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Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

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Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#61

Post by SandB0x »

maxklein wrote: post #47
pg wrote: post #30

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 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 pro…

As an anonymous user I actually kind of like your idea, but can you clarify whether you propose that being "verified" would mean your identity is available to everyone or just to other verified users?

("I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code." - Emo Philips)

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#62

Post by davorak »

DocuMaker wrote: post #41

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!

Maybe, I do not think the internet has not had a stable population in terms of demographics for a long enough time for a dominant productive culture to emerge.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#63

Post by davidw »

_cbsz wrote: post #49
treeface wrote: post #39

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…

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.

> I agree with this comment's current point value.

That would be a really cool feature. I would often use it for comments at 0 - something that's factually wrong and needs to be voted down, but without nasty pile-on downvoting that sometimes happens, that to me looks a bit mean-spirited. If the comment in question went below zero, my 'stay' vote would count as an upvote. If it went higher, as a downvote.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#64

Post by anigbrowl »

davidw wrote: post #55
pg wrote: post #30

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.

Since you asked... I've always thought you should be a bit more rigorous about eliminating the sorts of "rah rah!" topics that get people fired up. That's not a technical solution, but it's not really a technical problem either. 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. B…

The proximity of an election is likely a factor in this.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#65

Post by mahmud »

treeface wrote: post #56
mahmud wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the abstain effect can be emulated by just skipping that comment :-)

Ah, but how do you count that in a ranking algorithm? I'm 90% sure my idea is not the answer, but maybe we can think of something else. 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 comme…

I don't think it needs to get any more complicated. Paul asked for a "technological" solution, and it's not in the rankings; if the profile pages are made more prominent, then people will invest in their social reputations.

With respect to counting comment views, it's already implicit in the page views.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#66

Post by donaq »

mahmud wrote: post #12

FWIW, I discovered that people take disagreements personally and will stalk you across threads if you're not careful with their egos. For some reason I am incapable of remembering names and can only identify about 10 - 15 people here other than the ones I have met or know from somewhere else. So the whole thing feels to me like detached, anonymous discussion. I was surprised to be 1) remembered, and 2) "punished" in…

I've also noticed that there seems to be a mob downvoting mentality. I seldom downvote already downvoted comments unless they are especially egregious, but recently it seems that you either get no downvotes or a torrent of them. Either that or people are playing sockpuppets.

[Edit: I think one way to mitigate this might be to make a user's votes viewable.]

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#67

Post by patio11 »

demallien wrote: post #58
pg wrote: post #30

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 think the problem comes from the fact that we don't have a tool for expressing that we disagree with the tone of what someone is saying, but we agree with the position of the comment. This means that someone can write a mean spirited comment that happens to support a popular position in this community, and they won't get downvoted. Other people, seeing this, will take it as permission to be rude in their own posts.…

Particularly for folks who are not malicious, a reply saying that the tone is not normative is often enough to correct them.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#68

Post by 8ren »

pg wrote: post #30

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.

The marker for high avg. karma that was previous tried for a day. Indicative data: if mean-spirited comments correlate with low avg. karma.

EDIT The previous experiment and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 (4 Feb 2009)

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#69

Post by metamemetics »

maxklein wrote: post #47
pg wrote: post #30

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 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 pro…

Seems unnecessary considering some of the most thoughtful discussions come from throw-away accounts doing Tell\Ask HN. It could also exacerbate other issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

[ ie. comment upvotes co-vary with name of commenter instead of content communicated ]

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#70

Post by maxklein »

SandB0x wrote: post #61
maxklein wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

As an anonymous user I actually kind of like your idea, but can you clarify whether you propose that being "verified" would mean your identity is available to everyone or just to other verified users? ("I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code." - Emo Philips)

It would be available to everyone and google, since the point is that what you say is forever linked to you on the internet.
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