essay there should also be the same ban on Political Submissions. There are several reasons for this but just going into one of the reasons as to why there should be a ban on these type of submissions is because, if you go to any political thread you will see that they all eventually turn into flame wars and because there has been an uprise in the political submissions around HN recently and as a result of these flame wars, they have been spreading out into other areas of the site which have been reducing the comment quality.

Likewise, I think people should stop saying "This." - I'm not going to fully go into this as it has previously been covered - http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3153377 but its really of annoying when people just comment for the sake of commenting. I think that, if you are going to comment, then you should be commenting because you want to add your 2 cents and not because, you're commenting to say that you agree with someones comment yet don't add any other value because, this is what the "up vote" button is for. Maybe, some text could be added above the Add Comment button which says "Does Your Comment Add Value? If So:"

I might not have enough karma to do this, or it might be not available to users but like the down vote (which I do have access to) I think there should be an option to flag comments which are deemed unnecessary by users (this could be implemented via a certain amount of karma) to remove some of the unnecessary comments in particular the "This." comments and the ones involving flame wars between users.

Likewise, I also think there should be an "infraction" system used on Forums. I think there is already a system like this in place, as I know if you get a certain amount of downvotes then, the post will get deleted etc but, on Forums the users are clear of their infraction points and it encourages "good behaviour" on the site after they rack up infaction points - making them be more considerate etc. The infraction system could work in the sense that - if you submit something that is "fluff/banned on HN" then you would get +2 infaction points likewise, a bad comment would get +1 infraction points.

Infraction Points would last 30-45 days and if you get 10 infraction points simultaneously then depending upon your karma you would receive a punishment such as:

Under 200 Karma - 24 Hour Submission/Commenting Ban

Under 500 Karma - 24 Hour Submission/Commenting Ban + Loss Of Header Colour Change

Under 750 Karma - 24 Hour Submission/Commenting Ban + Loss Of Header Colour Change + Loss Of Downvote.

ETC

Users would be allowed to earn the ability to have the header colour change and downvote button back via the Karma System.

Likewise, repeat offenders of Infractions would get more severe punishments. Such as having a script which shows for certain users, where the site keeps messing around whenever they try to do an action for a duration of time they are on the website.

Whilst, there are other smaller aspects which could be improved around the site, I think if these were tackled then Hacker News would have its strong community over the long haul and we won't see, flame wars/poor comments off users as often.

I'd like to see down-votes used only in situations where the comment poster entered the conversation in a manner that didn't further the conversation in any way. Perhaps a trick could be borrowed from the StackExchange sites and a down-voter would pay for the privilege with karma points?