51–60 of 297 posts
If we could dispense with all of the boo-hoo-someone-was-mean-and-downvoted-me meta posts and comments, this could be a great site. Posts like this are the biggest problem with HN.
1. Avoid meta threads.
2. Downvote off-topic meta-discussion in other threads.
3. Do not add to the meta-discussion; just downvote and move on.
In this way, you can express your distaste for such discussion and avoid most of it with very minimal effort.
Incidentally, 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.
You could try fragmenting HN in the same way that Reddit allows; this makes it possible to turn off the bullshit that invariably rises to the top. I mean, I don't even read reddit main or /r/programming anymore; they're just garbage. Otherwise... aggressively ban people that don't contribute well enough. It is literally the only non-fragmentary way to fix the problem, because it's not a technical issue. People are ju…
Those users who are noted as being excessively mean spirited should have to learn to play in a sandbox nicely with others before they're let back into more active areas of the site.
The net effect is perhaps less of a knee jerk negative reaction so that users can eventually learn to contribute again in a positive manner and it keeps the more frequented areas clean again.
Incidentally, 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.
No 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…
Unfortunately this is often the case, however it should still be possible to make some sort of judgment based on rationality, patience, and communication skills of the people involved in a debate. If one side is constantly irrational and/or impatient then they are often also described as mean-spirited. This is why comments/complaints like the op's can be valid and important; though (ir)rationality/(im)patient/lacking communication skills are my preferred terminology over "mean-spirted" and other similar descriptions.
Incidentally, 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.
What I mean by "rah rah" things includes political articles that make people think "right on!" Paul B's article on Proposition 19 falls into that category for me: I strongly agree with him.
But when I step back and look, I think that I don't want to read everyone's "rah rah" articles because they tend towards flame wars, and, if opposing views are trampled to the point where those people go elsewhere, group think. I also think that, since they are topics that anyone can have an opinion on, that they are much more likely to draw people only marginally interested in the core topics of "hacker news". Those people in turn will submit more articles about politics. At a certain point a few days ago, between Prop 19, John Carmack's libertarianish views, and something else I don't recall, the top three spots on HN were occupied about articles that were essentially political in nature.
I would much prefer that articles like that one, much as I agree with it, and think Paul B is an awesome guy and a great contributor here, were ruthless pruned from this site.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :-)
Maybe this is naive, but there's something about a binary voting system that just strikes me as something that doesn't fit into a conversation. I often find myself agreeing with certain parts of a comment and not other parts of it. Maybe if the user could vote up the parts of a comment he likes and vote down the parts that he doesn't. Technically, that would be difficult (especially since on HN a comment is simply a text field).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Incidentally, 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 would suggest having a "tone" button that downvotes for tone. The level of fading applied to a comment will be bases on whichever of the two scores is the lowest, tone or voting - so a post with 10 upvotes but -4 tone will be invisible. To avoid abuse of the "tone" feature, it should be possible to recover the user names of those that flag a post for tone.
Incidentally, 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.
Ex [of what to prevent]. someone submits the latest tech-crunch article first and gets upvotes from everyone else trying to submit it. They can then downvote in comments without first being subjected to a socialization period of earning upvotes from thoughtful comments.
Incidentally, 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.