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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

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Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#121

Post by nirkalimi »

Excited about this. I would love for this to be implemented all over the internet.

It is fairly easy to be negative. In fact, the cynical approach is the easiest point of view you can take. I have been working on this myself, and I encourage everyone to try and go the whole day/week/month practicing the opposite.

I think this has to do with how we are taught. Critical thinking somewhere down the line gave justification to being 'gratuitously negative'. I went my whole life thinking that I was being helpful when in reality I was just hurting people.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#122

Post by andrewstuart »

It's "the programmers way" to try to come up with some sort of moderation/policing system to solve this. Please do not come up with a moderation system.

There should simply be a confirmation step after hitting submit, reminding the poster that they are valued for their positive contribution and giving the poster the chance to rethink their post and cancel if its too negative. Additionally when posting, require people to self-rate the level of negativity of their post when they submit from one to ten. Publish that number along with the post.

There's nothing at the moment that explicitly asks or reminds people of expectations when they post. What is it that makes you think posters know there is an expectation not to be negative? People don't read the community guidelines every time they post, UNLESS key points of the guidelines are presented to them.

The community moderation system, what it ends up being, will be gamed and abused and alienate and anger people. Don't do it. Witness the toxic mess of StackOverflow.

HN is not in a position right now to express concern about negative posts because it is not explicitly asking people to avoid negative posting, at the time that they post, and requiring the user to think about it. That is step one.

HN would be implementing a passive-aggressive solution by going to an indirect system that continues to allow people to post negatively and then gets the community to police it later. Address it up-front, at the time of posting. Let people be responsible for their own posts. Asked to think it through, posters will dial back the negativity.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#123

Post by bengali3 »

noir_lord wrote: post #116
bengali3 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, what if in downvoting a comment you had to pick a reason? What are all the reasons one would downvote something? "I do not agree" "I do not believe this adds value" "Inappropriate conduct" "I think you are being mean / rude" "Bad attempt at funny" "Off topic to parent" "Off topic to post" "Difficult to understand/Noise"

Slashdot does this. What generally happens is that instead of one argument about been downvoted/upvoted you end up with even more arguments about whether something is +5 funny or whatever. I've no idea how you solve this in the general case tbh.

thanks i'll check it out. I wasn't thinking to show the stats to others, possibly to provide feedback to the poster that they're 'above average' on the 'mean' or 'not relevant', etc scale.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#124

Post by DanBC »

sprash wrote: post #90

This is the worst idea ever. I'm generally a pretty negative person for a reason. Negative feedback is necessary for anything to actually get better. And who or what decides what is "gratuitous". This is a recipe for despotism and censorship.

You can provide negative feedback in a useful constructive way. I don't get the impression that HN wants you to stop doing that.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#125

Post by maxerickson »

moe wrote: post #91
striking wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do adjectives have to do with commenting?

Not with commenting but with classifying the comments. As maxerickson said we'd have additional votes for adjectives like e.g. "mean", "interesting", "funny" and others, but the hard part would be to choose a meaningful set. I think almost any set would probably feel arbitrary and limiting quickly, so I'd rather stick with very few, very basic ones and see how that goes.

I think the bigger problem is what to do with the extra information.

In that light, something like "too far off topic" is probably more useful (I think the too far is good there, as a reminder that things probably ought to range a bit).

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#126

Post by foobarqux »

DanBC wrote: post #108
foobarqux wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are obviously bad comments, which most people agree are inappropriate but I think the problem is that there are another set of comments that the HN team thinks is inappropriate but a significant portion of commenters think is clearly okay. So I think informative examples would point out comments that many people think are okay but that the HN team does not.

Someone writes a detailed technical blog post and submits it. A few comments are about the content of the post. And then someone makes a comment about the blog CSS or the framework or javascript, wothout mentioning any content of the blog. I get the impression that HN doesn't want those type of comments here.

I very much doubt that is the main category of comment that the new rule is addressing.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#127

Post by cpncrunch »

buckbova wrote: post #63
waterlesscloud wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about the downvoting. The harm it's doing has increased in recent months, and it's common to see perfectly reasonable satements of fact (much less opinions) that someone else doesn't like be downvoted. It's discouraging to see when it's not even your comment, and really offputting when it is. It's gotten to a point that I'm not sure downvoting is a net positive for the community any more. EDIT- example, this…

What did your comment add that the OP or the others replying to the OP didn't state previously? An "I agree" or "hear, hear" should be downvoted.

He/she added:

- facts are sometimes downvoted - it's gotten worse

I don't like being negative, but if you had actually properly read and comprehended the comment rather than downvoting it, that would have been preferable. In fact this is a perfect example of why downvoting doesn't work properly.

PS, I've upvoted both your comments.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#128

Post by makmanalp »

Karunamon wrote: post #93
chippy wrote: post #77

There is nothing to worry about. I do think it is indicative of a certain kind of new diversity friendly, "safe space", slightly censorious attitude which is rooted in normal human group psychology, keeping the tribe safe and secure and also swayed by whatever flavour of popular radical politics is operating at the time. It's nothing new. I wouldn't worry about this affecting Hacker News but if it does, we will notic…

Does that even follow, though? HN's community has traditionally (thankfully!) flatly rejected the "safe space" PC game whenever it's attempted to be played here, either in the comments or the submissions. Remember that the guideline is against "gratuitous negativity", not "negativity" in general. HN will still be a place where actual crap gets called crap, but hopefully this means that we'll see less middlebrow criti…

> HN will still be a place where actual crap gets called crap

I daresay that this is the problem. When one has the option to say "I think this isn't good from perspective X, because of thing Y", and one says "this is crap", one is being unconstructive and mean.

To say that something that someone did or thought is "crap" or "rubbish", the way I see it, is just needlessly inflammatory. I think a lot of people conflate being inflammatory with being frank and straightforward. "Look at how non-PC I am, I told it like it is!!"

The truth is option A above is just as frank, but much more civil, and isn't creating enmity when there isn't cause for any.

Re: New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity

#129

Post by dman »

bengali3 wrote: post #103
dman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. Conflating disagreement with downvoting seems to be mixing unrelated concerns. It is currently inconvenient (in karma terms) to hold dissenting opinions.

Interesting, what if in downvoting a comment you had to pick a reason? What are all the reasons one would downvote something? "I do not agree" "I do not believe this adds value" "Inappropriate conduct" "I think you are being mean / rude" "Bad attempt at funny" "Off topic to parent" "Off topic to post" "Difficult to understand/Noise"

I havent put a lot of thought into an ideal solution to this problem. But heres the best I have so far. Change the definition of karma to capture notability which would be a monotonically increasing number. So when a person mark a comment as notable, it increases your karma score by 1. Seperately have a agree / disagree score per comment whose lifetime is limited to a particular thread. Within a thread a reader can use the agree / disagree scores of comment to selectively read both sides of the debate.
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