How about notifying people when their comments have been flagged and pointing them to the site guidelines?
Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
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Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#12Some 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.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#13The 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.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#14A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.
Gotta agree.. I sometimes fall into commenting on or upvoting politics threads, but that's really not what HN is about... a harder line against that stuff would probably help.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#15Have you considered adding a down vote button like Reddit has? I know you can flag comments above a certain karma level but I think that either giving everyone the option to down vote or having a lower karma threshold to down vote would allow the community to regulate itself.
Just a thought, but it seems to have worked for Reddit. This puts a lot of responsibility on the community to keep the quality of the discussions up, but I think enough people on here care about the quality of the community to help out.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#16[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#17A hard ban on politics and current events, instead of the wiggly one we have in the site guidelines now.
Politics, I'm definitely with you. "Current events", though, is an extremely broad term -- what exactly did you intend it to mean?
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#18A privmsg feature, available to people who cross a karma or karma average feature, that would allow gruseom to tell people offline that their comments are dumb. Sometimes it's good to make an example of a dumb comment, but other times it just begs for an unproductive fight.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#19The comment flag button could be changed to really mean something; for instance: sufficiently flagged comments can stop collecting upvotes.
Maybe flagged comments could be killed in a similar manner as flagged stories are, rather than just stopping them from getting any further upvotes.
Re: Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?
#20I disagree that the quality is declining. I think you're just suffering a misapprehension of the quality of old.