Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#241

Post by dgallagher » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 5:54 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #218

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…

FWIW -- and it appears that pg has just implemented exactly this -- I decided to play a game with my "average" a while back, back when it was a reasonable value. I found that it didn't improve my interaction with the site, it just changed the way that I "played the game". Not literally playing a game, but there was a clear difference in motivations for commenting. For example: thread is more than 6 hours old? Don't c…

Interesting. What about a moving average? One that ranks you based on the last ~30 days of activity?

How about the ability to shut off karma for certain posts? One exception if it's down-voted by more than ~10pts. Then the user gets that subtracted from their score, preventing abuse when posting mean/hateful comments.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#242

Post by steveklabnik » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 5:55 PM UTC

JesseAldridge wrote: post #240

steveklabnik wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah, I didn't want to have to actually work on it, just trying out an idea. The code itself has since been lost in a backup mishap.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#243

Post by thaumaturgy » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 5:56 PM UTC

resdirector wrote: post #239

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…

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 .

I think this is the best approach, too, and is one of the tactics I'd decided to use when building a forum one day.

If we assume that any displayed score is going to trigger some amount of gaming motivation in most people, then displaying scores of any kind contributes to a rise in game behavior versus social behavior.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#244

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 5:57 PM UTC

Sukotto wrote: post #167

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.

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 would be highly surprised if the majority of your suggestions are not already in HN, in some way except for the anonymous postings. As for the trust factor, that applies to MF just the same, unless you go out of your way to hide your traces you are always going to be identifiable to the site admins. Fortunately.

Disallowing noob posting articles would be a good thing, a very low karma cap on posting articles would help (5 or 10 or so).

That would be just enough to increase the cost of spam to the point where it would no longer be worth it.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#245

Post by mnemonicsloth » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 5:57 PM UTC

resdirector wrote: post #239

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…

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 .

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844979

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#246

Post by pg » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 6:00 PM UTC

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…

There is now, on the profile page.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#247

Post by miles » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 6:04 PM UTC

maxklein wrote: post #47

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 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…

"to become verified requires a simple step: add a link to your facebook, linkedin or xing profile ... Non-verified users then have a very minor voting hit"

Why use some third-party proprietary system? It's almost as easy to make a fake Facebook account as an HN account. As far as "verifying" users goes, just look at their About page and previous comments.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#248

Post by JesseAldridge » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 6:15 PM UTC

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.

You could probably reasonably approximate this without too much effort.

The number of votes an article has and the number of comments are both going to be strongly correlated with the number of views per comment. So would the mean and range of the comment scores. You could also take the time since the comment was posted into account.

You could have the visible "raw score" for each comment and an invisible "quality adjusted score" that is used to give each user a quality rating.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#249

Post by bokonist » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 6:31 PM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #236

bokonist wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could hook some javascript to the page's onscroll event. The javascript would send ajax calls back to the server that record which comments have actually been seen (although there is no way to judge if the comment was actually read). It would be a bunch of work though, because the raw log would be enormous and so you'd have to create a special batch processing job to get the view counts split out for each separate comment.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#250

Post by po » Sun, Oct 31, 2010, 6:43 PM UTC

JeremyChase wrote: post #203

po wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…but if we remove downvotes, they will just stay at 1 instead of getting downvoted. Later they will still be able to shoot up. They will only get flagged if they are actively in the wrong spirit of the community. (spam, abuse, etc..) The concept of "down" is conflated in people's minds in a way "up" isn't. It is used by people to mean either "I disagree" or "totally inappropriate". The first is not supposed to affect…

Ah, ok, that makes a lot more sense. I was imagining removing comments that had been downvoted; not removing the link to downvote. I generally agree with that, but it reminds me of another problem. The Karma number is now an ever-growing and meaningless figure. I think it should be harder to improve your karma as you get higher, and it should be easier to lose it. That it actually has a meaning.

ah.. Progressive taxation. You're a commie liberal aren't you. ;-) (don't worry, I am too)

Inflation may be a problem some day, but for now I think it's under control. The leader board is still at a human understandable scale: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders