Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?

Then each user would be free to use software running on their own machines to implement the comment recommendation scheme as described above.

In fact, HN wouldn't even need to de-anonymize the votes for this to work. All the HN servers would need to do is make available a list of unique user id's of the upvoters and downvoters. How those user id's map on to usernames wouldn't need to be revealed. But the user id's should remain consistent from comment to comment and article to article, so that the affinity number described in the original proposal could be consistently updated.

So, in this new proposal, each HN user would be assigned a unique id, and when they vote their id would be made available via the HN API along with the comment(s) they voted on when a given story's comments are downloaded for viewing.

Software running on a given user's local machine would then use the user id's and information on how those user id's voted to create a measure of affinity as described in the original proposal, and then sort, rate, or recommend comments accordingly.

Combined with Slashdot's default filtering (only comments highly rated comments are visible by default) and the huge flood of comments that popular stories get, very few people ever read the posts of AC's.

I've never had a Slashdot account myself, and have always posted anonymously. I haven't posted a lot, but I feel the posts I did make were all carefully considered, polite, and contributed to the discussion. But, because of Slashdot's discrimination against anonymous comments, they were rarely upvoted (and therefore rarely read by most users, who have thier comment filters set to only read higher rated comments).

Which is kind of sad, when you consider some of the utter garbage that gets upvoted there all the time, and considering that every comment (no matter how awful) made by a registered user starts off with a higher score by default.

Now that's not to say that Slashdot doesn't have good reason to rate anonymous comments lower than the comments of registered users. There are plenty of anonymous trolls of Slashdot, and that's one way of dealing with them.

That's also not to say that on HN, giving lower default ratings to pseudonymous comments than to comments left by authenticated users would necessarily be a bad thing.

But it should be noted that there are many high quality pseudonymous comments on HN right now (as only a relatively small minority of people use their real names here), and I'm not so sure how the HN community would react if the people who've revealed their names started to dominate the discussions, or if the comments by pseudonymous users were penalized by default.

I suppose that as long as pseudonymous posts weren't censored (as AC posts effectively are through the filtering mechanism on Slashdot), then it wouldn't be so bad. But I have a feeling that such filtering (and effective censorship) will inevitably come to HN sooner or later. And then pseudonymous users would become even more second-class citizens. And to that I'd really have to be opposed.

There are better ways of dealing with the decline in comment quality than penalizing pseudonymity.

Indeed. That's why HN is struggling with this problem, because HN chose to build its system around voting. So now it has to deal with one of the inevitable downsides of voting. Namely, that popularity is not necessarily indicative of quality.

"If you want to avoid this problem, what can you do apart from get rid of voting in the first place?"

Read through this thread. There are many suggestions.

"Without voting, what will be left of HN?"

Comments, articles, and community.

But I should note that I am not suggesting we get rid of voting.

"isn't that [a populartiy contest for comments] what we have right now?"

Yes. That's why I said your proposal was "just another way of staging a popularity contest for comments".

"I'm merely suggesting a way of improving it."

I'm not so sure it is an improvement as much as it is a different way of getting the same result, as it doesn't change the fundamental dynamic of the lack of quality in highly rated comments.

"This gives those who reduce their activity due to quality an equal voice rather than a lesser voice."

I suppose that's true. But why should less active users have as much of a voice as more active users? Would that necessarily lead to an improvement in comment quality?

To me it seems the only thing your suggestion would lead to is that popular users would become more popular, and the voices of less popular users would be drowned out even more than they are now.

"People shouldn't be writing solely to seek popularity."

But plenty of them are. That's part of the problem that having a karma score at all or rating/sorting comments based on votes at all. People will write to be more popular (which karma is a measure of).