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Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
161–170 of 297 posts
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Out of friendly curiosity - what led you to change your official name? What are the steps to do that? (I have an awkward last name and am considering it).
It seems like you even changed your first name. How did it feel, how long did it take until your new name felt natural?
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#163Incidentally, 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 havent figured out anything specific, but I have a couple of thoughts about the karma system.
It occurs to me that the main failure of karma-type systems in general is valuing quantity over quality. This is perfectly rational for a commercial site that seeks to maximise engagement and page views, but it seems to actively harm both comment quality and the community dynamic.
It seems that the prime concern we have for HN is maintaining a high S/N ratio; Why should the karma system not make that desire more explicit? I may be completely wrong here, but I think most of us would like to see a community where people think carefully before they post. If we want to discourage flaming and poor-quality comments, I think we need to think harder about behavioural prods to discourage them.
I propose removing the display of a users' total karma on their user page and replacing it with their average karma. I would like to see voting privileges made contingent on average karma and would be interested to hear possibilities for punishing users with a high proportion of low- or negative-karma comments.
It is of course dangerous to use heavy-handed technical changes because of the myriad possible unintended consequences, but we all know that internet communities almost inevitably fail. As a community, we should be considering our options now while things are generally OK, perhaps even designing a 'nuclear option' for the possibility that HN experiences some sort of Eternal September scenario.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#164Incidentally, 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…
Agreed. I think downvoting starts a revenge cycle, and the methods that are in place to prevent revenge only make the revenge less direct.
For instance, you can't downvote replies to your comment, but you can go into their user history and downvote their other comments. This is worse, because their other comments quite literally have nothing to do with what would have been downvoted had that measure not been in place.
If someone views downvotes as punishment, then this engenders retaliation, and retaliation doesn't engender civil discussion.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#165Incidentally, 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 just read Paul's essay in Hackers and Painters on his spam filters using Bayesian probability of words in the message. Could something like that work on trolls? The body's corpus would be only replies marked with a certain flag?
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#166I've been seeing a lot of this lately, too. I wonder how much of it is related to the Digg mass exodus?
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#167Incidentally, 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.
Griefing: If the system does not already, I think it should flag for review users who consistently downvote a particular user.
Cliques: Likewise if the same few people are consistently the first to upvote stories or comments of a particular user.
Multies/Sockpuppets: I think votes for a user buy another user from "too close" an ip address should be automatically discounted. I'm not sure how to define "too close" (and I suspect HN already does this)
Anonymous posting: I like the way MetaFilter handles anonymous posting instead of people making throwaway accounts. The downside of this is that 1) Posters have to really trust the site admins; 2) This becomes more work for the admins
Disallow noob posting articles: What % of the [DEAD] articles were posted by users with a very low karma? What % hit the front page?
(Yes, those last two are not directly related to the OP's comment but I feel they're ideas worth throwing out there)
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the same name as is on my id card, and has been for years now.
Out of friendly curiosity - what led you to change your official name? What are the steps to do that? (I have an awkward last name and am considering it). It seems like you even changed your first name. How did it feel, how long did it take until your new name felt natural?
Changing your last name is a reasonably straightforward process in most countries, because women usually do it when they get married. The first name is a bit more difficult, but if you have appropriate and reasonable reasons, it can be changed.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#169Incidentally, 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.
Force users to give a reasons when voting.
This would allow two things. First, users can downvote for specific reasons - mean spirited/dumb/insulting/off-topic. If a comment is technically correct, but unnecessarily mean, then I can its disposition.
Secondly, it would provide feedback to the commenter. If my 'me too!' comments are being downvoted, it'd be great to have some reason why.
Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments
#170I upvoted this because I agree with the concept, but I don't believe such things are necessary. General rule of life: assholes will be assholes. This isn't going to make anyone more polite. Most of us are already polite, and quite content to simply downvote people who aren't.
I think I'm a pretty nice guy, but I've written some mean comments when I strongly disagreed with someone here. Imagine most of the mean comments here are coming from nice people who would rather (if they thought about it for a second) not respond in a negative way in those types of situations.