A Proposal To Improve Hacker News

That's why I like the idea of going after the users and sites that are better suited to other social news sites - the crossover in stories and topics between HN and http://www.reddit.com/r/technology is significant when it should be incidental.

But I agree with you. You don't fix human problems by adding technical controls. You fix human problems by adding technical measures designed to enable human controls.

My proposal is relatively simple: figure out a high karma number (high enough few people have it) and allow these people to issue an incivility warning. If you get more than a certain number of incivility warnings in a month you get banned, first temporarily and on the second time perhaps permanently. These reprimands would be public.

People need feedback. People need to know when they are stepping out. One of the real concerns I have with hellbanning (though I recognize in some corner cases it may be useful) is that it denies people this feedback and therefore does not encourage people to stay within the lines of acceptable conduct. So make hellbanning only for cases of people who are long-term repetitive problems or spammers. Implement a system that gives feedback to users for the rest. And allow the most senior people to enforce civility constraints.

Technology needs to empower people to manage people. Software should not manage people.

The size migh be an issue, but the greatee problem is that by the time I reach the bottom of the page, the link has usually expired. If you want your users to see the next page, that really is inexcusable.

1. Don't let people create multiple accounts so easily. Switch to OpenID and have the ability to associate old accounts with the new ID or have the old account deactivated within 90 days. I don't even know how many accounts I've created, but it is a lot. This is basically anonymity. This does not work.

2. Don't filter comments and not hide topics that anyone disagrees with unless they are extremely offensive, and those could be marked as offensive and then PG and those with enough karma will check those and if they are offensive, they will hide them, but anyone could still see them, vote on them, and comment on them, if you clicked a flag to see them. You have to login to upvote, downvote, mark as offensive, post, or comment.

3. Show who upvoted or downvoted to everyone. This will make people think twice before downvoting.

4. Allow private communication between users so that if someone downvotes you without saying why, you can ask them why.

5. The new page is grouped by: last 24 hours, last 3 days, last week, last month, last 3 months, last year, and then by year. Everytime something is upvoted it goes to the top of the new list for the group it is in.

I'm sorry that some people have complained that HN works fine technically as it is. It certainly does, for those it serves. However, people complain that there are negative views here. I think the changes I proposed will help with that. But a bigger problem is that people's posts and comments get whacked. If you handle things in the way I described, and stop silencing me and others, I think the community will be much happier.