181–190 of 729 posts
Make it invite-only to post threads/comments and quietly associate the inviter with the invited person.
Thus ensuring that we don't get spontaneous comments from e.g. the UX guy at Zappos on that story about Zappos. A non-starter, I think.
The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted. a) If a comment is truly mean, a personal attack on another community member, delete the comment and subtract from the user all the karma that the comment gained. That is something that can only be done by someone with curator powers here, but the rest of us can be encouraged to flag such comments more, and…
Even better, deduct everybody's vote on it from their karma. So downvoters get +1, and upvoters get -1.
I'd try to severely decrease total # of comments. Really bad comments are not the root of the problem. Simply having large number of mediocre comments crowds out and discourages thoughtful discussion from starting at all. I'd say: * create some real cost to making comments * make bad comments disappear/not display at all with time * make things less democratic -- to encourage good behavior identify users who have thi…
Making it cost karma to comment would be one way to do that. I could also do something like slashdot and reddit do, and not show comments below some threshold.
Popular comments will make more karma than they cost, so users will still be encouraged to leave comments that will become popular.
It seems that a system like this will be even more sensitive to what community considers popular. For this to work well you'll need to make sure that comment being popular correlates with it being good. To improve on that you'd may need to further reduce inefficiencies (e.g. time-of-day vs popularity) and maybe implement un-democratic measures if "voice of the community" still doesn't correlate with good.
I'd split test this system (and any other change like this). Have some posts that have these new rules in place (this should be publicly visible) and some that don't. See how this affects the results.
2. When someone upvotes or downvotes, all followers of that person upvote or downvote the same submission or comment by proxy. If a person follows multiple people some of whom upvote and some downvote, or upvotes or downvotes himself, then cancel their proxy vote. This proxy voting is the sole purpose of the follow graph, eg. "I want to vote the same way tptacek, cperciva and pg do".
Perhaps publish a leaderboard of top followed people and their voting history to try and avoid a Digg situation.
Perhaps limit the number of people one person can follow. This would help with performance as well.
Perhaps the number of proxy votes would need to affect the score of a comment or submission logarithmically instead of linearly.
Edit: there may need to be a minimum level of karma needed to proxy vote to avoid sockpuppets. Perhaps limit it to active accounts, too.
Allow commenters themselves to publicly flag their own comments to prevent them from accruing karma. Call it the "sincerity" flag. Actually, this is my #1 top feature request for HN, period.
HN Karma can be retooled to give people a certain number up/downvotes as well as a rate of regeneration. Perhaps new users will get 3 upvotes a day and no downvotes. Upvotes need to be rebranded so that users understand that they are not the mechanisms of popularity contests or flame wars.
This is my vision, feel free to take from it what you will: "HN tokens are for you to use to make this is most intelligently crowd-curated site known to the English language.If you find a post or comment that helps you to solve a problem, see another point of view, or expand your thinking, drop a token in to promote it. However, if you are found among those using your tokens to add fire to flame wars or to reward comments that have no creative or intellectual value, your token regeneration rate will be reduced. Choose wisely."