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Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

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Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#181

Post by mehmeh »

csomar wrote: post #176

As someone who was a "bad" user (under another username); posting rather useless, short, unsighted comments and submissions; I think the best way is to "educate people". This is not only a HN culture, it's a civilian culture. Limit the freedom of newbies until they are more mature. When you are committed to the community, you become more responsible and work toward creating a name/friends. When you are new, you prett…

I am a bad user who was a good user.

I stopped bothering after a few incidents where content-free snarky bullshit written in response to my genuine comments was upvoted, and pg was unwilling to remove any of it.

Then, I got banned for some very genuine, but negative, opinions. I don't expect people to agree with them, but banning me for them again seemed asinine.

I didn't bother changing my proxy, so this will probably auto-dead, but that's true. pg's lack of action was an endorsement of shitty, snarky, content-free behavior. Unsurprisingly, shitty, snarky, content-free behavior has grown since then.

Want to fix HN? Fire pg.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#182

Post by hsuresh »

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 agree with you. The only times i have wanted to downvote was to mark some comment as spam and/or troll. Given that we have a 'flag' link on comments, i don't see a need for downvote, except to undo a upvote.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#183

Post by MarkSweep »

mjfern wrote: post #3
daeken wrote: post #2

I 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.

If mean-spirited comments are down-voted, then it's not much of an issue. The problem is that I've started seeing mean-spirited comments receiving up-votes, and rising to the top of discussions. How do we solve this as a community?

Slashdot attempts to fix this with meta moderation. Users are given the chance to judge up-votes essentially. Whether that is actually effective for them or applicable to Hacker News, I could not say.

http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#184

Post by maw »

Alex3917 wrote: post #175
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.

For every one mean-sprited comment, there are probably at least five comments that are just plain wrong about something. Are mean-spirited comments really that big of a problem compared with, say, commenters critiquing the methodology of academic papers they haven't read? edit: Jon Stewart is generally quite mean spirited, in that he goes out of his way to get people fired and treats people he disagrees with like lit…

It's a good point. I stopped reading another well-known site years ago in large part because so much there was outright wrong, and I was afraid that I'd picked up and internalized false ideas, and would continue to do so, in unwary moments.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#185

Post by huhtenberg »

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.

Please consider running the anonymization experiment.

Mean-spirited comments can quite possibly be the response to the rampant favoritism that exists on HN and that can be as dangerous to maintaining discussions balanced and interesting.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#186

Post by pg »

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've often thought of it. The reason I had downvotes originally was to deter people from saying things that were mean or stupid. But maybe the right way to deal with that is a separate mechanism from voting, as it is with stories. Maybe the right combo for comments is an uparrow, plus a flag link, and encourage users to flag comments that are mean or stupid.

I'll think about the real solution more after I'm done reading applications, but I'll increase the downvote threshold to 500 now.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#187

Post by aturek »

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…

Downvotes can be used to stifle dissent, but are generally valuable.

I feel like 60-70% of the heavily downvoted comments I see are already trolling or flaming (or in some cases something dumb, like a 3-word reference to an internet meme). With the grayed out text, I think this is a fantastic visual cue about how not to act on HN.

(I could have just written this comment as "/disagree", and then watched it get appropriately downvoted, and learned my lesson)

Edit: I should also add that as a barely-contributing user, I don't have the ability to downvote. But I'd still like other people to be able to do it, to enforce the community's standards.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#188

Post by pg »

araneae wrote: post #164
chaosmachine wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually downvoting a bunch of someone's comments doesn't work. There has long been protection against that.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#189

Post by Tycho »

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.

Perhaps a gentle warning built into the voting system will suffice. I like the concept of downvoting to express disagreement (rather than cluttering the thread with replies), but I don't think anyone should downvote a comment into negative figures unless it was actually abusive. That creates bad will, which breeds more bad will, et cetera. So what about a little message that pops up saying

"Are you sure you want to downvote this comment? Doing so will push its karma into negative figures. At HN we don't encourage this type of downvoting except in response to abusive content. "

In my experience some people just don't have a clue how to behave online and it's not even expected of them in most places. HN is different.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#190

Post by pg »

jdietrich wrote: post #163
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 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 fo…

We also measure average comment score. It's the avg field on the profile page.
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