681–690 of 729 posts
The comment flag button could be changed to really mean something; for instance: sufficiently flagged comments can stop collecting upvotes.
Would also be nice if the flag button were visible without clicking the comment.
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alextp, what if you use ML on voting patterns instead of comment words? (also what if the ML only provided feedback while one is typing the comment?)
By voting patterns, what do you mean? Features like how many times the user has voted in this thread/hour/day? How many times the comment has been voted, the replies have been voted, and the story has been voted? I didn't try those; maybe they'd work, but I have no intuition saying why they should. Using ML to provide feedback is a bad idea. Most ML techniques latch on to surface features of the text rather than the…
1) who votes on good comments 2) who votes on whose comments 3) who votes a lot / a little.
But mostly (1).
I take your point about ML being superficial. But if it's being used at all, shouldn't the users be informed about what the robo-brain thinks of them?
Your excellent example of a rewording might fool a lot of humans too (see pg's article another commenter linked to ... Ctrl+F "DH4").
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If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion. Popular comments will make more karma than they cost, so users will still be encouraged to leave comments that will become popular. It seems that a system like this will be even more sensitive to what community considers popular. For this to work well you'll need to make sure that comment being popular correlates w…
> If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion. I disagree. I think it would lead to a mix of bland groupthink and fashionable rebellion, with no room inbetween for the merely thoughtful.
Some policy/feature/system to aggregate related stories ("killing" stories that duplicate stories that already have active threads, and posting a link to the "duplicate" story in that thread, or something similar to that --- I'm being minimalist here). A lot of dumb comments appear to germinate on threads that are the 3rd or 4th take on some tech news story about Facebook or Apple.
This plays into RiderOfGiraffes' experiment with leaving comments that tied together related (or identical) discussions, which I was rather sad to see him discontinue (especially in cases where two threads were discussing different aspects of a story). I don't recall, though; was he automating that, or was it a purely manual effort? I suspect a "closed as duplicate" system, ala StackExchange, could work well here, as…
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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.
Simple; they would need to be published in journals, or have bibliographies, or have a cite record. "Scholarly" isn't really a subjective term.
. Econophysics, fuzzy logic, systems theory -- are those really serious fields? Could they become serious? The answers are subjective.
. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-based Learning -- too specific? is this just a journal that someone started to enhance her reputation in a self-defined field? how long has it been around and how long will it be around?
. Douglas Hofstadter -- scholar or dilletante?
. the blog of Terence Tao -- it is serious but is not published in a journal
. http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Jormakka_J/0/1/0/all/0/1 -- a guy who claimed to solve more than one Millennium Problem and is widely considered a crank. Articles were published in journals.
. http://arxiv.org/find/math/1/au:+Perelman_G/0/1/0/all/0/1 -- a guy who did solve a Millennium Problem. Articles were not published in journals.
Listen to Frank Wilczek talk about his feelings about not having his genius recognised: http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Science/Physics/The-Univ... (Q&A at the end).
Academics play the karma game with much higher stakes.
The comment flag button could be changed to really mean something; for instance: sufficiently flagged comments can stop collecting upvotes.
That wouldn't do anything currently. Only really atrocious comments get flagged, and they always have huge negative scores. Though of course if flagging had more effect, maybe more people would do it. Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments, and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your…
Old guard would prefer to vote on a "Contributes/Detracts" axis, while new users vote on an "Agree/Disagree" or "Like/Dislike" axis.
Arguments about this erupt in threads, with newer users generally saying, "It's a democracy, this site is what the majority want it to be, and if most of us want it like this, your loss." But such an approach devolves into pop pablum.
I believe most other ideas here would be unnecessary if the meaning of the up/down arrows could be resolved either socially or algorithmically.
The "correct" solution would be to offer a quadrant, with contributes/detracts on one axis, and agree/disagree on the other. But that would require a rewrite.
Instead of a rewrite, I'd experiment with temporarily changing the arrows to say something explicitly supporting well reasoned comments:
17 points by uptown 1 hour ago [ contributes | detracts ] link | parent | flag
17 points by uptown 1 hour ago [ content | spam ] link | parent | flag
17 points by uptown 1 hour ago | interesting* | spam | link | parent | flag
I think this type of vocabulary is more in line with the desire to see well reasoned or contributory discussion flourish.
* Mouse over the word "interesting" could tooltip: "This comment made me think."
// This account is ~400 days old, but a prior anonymous account is ~800 days old, giving some perspective on the trend over time.
The comment flag button could be changed to really mean something; for instance: sufficiently flagged comments can stop collecting upvotes.
That wouldn't do anything currently. Only really atrocious comments get flagged, and they always have huge negative scores. Though of course if flagging had more effect, maybe more people would do it. Another thing I've considered is having specific types of flags on comments, and having them have different effects. E.g. there could be a flag for incivility, and if you got enough of those (maybe in proportion to your…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could get chips (er votes) relative to your average comment score.
gridspy, I thought about this as well. But does this create an echo chamber problem? You would give lots of chips to someone who makes cheap "mother###ker" comments and then that give that person more power in controlling the site.
But you make a good point.
PS. I'm 3000+ karma, 3+ year HN user posting from public terminal in a hotel, hence the anon account. My apologies.