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Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

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Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#231

Post by silentbicycle »

pg wrote: post #215
GHFigs wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace the total karma score by the username in the upper right of the page with the average that's already visible on the profile page. An average is a better indicator to the user of how well they are engaging with the site. It only goes up if the user consistently posts worthwhile comments, which rewards being selective about when you post and thoughtful about what you post. Fewer and better is encouraged. Consis…

Ok, let's try that for a while.

Showing (total, avg) may be a good compromise. Showing the average is an incentive for / against certain kinds of comments (i.e. against answering questions in old threads), showing both might soften that. Also, I use changes to my karma as a quick proxy for if I have more comments in any threads.

Come to think of it - a "new responses" link on the profile page could be very helpful.

Is there a reason flag isn't shown on comments until the reply page?

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#232

Post by Alex3917 »

cperciva wrote: post #222
GHFigs wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace the total karma score by the username in the upper right of the page with the average that's already visible on the profile page. An average is a better indicator to the user of how well they are engaging with the site. It only goes up if the user consistently posts worthwhile comments, which rewards being selective about when you post and thoughtful about what you post. Fewer and better is encouraged. Consis…

Lousy comments (like one-on-one arguments and "Me too!") are discouraged even if nobody votes them down. Comments which few people will notice are also discouraged. Most of my 1-point comments are the only comment on their respective articles, and many of those are 'Ask HN' posts. I don't want to find myself thinking "I could contribute here, but doing so will drag my average down".

It also encourages you to upvote people who are wrong so that more people will see it when you correct them. Similarly, it encourages people to upvote bad stories so that more people will see your comments.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#233

Post by cperciva »

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.

Add a "time-out" mechanism: If a comment is killed by the editors (and/or by being flagged many times) then for the next X minutes (I'd go with X=60) handle any GETs from that user by redirecting to a page saying:

  The following comment has been judged to be unhelpful
  and as a result you are now on time-out:
  
  You may return to Hacker News in Y minutes.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#234

Post by mkr-hn »

pg wrote: post #215
GHFigs wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace the total karma score by the username in the upper right of the page with the average that's already visible on the profile page. An average is a better indicator to the user of how well they are engaging with the site. It only goes up if the user consistently posts worthwhile comments, which rewards being selective about when you post and thoughtful about what you post. Fewer and better is encouraged. Consis…

Ok, let's try that for a while.

I usually end up posting on old threads (since I only check once or twice a day), which means I rarely get more than 1-2 upvotes per comment (if any).

I've got .77, which seems a lot lower than I would expect. I rarely end up in negatives on my comments. But when I do, the negative is a high one.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#235

Post by corin_ »

plinkplonk wrote: post #221
pg wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, let's try that for a while.

Is there any way I can see other people's average karma? The individual users pages (except my own) still seem to display total karma. The leaderboard is still ranked by total karma. If we are adopting (temporarily perhaps) average karma as a metric , it would be great to see who is ranked highest on it or even just how much average karma a user has, just as we can check total karma of a user today I also suspect tha…

Agreed - people whose behaviour might be changed by the move from total to average are people who care about how they look, so if no-one else can see it they won't care, surely.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#236

Post by cperciva »

bokonist wrote: post #230
cperciva wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lousy comments (like one-on-one arguments and "Me too!") are discouraged even if nobody votes them down. Comments which few people will notice are also discouraged. Most of my 1-point comments are the only comment on their respective articles, and many of those are 'Ask HN' posts. I don't want to find myself thinking "I could contribute here, but doing so will drag my average down".

The ideal measure would be number of upvotes of a comment divided by the number of views of the comment. That way you wouldn't get punished for making comments late in a thread or on a less well read post. Unfortunately measuring this statistic would require a lot of work to implement.

A lot of work, and it might even be impossible. If someone loads a page with 200 comments, how many of the comments do you judge that he has read?

That said, upvotes per page-load-including-the-comment is probably still better than the raw number of upvotes.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#237

Post by thaumaturgy »

mmaunder wrote: post #204
pg wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 read…

I've had my comments republished in your monthly but I rarely comment on HN anymore due to the negativity. Case in point: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652566 We've gained a few trolls but I don't think we've suffered from evaporative cooling yet so it's not too late. I support removing down voting and switching to flagging specific offenses e.g. spam|offensive|troll to start. Alternatively [just a crazy thoug…

> ...but I don't think we've suffered from evaporative cooling yet...

If we assume that a user's total score is a good indicator of their value to the community, then the HN leaderboard would agree with you.

I'm not so sure, though. IIRC, pg has mentioned in the past that he spends less time here now, and I rarely see anything from Reddit's founding user group. Another HN user that I've been following for a while -- DaniFong -- who's doing some pretty interesting stuff and has a tendency to post fairly intelligent comments, has had a really obvious decline in activity here.

Although I've been a part of this problem as often as not, I've also found that the discourse here isn't worth participating in any more.

But, maybe there are alternative explanations for all of that.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#238

Post by WiseWeasel »

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.

Downvotes could be made precious by limiting the number one could make each day, ensuring that people will use them more carefully.

It could then be conceivable to give the downvotes more weight, perhaps putting users in a karma hole, with their posts starting out at 0 points, appearing at the bottom of the comments page, if they have accrued too many downvotes. They would then have to dig themselves out by posting more valuable comments.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#239

Post by resdirector »

GHFigs wrote: post #210
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.

Replace the total karma score by the username in the upper right of the page with the average that's already visible on the profile page. An average is a better indicator to the user of how well they are engaging with the site. It only goes up if the user consistently posts worthwhile comments, which rewards being selective about when you post and thoughtful about what you post. Fewer and better is encouraged. Consis…

Lets hide all karma.

Lets keep the up/down voting arrows, and let the karma operate in the background in the usual way (percolating good comments/submissions to the top, and letting bad comments fall through). But lets just not show karma. Anywhere. Thus keep the quality of submissions/comments the same, and keep the eyeballs focused on what really matters: good articles and good comments.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#240

Post by JesseAldridge »

steveklabnik wrote: post #225
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: I actually built this, but never put it up on a server.

Cool. Might as well put it up somewhere, right? Of course, you'd face the big chicken and egg problem of getting users.
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