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Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

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Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#111

Post by mfukar »

pg wrote: post #29
jrockway wrote: post #7

No social news site is going to be perfect. If it's people that are writing comments, some comments will be good and some will be bad. Read them and decide for yourself. If a comment hurts your feelings, get over it. If you like a comment, upvote it, and help other people find the best comments. Really, I kind of get tired of reading stuff like this because there is always some subtext to it. "mean-spirited" usually…

I think meanness is something you have to push back against actively. This site is not in a state of nature. There are all kinds of things I do to keep meanness at bay, and the situation would be a lot worse if I didn't. Preventing the site from declining into a swamp of meanness and stupidity (I believe the two are closely related) is something I think about constantly.

Preventing the site from declining into a set of meanness and stupidity (I believe the two are closely related) is something I think about constantly.

Does that imply anything regarding hateful posts in HN, or is it just a 'hey, there's a correlation here' observation?

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#112

Post by dtf »

demallien wrote: post #58
pg wrote: post #30

Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.

I think the problem comes from the fact that we don't have a tool for expressing that we disagree with the tone of what someone is saying, but we agree with the position of the comment. This means that someone can write a mean spirited comment that happens to support a popular position in this community, and they won't get downvoted. Other people, seeing this, will take it as permission to be rude in their own posts.…

I always downvote on harsh tone or meanness directed at others (but not directed at myself). I upvote for valuable and interesting information, and intelligently argued points. I try not to upvote for mere agreement (although sometimes it's hard not to), and I never downvote for disagreement. (There are some exceptions - questions that are phrased as surveys etc). Since my time here on HN, it seems to me that most people follow something like this, much more so than on most of reddit where upvote-if-funny/upvote-to-agree/downvote-to-disagree is the law of the land.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#113

Post by hasenj »

pjscott wrote: post #51
sutro wrote: post #23

If we could dispense with all of the boo-hoo-someone-was-mean-and-downvoted-me meta posts and comments, this could be a great site. Posts like this are the biggest problem with HN.

Here's what you can do: 1. Avoid meta threads. 2. Downvote off-topic meta-discussion in other threads. 3. Do not add to the meta-discussion; just downvote and move on. In this way, you can express your distaste for such discussion and avoid most of it with very minimal effort.

isn't this a mean-spirited comment?

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#114

Post by JesseAldridge »

kristaps wrote: post #109
JesseAldridge wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possible solution 1: Smaller communities; Dunbar's number. I know it's been suggested before, but here it is again... When everybody knows everybody, people are nicer. Just create one unique, isolated instance of the site for every X number of users. Distribute current users randomly (or whatever) among the instances. Assign new users to the least populous instance. If an instance gets over max_number of users, split…

Possible solution 1 sounds like a horrible idea. By fragmenting the community it would fragment the knowledge, quite a high price to pay for clean comments.

I don't know, I find that in smaller web communities I tend to participate more, because I know my voice is more likely to be heard. And if everyone knows everyone than people would be more easily remembered for making good comments. That would give them more of an incentive to be helpful and constructive. So the knowledge loss might not be as great as it would seem.

And communities could still be visible to everyone, even if only members of that community can participate. Then if there's a really good comment in one community, someone from another could just copy and paste it over.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#115

Post by hasenj »

pg wrote: post #30

Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.

Limit the amount of downvotes one can perform per day, or per X hours.

Points from comments should have way more weight than karma points from submissions. It's easy to get massive karma points if you submit something interesting. On the other hand, you could spend a lot of time writing a comment and you wouldn't get than many points from it.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#116

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

plinkplonk wrote: post #42
pg wrote: post #30

Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.

pg, (this might be somewhat obvious but)couldn't you detect and (penalize?) the "punishing" some folks compllain about? someone downvoting a specific person across discussions. I would imagine most people do this by bringing up the target's profile first and then downvoting all his comments. Hard to think of a lgitimate use case for this behaviour.

Case in point ...

I've occasionally found a comment that I felt was both mean-spirited and largely content-free. I've down-voted that.

Then I wondered if that person had a history of such comments, so I've brought up their profile, looked through their comments, and attempted to assess each one on its merits. In cases of doubt I've left them alone, but if I've felt that the comment in question was again mean-spirited and content-free, I've down-voted that as well.

I've realised that such actions, while intended well, might be viewed as "punishing" the "contributor" in question. Further, I suspect that PG already detects and inhibits this behavior.

So here we have a case where I believe I'm doing the right thing to help reduce the mean-spiritedness of comments, and I get prevented from doing so.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#117

Post by Locke1689 »

davidw wrote: post #71
anigbrowl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proximity of an election is likely a factor in this.

That's a good point; hopefully it will subside afterwards.

There's always another election and another hot-button topic right around the corner.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#118

Post by 8ren »

crististm wrote: post #90
pg wrote: post #30

Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.

what about a "members only" club, where you need an invitation to get inside? It worked for google to get members if this is a problem and it may show the relative quality of the members subtree.

You make me think of a way for every user to make their own members only club, by filtering, and they 100% control who is visible in it; others can view through another's filter:

1. every user can config a "whitelist" of users, to personalize HN to only show comments from those users (and access other users via parent links). This is the "filter", of who they "follow".

2. you can set your whitelist to be the whitelist of any other users. This is "subscribing".

Some few users would end up working to maintain detailed whitelists (like, who they "follow"), and most others would just "subscribe" to them. New users would be left out in the cold til one of these services picked them up (like new bands getting signed to music labels?)

No way would pg go for this, but it's interesting to me. It's sort of a variation of subreddits; and a bit like the various newswire services (like reuters etc) being picked up by local newspapers...

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#119

Post by awakeasleep »

maxklein wrote: post #104
_delirium wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't found anonymity to be very well correlated with politeness on tech discussion forums I'm on. Some of the most abrasive ones are filled with people posting under their real names, and folks like rms, Theo De Raadt, Ulrich Drepper, and a bunch of the comp.lang.lisp crowd have no problem flaming you under their real names.

But that's real life. The goal is to make the conversation here equivalent to how people talk in real life, not be more polite than that.

In a way I understand what you're saying, but I feel our environment influences how we interact with each other-- anywhere. For example, rules can be added to give structure to a debate. The whole debate format, while artificial, exists to increase the utility of 'real life' discussion.

It seems to me anything we can do to boost the interesting aspects of this community are fair game, and they augment real life itself.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#120

Post by m0nty »

cageface wrote: post #106
pg wrote: post #30

Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.

I'd like to see the karma system dispensed with entirely. I don't think it encourages thoughtful and productive discussions.

> I'd like to see the karma system dispensed with entirely

Totally agree with that. Comments should be judged on their merits, not the number of points they have gained or lost. Disagreement should be expressed using actual words rather than "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Removing comment karma would slow people down as they scan comments: rather than just looking for the highest-rated ones, they would have to look at the meaning of all of them. Bitch-slapping commenters with a down-vote doesn't add anything to community or discussion. Clicking the "me too!" upvote button doesn't help that much either.

Keep a flag for "spam", "inappropriate" or "offensive" and leave it at that. People who habitually misuse those buttons should lose the ability to use them at all. People who are constantly (and justifiably) reported using them should have their account limited in some way, maybe limiting the frequency or number of comments they can make.

(I mean comment karma, specifically, not submission karma.)

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