671–680 of 729 posts
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Require articles about (say) economic inequality to be scholarly.
tptacek, it would be great to require everything on HN to be "scholarly" or sufficiently serious, no? But the question is how to do that.
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Is everyone who believes there is a lack of quality stories out there finding and submitting quality stories? My main thought every time this topic comes up is "Community quality don't maintain itself." So vote on comments you like or don't like, every time. Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time . And submit stories y…
> Check the "new page" and vote up stories you like. I know very few people do this, because I find good stuff overlooked there all the time. This is the biggest one IMO.
It is a good filter for low quality content, but it also filters out things I find interesting.
Personally, I want information to inform my actions. I want to make better predictions. Please give me info I can use. Help me sort it. Make me act on it.
I want statements I can agree with, or not. If I'm not sure which, please provide me access to distillable arguments for and against any such statement.
First, I want to very clearly understand what any statement intends to say. Please provide ample means for clarification of such a statement. What is said? What does it mean?
Next, I want to sort and compare reasons to agree or disagree with any such statement. I want to see who agrees or disagrees with such a statement. This is much more valuable to me than the herd voice.
Make it systemic: let broad statements rest on supporting statements, where each statement provides for debate to define whether it is True or Not, Unlikely or Likely.
Something like this might suck less than the bloviating blog/comment/infoglut of yesteryear, especially as the next billion users go mobile.
Stop showing people other people's comment scores. They stimulate argumentative comments.
I do like that idea. I think I tried it a while ago, but users complained that without comment scores it was too hard to figure out what were the most interesting comments in a thread. Is there some other way to show what the most interesting comments in a thread are? How about if I displayed the point totals for subtrees, but not for individual leaves? Would it solve the problem if you could follow other users, and…
Some examples:
- "good": tptacek likes something and gives +1 point - he has no more power than anyone else to upvote
- "bad": RiderofGiraffes downvotes for -1 point
- "crap": RiderofGiraffes thinks a comment at -2 is mean, and downvotes twice. The comment is now at -3, since extra_downvotes do nothing on comments with zero or fewer points.
- "popular crap": tptacek double-downvotes a 17-point comment to 8 points. Two 2000-point (top-1000?) double-downvoters could also get it to 8.
- "ridiculously popular crap": tptacek and RiderofGiraffes hate a 302-point comment. tptacek double-downvotes it to 176; RiderofGiraffes double-downvotes to 150 (half of #upvotes - #downvotes = 300); lots of others also lend their extra_downvotes. The comment stands at 150 and upvotes have half effect.
I think this proposal strikes a nice balance: users with high (500+) karma can better help keep the crap out; extremely-high-karma users get a bit more power (only a bit - realistically, tptacek will typically remove something like five points from a popular-but-crap comment since others also have extra_downvotes).
More importantly, "normal" users still run the site (that 150-point comment is still at the top of the page, and no amount of extra_downvotes is going to dislodge it). If you're going to cry "democracy", remember that the only current way of dealing with popular crap is [dead] - losing half your comment karma is not that harsh. And, again, people with lots of karma are apparently interesting.
Note that points and extra_downvotes must be tracked separately; otherwise, people would want to wait until a crap comment has gained some points to make their extra_downvotes more effective.
Finally, two tweaks: it may be a good idea to let only comment karma count for extra_downvotes purposes, and it may be a good idea to allow extra_downvotes on submissions.
It's a pity that no-one is going to see this comment...
[Note: HN handles used for illustration only, I'll happily remove them if you'd like.]
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Perlmonks had that as part of the structure from the time I arrived there. Which was in the first few months.
"... Perlmonks had that as part of the structure from the time I arrived there. ..." It certainly works. I always go there ready to really think twice before I post & you learn. HN appears to be more OpEd a lot of the times.
Ironically that is one of the reasons why I lost interest. My interests moved on. A small fraction of the conversations taught me anything interesting. And so I drifted away. However the focused remit is essential for maintaining that community as it is, even if I am no longer that big a part of it.
Incidentally I am http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=tilly there, and http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=754085 describes some of the early history of how it came to be as it is.
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One reason comment threads get tendentious is when people think other people are commenting to game the thread and collect karma. The karma-ceiling flag tries to say "this is a good faith comment".
Ok, I see. I haven't noticed that phenomenon of gaming the thread. Is it so common that this would be the best way to fix comments?
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It's telling that this comment got more upvotes than any of my other (much more constructive) comments in this thread
I think that gridspy's comment is worthy of some upvotes. He made a valid point, and in a meta-joke kind of way. I'm perfectly happy with flippant posts, so long as they're not mean, and they add something to the discussion (be it humor or insight or both).
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That is a great idea.
No offence to pg, but why did this comment get upvoted 9 times? This makes me think it would be good to remove the name of the commenter as well as the number of points a comment gets.
Also, username hiding is a good idea in some cases, but I think it's worse overall. It encourages snarkiness, some posters are actually worth looking out for (grellas on legal threads, pg on HN, etc), and it makes back and forth discussions difficult to follow unless you give each user a unique ID per thread. Impersonation can also be a problem. Overall, I think it adds up to more problems than it solves.
# more polite language
# removal of irrelevant bits
# removal of memes
and hopefully this would encourage newbies to write better comments.