It's not just Hacker News. It's everywhere on all forums, blogs, etc. I have no idea what's causing it other than economic stress!
Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
41–50 of 297 posts
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#42Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.
pg, (this might be somewhat obvious but)couldn't you detect and (penalize?) the "punishing" some folks compllain about? someone downvoting a specific person across discussions. I would imagine most people do this by bringing up the target's profile first and then downvoting all his comments. Hard to think of a lgitimate use case for this behaviour.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#43It's not just Hacker News. It's everywhere on all forums, blogs, etc. I have no idea what's causing it other than economic stress!
Which got me thinking a few nights ago -- what a way to stimulate the economy. Hire some damn moderators!! ;-)
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#44Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.
increased popularity has decreased the signal/noise ratio. just reverse the popularity :) or just make somewhere new to migrate to.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#45No social news site is going to be perfect. If it's people that are writing comments, some comments will be good and some will be bad. Read them and decide for yourself. If a comment hurts your feelings, get over it. If you like a comment, upvote it, and help other people find the best comments. Really, I kind of get tired of reading stuff like this because there is always some subtext to it. "mean-spirited" usually…
I think a big problem with a "harsh debate climate" is that the people who can provide real value with experience, knowledge and insight will stay away. For different reasons like personal, professional or just disinterest. That will in turn attract more people who enjoy a harsher debate, which most (if not all) of the time are less enlightened. Or as the saying goes "Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you dow…
That saying is only true if there are no other people listening to or reading the argument. If your goal is to convince lurkers, it's actually pretty easy to win a written argument with an idiot.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Err, that thread was fine until you linked to his history, Peter. But yeah, drug related threads, red flag :-) I hope you learned your lesson.
I don't see a problem in looking at people's previous submissions - it can come in handy to get some context (in this case, it did, since his behavior on HN was getting him voted down in the past). That said, I just went back and re-read your post and, yes, I see your point now and it's not quite how I read it first time round. I think the real problem is people who go back and vote down stuff to "punish" people, not…
OTOH, there are threads that are just way too interesting, but get virtually no contributions.
Here is a thread with one comment and one upvote, both mine, and it just has the potential of being very rewarding, IF the person who started has any intention to continue:
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#47Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.
I believe that the less anonymous a forum like this is, the more polite it will be. You have said you want people to speak to each other here as they would in the real world: well, I believe the more strongly you tie their real world identity to their account here, the more polite they would be.
My suggestion, similar to that experiment in the past, and similar to twitter, add a "verified user" badge in the users profile. However, to become verified requires a simple step: add a link to your facebook, linkedin or xing profile. Any already verified user can then verify you.
Non-verified users then have a very minor voting hit, for example a comment karma cap at 50 or so.
This will encourage people to associate their real life accounts with their hacker news accounts, and will result in conversation that more accurately reflects what one would say in real life.
The fundamental dynamics of the site would not change, since the advantage to being verified are not that major.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#48Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.
I wonder if it would help at all to add some kind of persistent disincentive for users with low (negative) karma. Maybe the rate at which low-karma users are allowed to post comments could be limited, or maybe low-karma users' posts could start in a slightly shaded state (like downvoted comments).
I guess the success of that strategy would depend heavily on whether a user's karma is a good indicator of the likelihood that they will make a mean-spirited comment in the future. It would also depend on whether the low-karma disincentive is actually undesirable to a potentially mean-spirited poster.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#49Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.
Have you ever considered giving people the option to register their abstinence from voting on a comment? Right now we have up and down, but a lot of the time I feel like I wish I had an "abstain" button. This would be reserved for the comments that aren't mean-spirited, but don't add much to the conversation. Then perhaps a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral would rank lower than a comment with 20 up, 5 down…
A flaw: I might vote neutral as "I agree with this comment's current point value." In that light, 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral is a fairly confidently ranked 16-point comment, but 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral is not. However, the less confident one should be "floated" to a small portion of users to get more votes.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#50Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.
Have you ever considered giving people the option to register their abstinence from voting on a comment? Right now we have up and down, but a lot of the time I feel like I wish I had an "abstain" button. This would be reserved for the comments that aren't mean-spirited, but don't add much to the conversation. Then perhaps a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral would rank lower than a comment with 20 up, 5 down…
I think the abstain effect can be emulated by just skipping that comment :-)