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Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

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Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#121

Post by nailer »

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.…

Agreed. there's a perrfect example of this in recent nosql debates - a few abusive comments are sitting at plus 17 because people agree with whats being said, but the tone is very, very nasty towards anyone being disagreed with (which includes myself amongst others).

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#122

Post by awakeasleep »

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…

I'd like to register my strong disagreement with this notion.

While accountability has many benefits, I believe our world doesn't allow any feasible way to discuss many important topics without anonymity— especially in regard to business or our jobs. Think of the trouble that can come from discussing salaries, and don't even bother going into what sort of trouble opinions on drug policy can bring people.

While real name accountability can bring a lot of gravity to a discussion, I feel our current social order will give certain people unwarranted power under their real name while forcing others to censor themselves entirely.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#123

Post by nailer »

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #5
mjfern wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If mean-spirited comments are down-voted, then it's not much of an issue. The problem is that I've started seeing mean-spirited comments receiving up-votes, and rising to the top of discussions. How do we solve this as a community?

Where have you seen that? I have seen most of them getting downvoted and some getting 1 or 2 upvotes

The recent NoSQL discussion. There's a user called gaius who spent a lot of time abusing anyone who mentioned why they used a nosql database.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847978 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847783 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847836

everything is a sarcastic take on the parent, a comparison without any justification, or a straight out insult ie 'it makes me laugh'. The parents one of whom is me are all making polite comments about why we use nosql in our projects, and paraphrased sarcastic insults are sitting there upmodded. Who seem to agree with the sentiment but don't care about the tone, civility or lack of supporting arguments.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#124

Post by maxklein »

awakeasleep wrote: post #122
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…

I'd like to register my strong disagreement with this notion. While accountability has many benefits, I believe our world doesn't allow any feasible way to discuss many important topics without anonymity— especially in regard to business or our jobs. Think of the trouble that can come from discussing salaries, and don't even bother going into what sort of trouble opinions on drug policy can bring people. While real n…

Don't you get it? Anonymous and non-anonymous comments have equal ranking. The point of my system is just to encourage most people to be non-anonymous. This means that the vast majority of comments will stay civil, and when most comments are civil, the tone will tend to stay that way. If you need to make commentary on drug policy or your salary, then simply make an anonymous account and say all you want to say. There is no penalty to that.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#125

Post by crististm »

8ren wrote: post #118
crististm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about a "members only" club, where you need an invitation to get inside? It worked for google to get members if this is a problem and it may show the relative quality of the members subtree.

You make me think of a way for every user to make their own members only club, by filtering, and they 100% control who is visible in it; others can view through another's filter: 1. every user can config a "whitelist" of users, to personalize HN to only show comments from those users (and access other users via parent links). This is the "filter", of who they "follow". 2. you can set your whitelist to be the whitelis…

Actually, none of the two items were on my mind: you are a member but you don't own the club to set the rules. You are just allowed to invite someone else in. I'm not sure manually whitelisting scales.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#126

Post by noverloop »

ramanujan wrote: post #94
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.

You have the full HN dataset and voting logs. What if you used it to train a simple classifier that would predict the likely karma of a comment as a function of a number of features, including username, username responded to, bag-of-words vector of the comment, time of day, total number of comments in thread, "controversy" of the comment (as reflected by a mix of up & down votes) and similar factors? The goal could b…

I think it's more effective to train classifiers on users' voting logs and comments in order to maintain the quality and thoughtfulness of HN. This allows you to classify all your users into classes that resemble their characters. e.g. A genuine nice guy won't post mean comments and won't pick 'punish' a user he disagrees with. A person who downvotes when he disagrees can be classified as such. I'm sure a troll has a specific pattern too.

Then you can enable or disable aspects of the site for each user-category. e.g. disable comments from trolls, disable downvoting for people who downvote when disagree as this stimulates groupthink, etc...

A set of users can serve as a training set for each category. It is possible to let the 'genuine'-category classify comments from users from the other categories in order to enhance the classifiers.

Actually this is an interesting machine learning problem, I still need to pick a project for my course in machine learning so I can research this if I can get my hands on the datasets.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#127

Post by rms »

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 you need to do as reddit did -- hire a full time person as community manager (http://blog.reddit.com/2008/10/welcome-erik.html, http://www.reddit.com/user/hueypriest). You can only take technical tricks so far, community management is an AGI-hard problem.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#128

Post by 8ren »

crististm wrote: post #125
8ren wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make me think of a way for every user to make their own members only club, by filtering, and they 100% control who is visible in it; others can view through another's filter: 1. every user can config a "whitelist" of users, to personalize HN to only show comments from those users (and access other users via parent links). This is the "filter", of who they "follow". 2. you can set your whitelist to be the whitelis…

Actually, none of the two items were on my mind: you are a member but you don't own the club to set the rules. You are just allowed to invite someone else in. I'm not sure manually whitelisting scales.

Yeah, it's a different idea, but inspired by yours. Good point about scaling: perhaps your whitelist could include selected whitelists of others; you can aggregate whitelists.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#129

Post by apl »

maxklein wrote: post #124
awakeasleep wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to register my strong disagreement with this notion. While accountability has many benefits, I believe our world doesn't allow any feasible way to discuss many important topics without anonymity— especially in regard to business or our jobs. Think of the trouble that can come from discussing salaries, and don't even bother going into what sort of trouble opinions on drug policy can bring people. While real n…

Don't you get it? Anonymous and non-anonymous comments have equal ranking. The point of my system is just to encourage most people to be non-anonymous. This means that the vast majority of comments will stay civil, and when most comments are civil, the tone will tend to stay that way. If you need to make commentary on drug policy or your salary, then simply make an anonymous account and say all you want to say. There…

I somewhat agree, but you're neglecting the more interesting point: Anonymous posting makes trolling easier, yes, but it also allows for a highly fascinating form of discussion - one that is merit-blind[1].

Right now, certain posters carry a lot of weight around here, mainly because we know what they have achieved in their careers. Inevitably, there will be lots of up-voting, lots of agreement, lots of influence regardless of what they actually say. Introducing real names would exacerbate this effect. I enjoy the fact that sometimes, you'll find a renowned Silicon Valley person arguing with an enthusiastic college freshman about a technical/ethical/... topic. I suspect that's only possible if they're called "johnny32" and "jimmy21".

Display their real names, and the college kid will think twice before he/she answers. Anonymity encourages trolling, yes. It also liberates discussion.

[1] Of course, I'm talking about "external merit." The karma system is wonderful, maybe even essential. But I don't think that non-HN-related achievements should directly affect how your comment is received. Postings need to be effective on their own, not in virtue of who wrote them. (Obviously, if you're head of engineering at Facebook and talk about scaling, please say so! This does affect how your comment is and should be received. But as a default? No.)

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#130

Post by ahoyhere »

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…

What you're talking about is the primacy of emotional alignment vs intellectual improvement. That is, identifying with the emotional content (like you said - "RIGHT ON!" or "NO WAY!") vs reading content that causes emotions.

The former is, of course, the Twinkie of human growth. HN is becoming Twinkie-ville. Reddit is Twinkie-ville already, but it's Twinkie-ville with a sparkling sense of humor, which HN lacks (cultural difference).

Granted, we're all emotional creatures first and foremost -- false impressions of reason aside -- but… there's something that's dramatically changed in the last two months. Don't you think?

Even the non-emotional-alignment stuff is more boring. Boring things stay on the front page longer. Articles that would normally have captured the HN spirit languish.

What's going on?

I almost miss the "What makes an entrepreneur?" pr0n.

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