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Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

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Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#61

Post by msuster »

pavs wrote: post #16

> I have thick enough skin or I wouldn’t blog. ... > It’s totally acceptable to me for people to harshly criticize my > points-of-view. No problem. But calling me a f***ing a**hole or some > of the other epithets used goes too far. Does not compute. Though I agree with you that such language is not nice and can be (should be) avoided as much as possible. Some people sometimes have bad days and certain topics can brin…

These same people on a bad day wouldn't likely say FU to my face. They would argue with me and I would listen. But verbal insults of this type are usually encouraged by anonymity where people feel brave using this language with no attribution.

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#62

Post by alttab »

msuster wrote: post #60
alttab wrote: post #43

Had the author of the article had responses that did not bruise his ego because of what people on the internet said to him - he would be writing an article about how awesome Hacker News was. Posting another article explaining how you would change HN to your own benefit is adolescent behavior. Maybe, just maybe , the OP didn't have the correct view point. These types of people hop from job to job because everyone at t…

OK. I accept that. And the truth is that I really did value the push back that I got. I only felt it was over the top when invective language was used and personal emails were sent.

And getting value out of it was the best thing that could have happened. However, the incendiary responses and the personal e-mails come with the territory of having a blog, submitting it to aggregators only increases that. HN or not, this is the internet - and everything that comes with it.

A worst case scenario is you got no responses. At least this way you know people are reading what you write, and actually care enough to say anything to you at all. This, as my boss always says, is a "happiness problem."

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#63

Post by looprecur »

swombat wrote: post #52
looprecur wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Hacker News has a lot great people on it. Karma, however, is a joke because accounts are regularly nuked for no good reason, which necessitates starting over at zero. Hellbanning spammers and outright trolls makes sense. Hellbanning good posters who make one annoying comment is ridiculous. If you don't like what someone has to say, disagree with him. (This is also why I don't like downvoting without a reply;…

I've made a prodigious amount of comments, and I'm sure some of them were quite stupid, and yet my account hasn't been banned. So have most of the people on the leaderboard. I guess it's not "one annoying comment", but a) how bad the comment is, and b) how much contribution that user had made in the past.

You don't get to the leaderboard if your account is nuked. Survivor bias.

Admittedly I've said things that are immature and stupid and that I regret. None of them merited the destruction of 2000+ karma account. Not a one. The banning policy around here is extremely inconsistent.

Also, I once got hellbanned for comparing Clojure favorably over Arc. (Although Arc wins on aesthetics, Clojure has the JVM libraries which is a win in the real world. That was the gist of my argument, and enough to merit a ban.) The ban policy on HN is heavy-handed, inconsistent, destructive and, quite frankly, moronic. If Paul Graham is directly responsible, he should be embarrassed; if others are doing the trigger-happy banning, he should revoke these powers.

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#64

Post by grellas »

Wow, I love Mr. Suster's contributions generally but this one is unfair. It reads like an indictment. HN "falls short" on its goal of maintaining civility. A YCombinator company CEO goes there only when he wants to get "upset." And so on.

This paints the site in a false light - yes, the individual bits of evidence might be true in the particular case cited but they are nowhere near representative of the whole and to say that they are makes it a gross distortion.

Not at all fair to this site or to the administrators and core members who, if anything, regularly go way out of their way to keep standards high around here.

That said, I look forward to many future outstanding posts from Mr. Suster, who remains one of my favorite bloggers on the whole range of startup issues that are important to the HN community.

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#65

Post by philk »

msuster wrote: post #54
philk wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that I can agree. 1) The blog post of yours which attracted such vitriol was entitled "Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees"; you aren't using a conciliatory tone and it seems unfair to expect one in response. 2) Practically all the comments I read on here are more civil than I see elsewhere on the web. 3) In pw0ncakes original post there were a lot of measured statements (for inst…

I wrote the first post. The title was too extreme. I acknowledged that and apologized for it. I agree that many of the comments were fair and said so in this post. This isn't my first post to get FU's. I can live with that. I still wonder whether my suggestions may help?

I don't really see that there's a problem with incivility on HN.

Of your suggestions I only take issue with the first; if I had to post with my full name I'd leave. I've already got Facebook/Twitter/blogging if I want to publish something on the web with my real name.

I'm also not sure how easy it would be to enforce.

On a side note I usually really enjoy your blog. So, you know, thanks in general.

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#66

Post by shadowsun7 »

msuster wrote: post #54
philk wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that I can agree. 1) The blog post of yours which attracted such vitriol was entitled "Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees"; you aren't using a conciliatory tone and it seems unfair to expect one in response. 2) Practically all the comments I read on here are more civil than I see elsewhere on the web. 3) In pw0ncakes original post there were a lot of measured statements (for inst…

I wrote the first post. The title was too extreme. I acknowledged that and apologized for it. I agree that many of the comments were fair and said so in this post. This isn't my first post to get FU's. I can live with that. I still wonder whether my suggestions may help?

Your first six sentences tell us that you were mistaken, that the problem isn't as big as you realized, and that you are partly to blame. That is: you admit that you have grossly exaggerated the problem of incivility on HN.

How, I ask, are your suggestions to help when there is no problem to solve?

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#67

Post by thaumaturgy »

msuster wrote: post #54
philk wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that I can agree. 1) The blog post of yours which attracted such vitriol was entitled "Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees"; you aren't using a conciliatory tone and it seems unfair to expect one in response. 2) Practically all the comments I read on here are more civil than I see elsewhere on the web. 3) In pw0ncakes original post there were a lot of measured statements (for inst…

I wrote the first post. The title was too extreme. I acknowledged that and apologized for it. I agree that many of the comments were fair and said so in this post. This isn't my first post to get FU's. I can live with that. I still wonder whether my suggestions may help?

Well, for most of the folks that are regulars here, HN is still considered to have a pretty decent tone overall. There are tons and tons of counterexamples to your examples of "meanness" -- and, by the way, some of your examples of meanness seem to be conflated with angriness, and anger seems to be generally acceptable here.

The rest of your post comes off as licking your wounds over the response to your last article. That, or, more cynically, attempting to get the greatest possible mileage out of your job hoppers post.

And ... don't you think maybe that blogging about HN is the silliest waste of time? Out of all the possible subjects out there, and all of the possible insights to be discovered ... blogging about some forum somewhere is it?

Huh.

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#68

Post by thirdstation »

sarvenna wrote: post #51
thirdstation wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) The Internet never forgets. If you post something regretful in a fit of rage you can never take it back. You are not the same person you were ten years ago (even if you have the same name). Do you want to be judged today on how that person behaved back then? It is naive to think you won't be judged so. 2) There are some really batsh*t-crazy people in the world. I prefer to be somewhat isolated from them. 3) How do…

#3 is what always confuses me about the argument that switching to real names would in and of itself make flames and trolling less common. That said, I don't think this is necessarily something where solid evidence matters. It seems to me that requiring real names is much more about making bloggers and journalists who consistently have their real names attached to postings feel more on an even footing with their comm…

I put discussion/aggregator sites like HN in a different class than news sites. We come here to talk about things we see elsewhere. It's not very important who we are in Real Life. I think anonymity can improve the discussions.

Mr. Van Dyk makes a valid point but doesn't take it to the conclusion that comments aren't created equal. I would prefer to only see comments that improve the overall quality of the article -- just like the old days when you had to write a letter to the editor to augment or rebut an article (as he mentions).

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#69

Post by anamax »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #11
marilyn wrote: post #6

The civility on HN is unparallelled. This community, with pg's guidance has done an amazing job of fostering a thoughtful community for intelligent discussion. Suster's arguments all focus around one particular discussion in which emotions ran a little higher than usual, and are not, in my opinion, representative of the community as a whole. As for Suster's suggestions, the first one would be a mistake. There are man…

Let's not get too self-congratulatory here. Yes, the civility on HN is much higher than on many other discussion sites, but it's still a lot lower than you'd find in most real-world situations. I agree that throwaway accounts are useful, and that there are times when anonymity is advantageous, and that the added civility that comes with real names is a bad tradeoff in this case. However: in this case, the second poin…

> However: in this case, the second point (downvoting) didn't prevent an uncivil (yet insightful) comment from becoming the highest ranked comment in the thread.

So? Does it happen often enough to worry about?

> still a lot lower than you'd find in most real-world situations.

It's not clear that that's true and even if it was, it's not relevant. The relevant comparison is with comparable real-world situations.

Which reminds me - there's an acceptable way to call someone an asshole in every situation. Are you measuring "civil" by whether the acceptable form is used or by whether any form is used?

If someone is being an asshole and pointing that out is useful, I don't have a problem with what form that takes so long as it doesn't draw unnecessary attention. In fact, failing to point out assholism in many cases is itself uncivil.

YMMV.

Re: Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News

#70

Post by shadowsun7 »

msuster wrote: post #58
CodeMage wrote: post #49

Dear Mr. Suster, While I personally don't condone obscenities, insults and ad hominems in a discussion, I couldn't help notice that most of the time HN audience downvotes comments according to their signal/noise ratio, which means that we're willing to tolerate even occasional obscenities for the sakes of a valuable contribution. In the first example you pointed to, pw0ncakes actually made a rather valuable contribut…

Vojislav, Thank you. Well written and fair points. I was expecting negative comments and wrote "let 'er rip" as a way to add some levity. But you're right that it doesn't achieve what I'm after. I will change it. Mark

Dear Mr Suster,

You sound much better here than in the rest of the thread. Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from this exchange is to rise above whatever it is people throw at you. If they act rudely, and you respond cordially, you force them to meet you at your level.

And if that doesn't happen, I assure you the ruder person will be downvoted.

Cordially yours,

Eli James

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