I think it'd be interesting to compare the current site with the site showing only posts submitted by users that have been members for a certain number of years.
Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
31–40 of 64 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
#32While it is essentially to be civil, too much agreement and mutual back-patting can lead to chronic group think in a community, where anyone deemed to be contrarian is instantly down-voted regardless of how civilly made their arguement is. I see a lot of this on HN.
Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you willing to share or discuss some of the ways you're quantifying "quality"? It seems like an extremely difficult problem, and relevant to the problems many of us are trying to solve. I can come up with plenty of simple metrics, but they all fall apart pretty fast, especially if the community quality starts to tank hard. Think of the sheer number of upvotes that most inane meme references get on reddit. Situati…
Think of the quality constraints of /r/askscience Quality is discourse, not peanut gallery, vacuum sucking commentary that builds on puns, memes, insults and karma whoring. Inflammatory comments often devolve into nothing. No insights, no evocative call to action. However, constructive assertions backed by reason are not inflammatory and equally capable of evocative statements that can be challenged.
Agreed on all your points.
What I'd love to dig in around, though, is if there's a way to quantify the difference between an inflammatory comment vs. a constructive comment.
Just thinking out loud: Source links/references perhaps? If it's a primarily English-speaking community, look for specific keywords? As a negative metric, look for an extended back-and-forth between two people?
This is one of the things I'm struggling with - it's easy to come up with "dumb" metrics & ideas, but the false positives/negatives are a real problem.
Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
#34Is this Hacker News or Institute for Noble Maidens?
That particular comment conveyed a valid point, it was done effectively and added to the discussion. I'm rather concerned that this site becomes more and more of an echo chamber as I see dozens of comments from different people that could be easily compressed into one.
Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
#35For those who missed it (like me), here's the Corpus Delicti: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3492889
Corpus Delicti, latin for body of crime...
I'm sympathetic to the discussion of promoting a civil and interesting community, however, in this specific example, I believe the lack of sensitivity towards the poster is actually worse than the crime itself.
Guidelines are exactly that, guidelines. When a long time contributor becomes emotional about the brutally honest instruction of killing an industry, which happens to be one he feels aligned to, I would figure the appropriate response is to explain rather than admonish. There is a propensity to over-regulate with respect to the guidelines, which I attribute to a lack of thought, really.
Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
#36The quality of comments has been declining very gradually for years. There's a lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet undiscovered. This is somewhat uncharted territory. I'm medium hopeful.
It's not just the comments, I'm more concerned about the submissions. Look at the front page right now, and see how many items are not "Hacker News" even with a very lax definition of "stuff that's interesting specifically to hackers." For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497331
It's clear why this happens. The people interested in fuzzy, quasi-political or "outrage" issues are passionately engaged with them. People are less passionate about the debate over the worst-case complexity of hash table lookups. At a step's remove, it's evident that the topics HN was intended to cover are systemically disadvantaged compared to whatever the moment's advocacy topics are --- and every moment has at least one advocacy topic: the TSA, SOPA, Occupy, Wikileaks, police misconduct, Asian manufacturing, ebook licensing, DRM, &c &c &c.
More passion, less thought, less tolerance for conflicting views, worse threads.
Paul Graham seems cautiously optimistic about comment quality. I think he's being too generous. I suspect that advocacy energy is cumulative; it doesn't go away when the topic fades, but sticks around and waits to bind to subsequent advocacy topics, causing the site to steadily crud up with them.
Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
#37The quality of comments has been declining very gradually for years. There's a lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet undiscovered. This is somewhat uncharted territory. I'm medium hopeful.
A few years ago, posting on HN felt like posting to a small community. Reputation and civility seemed to matter a lot. When people posted something offensive or rude, they were sanctioned to the point that they would often delete the offending comment. (I remember deleting a comment I made on an old account merely because, without tone, it seemed inflammatory; I felt compelled to delete it even though it had no malicious intent because it damaged the conversation.)
Now, I think it has become too large and feels anonymous. Posting something offensive has no cost because it doesn't feel like a "know your neighbor"-type community anymore. The costs imposed by karma seem to be less significant. I even think that if you post a rude or ideologically motivated comment, there are other rude people who will agree with you, attenuating the negative signal.
The HN is turning to reddit mime is genuine. I think it's just a consequence of having a very large community. Although a lot of HNers may disagree, I think the herd must be culled. I'd be happier of participation was limited. If I was the benevolent dictator, I'd collect a list of people whose contributions are most valuable and remove everyone else. Then, give those high-signal / low-noise contributors the ability to invite other people. Continue to have all content publicly readable, but ration the writes.
(Disclaimer: Although I have many doubts, I do believe it is possible to have an HN-scale community that remains civil; however, without the data, I'm not very comfortable just enumerating implementation ideas.)
Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
#38The quality of comments has been declining very gradually for years. There's a lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet undiscovered. This is somewhat uncharted territory. I'm medium hopeful.
It's not just the comments, I'm more concerned about the submissions. Look at the front page right now, and see how many items are not "Hacker News" even with a very lax definition of "stuff that's interesting specifically to hackers." For example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3497331
I'd vote for that too!
Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
#39There should be a karma or seniority threshold for upmodding. And it should be high.
Alternatively, a pagerank-like scoring system where not all upvotes are equal. You could score each upvote giving it a value `influence` instead of `1`. The influence of an account increases when its posts are upvoted by PG or upvoted by people who are upvoted by PG, etc. This of course depends on the assumption that people who post nice comments also upvote nice comments.
Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?
#40Is something happening to the quality of this community lately?
Personally I like the ass-comment (cue hackers fainting in the audience).
There's some passion and lifeblood in it that I'm missing on HN for a while. And he's obviously making a point beyond name-calling (the point I disagree with, just for the record).
What I'm growing tired of is quite the opposite. It's the politeness-police that demands fluffy padding around everything that is said and jumps out the woodwork at the slightest trace of "harsh tone" or (god forbid) humor that doesn't directly add to the discussion.
It's a fine line obviously, but having this particular comment spawn this particular Ask-HN is exactly what I mean. There's more than plenty echo-chambering and mutual shoulder-patting on HN as it is. Do we really need to throw a meta-tantrum every time someone opposes the hivemind with a strong, alternate opinion that is not coated in the finest super-gloss politeness?