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Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

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Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#151

Post by rue »

jozo wrote: post #27
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 a big problem with a "harsh debate climate" is that the people who can provide real value with experience, knowledge and insight will stay away. For different reasons like personal, professional or just disinterest. That will in turn attract more people who enjoy a harsher debate, which most (if not all) of the time are less enlightened. Or as the saying goes "Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you dow…

> I think a big problem with a "harsh debate climate" is that the people who can provide real value with experience, knowledge and insight will stay away.

An overly civil debate climate, viewed as a "circle jerk", might also keep some valuable contributors away. Whether that is a good thing or not is up for debate of some sort.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#152

Post by maxklein »

SandB0x wrote: post #150
maxklein wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite a negative word about someone else on a thread about negative comments.

It's accurate though. Hopefully more people will take your comments about real world identities in context.

This is the same name as is on my id card, and has been for years now.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#153

Post by DeusExMachina »

AlexC04 wrote: post #143
edw519 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're almost there with your "reply time delay". Just take it all the way... Limit the number of times one person can post in the same thread to once (or maybe twice), either from the top node or a sub-node. Example: PersonA says, "blah blah blah..." PersonB says, "You're an idiot because blah blah blah..." PersonA is locked out from replying to PersonB. This will do 7 things: 1. It will eliminate argument strings b…

I'd worry that it also eliminates the opportunity to have those tremendous back and forth type discussions where people help each other and make incremental improvements to the idea they're working on. That's a lot more rare than two people griping back and forth - but what price would you pay for the sublime? You would really lose the 'discussion' aspect of things by turning it into a 'say once' system. People in co…

This to counter number 1, but I see other issues too:

2. Trolls do not care who replies. This can avoid the argument between the OP and the troll, but does not prevent the latter to post the snarky comment in the first place. Some people just want to express their frustration attacking someone, they do not care about replies. Moreover, the lack of chance for the OP to reply could even incentivize the bad behaviour, giving the flamer a sort of "revenge" weapon. People often find gratification in silencing others.

3. Some discussions give value to the community because they happen in a short lapse of time. If someone needs 2 hours to reply, then there is a chance fewer people will see it.

4. As I said, trolls just want replies, from anyone. Flaming the full community could even be more satisfactory to him.

5. Unfortunately often there is no way of doing this because some users do not have their address in their profile.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#154

Post by JeremyChase »

chaosmachine wrote: post #142
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.

Downvoted comments are bad for the community. They are literally negative. Remove downvotes. Anything that truly deserves downvotes probably deserves flagging/deading, too. Downvotes change how you think about reading comments. Instead of "was this helpful?" you're thinking "do i love this or hate this?". It's polarizing, and as the number of users increases, it's easy for a comment to hit -4 in a couple minutes. Peo…

I'm embarrassed to say that I have accidentally upvoted many times. This always happen on a particularly egregious comment that caused you to be distracted while clicking.

We should not remove down votes outright. I've seen a comment get downvoted to -4 because people didn't like the commentary, but then shoot back up to +10 when it was shown that they were correct after all.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#155

Post by JeremyChase »

spuz wrote: post #78
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.

How about you add a little note just above the reply button. Something like: Does this comment add value/insight/healthy debate to this topic? Very low tech I know, but sometimes people need a little reminder to think about the tone of their message and how it will be received by the community before they hit that reply button.

In general, text like that is never read on websites. It just adds clutter.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#156

Post by silentbicycle »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #103
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.

Educate people on flagging inappropriate comments, like offensive ones, instead of downvoting. Downvoting can be used for disagreement, but nasty comments deserve to be flagged and then eliminated. Then, put a heavy fine on it: for example, if a user has a comment eliminated due to flagging, he loses a big amount of karma (20%?) and he cannot comment/submit for one day.

The flag button doesn't appear until you get to the reply page - making sure people know they can flag comments would be a good start.

Also, 20% of karma isn't very useful for troll / griefers on throwaway accounts. A fixed value (-100?) might be better.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#157

Post by zdw »

spuz wrote: post #78
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.

How about you add a little note just above the reply button. Something like: Does this comment add value/insight/healthy debate to this topic? Very low tech I know, but sometimes people need a little reminder to think about the tone of their message and how it will be received by the community before they hit that reply button.

Two improvements:

1. Make it a checkbox people have to check. Just to force people to take one minor action, and read it.

2. Rotate the text with a variety of different statements, just to mix it up:

"Are you being nice?" "Does this contribute to the conversation?" "Following the golden rule here?"

and most importantly:

"Will this get upvoted?"

:P

It's a low tech solution which focuses on fostering community values.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#158

Post by robryan »

invertedlambda wrote: post #97
wnoise wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't mind if you as a respected user of this site knows who I am. Google - forever and ever - not so much. Unfortunately, you can't get the first without the second, as witness the leak of the "journolist" e-mails.

Agreed. If you don't want your presence to be known on the Internet, there's a very simple way to accomplish that. Don't post, don't publish, don't comment. Simple as that. Some time ago another person made a comment about pearls and some sort of livestock. Throwing...things...in places?

Yeah, even posting anonymously on the internet your identity could probably still be found, given someone sufficiently motivated to find it.

Was interesting maybe a year back we had someone post anonymously and then had a thread on people trying to work out who it was, knowing it was someone who had commented a decent amount before. People were applying algorithms to attempt to work it out, no idea if anyone ever did, can't find the thread.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#159

Post by ezy »

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.

The ability to post should be linked to the rate of posting. Or maybe the rate of pt change in general. This has two purposes:

It cuts down trolls who snipe in lots of different threads at once.

It cuts down on me too commenters, or the know it all contigent who seemly does nothing else but post on HN, again hitting lots of threads at once.

It encourages people to think abiut what they're writing, instead sending out one sentence snark, or writing a long missive they feel they can "clarify" later in a pointless semantic debate.

This isnt a complete solution... I have no idea how to correct for mean spiritedness, for example. But some kind of limit that tells people that they should stop venting/pontificating and take a walk might help.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#160

Post by fragmede »

yewweitan wrote: post #80
maxklein wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that the less anonymous a forum like this is, the more polite it will be. You have said you want people to speak to each other here as they would in the real world: well, I believe the more strongly you tie their real world identity to their account here, the more polite they would be. My suggestion, similar to that experiment in the past, and similar to twitter, add a "verified user" badge in the users pro…

As an aside, is there any particular reason that the comment header (containing the commenter's username and other details) was designed to be grey and of the same text size as the actual comment body? I think we can say that standard forums are much more 'scannable' compared to HN, and I often find myself looking out for posts from users whom I respect on that particular forums. In this case, Putting the username be…

The username being unemphasized is quite intentional - Reasoning being who cares who said something? If it's right it's right; if it's wrong, it's wrong.
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