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I switched from Slashdot to HN a few years ago to hear more insightful, interesting debate on tech news topics, as opposed to flamewars.
Is something happening to the quality of this community lately? And if so, is there anything we can or should do about it?
(I'm a long time listener, first time poster)
[1] Careful with the words I use. Not careful as I want to be, and I post too much. (I am managing to reduce the amount I post.)
The pity with the ass comment was that a lot of its content was well written, its just the first line spoiling it all.
I think a lot of people need to look at their comments before they post them, take a breath and try and self moderate better.
I opened up my username account here 1161 days ago, after lurking once in a while for at least several weeks beforehand. As far as I know, NO ONE has read every Hacker News comment exhaustively for years, although some members of the curating team and some of the high-karma participants may come pretty close to reading most of the most active threads. My general impression is that there have always been some instances of incivility here, and there has definitely been an increase in just-plain-dumb comments since the participation on HN greatly expanded, but on the whole HN still stays way ahead of most online communities in civility and in level of information on the part of the regular participants.
And if so, is there anything we can or should do about it?
What I have seen as most helpful is users who observe breaches of civility pointing that out to users who perform such gaffes. That reaffirms the forum culture and identifies which overt behaviors are not helpful here. I have to acknowledge that from time to time I have learned from other participants pointing out my less-than-ideal comments, and I appreciate people taking the effort to help me learn from my mistakes.
Here are some links to earlier discussion (initiated by pg) about efforts made beginning in March 2010 to improve comment quality on Hacker News:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271
One way to get a reality check on how HN is doing is to look at the bestcomments view of the community
http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
to see if all the most recently highly upvoted comments look like civil, informative comments or not.
Imagine logging in to HN one day and seeing a black screen or something with your comment and a small note saying it wasn't appreciated by the community because it was uncivil - then everything goes back to normal and you can continue browsing.
A gentle reminder may be all that is needed?
There should be a karma or seniority threshold for upmodding. And it should be high.
However the "ass" comment came from a relatively "senior" member, so it would be an imperfect solution, and may have other unforeseen (by me at least) consequences.