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Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

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Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#251

Post by po »

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…

Looking at the leaderboard, the relationship between high ranking hn members and average comment quality seems fairly weak to me:

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

This is probably due to the fact that some people spend a lot of time commenting on threads that don't get much viewership. I doubt there's much harm in showing the average as a reminder to try to keep the quality high, but I think there are probably better ways to encourage it.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#252

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#253

Post by justlearning »

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.

is it too late for me to chip?

if a user is downvoted>n times, delete the comment with added penalty factor. this would keep the content clean forever.

Despite the downvoted comment being hidden, it almost stands out the elitist comment(and nowadays the chain of explanations growing usually offtopic)

Could we restrict users to one user per ip? I sometimes suspect people using multiple ids to upvote their comments/posts. There are some posts way out of HN league that get upvotes within minutes from the new page (even the spammer ones).

Would it be hard to have new users moderated? One way is for new users to write few lines about themselves. Moderator would look for human(no-spam) and genuinity.

Show a warning or part of content from http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html upon submission of a post or comment - until they attain their downvote karma rights.

One liners like 'i like it too' should be deleted. Perhaps there should be a minimum amount of words for a reply or a warning telling the user to verify if he really wants to post.

Link searchyc.com on top of the page beside 'submit' - new users don't know of this awesome search site. While there is a search link at the bottom of the page, I wouldn't be using it more than once that I know it's googlified. SearchYC works! with lots of criteria. imho, this would reduce many of'django vs rails' kind of questions, that have been discussed in the past.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#254

Post by justlearning »

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…

I disagree.I don't use any of the social networking sites. It would be bit crude to assume that the only way for me to be verified is belonging to a social-networking site.

Please, no social networking verified user.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#255

Post by tel »

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 comment arrows with a plus and a flag. Plus increases karma and plays into the comment arrangement on the page. Flag is scored separately and silently as a measure of meanness and/or community culture clash. From two dimensions of data you'll have a better capacity to guess whether someone is a bad participant on HN.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#256

Post by GHFigs »

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".

Comments which few people will notice are also discouraged.

I think this is a feature, generally, but I get what you're saying. With any criteria you present for deciding what is worth posting you run the risk of it being the only criteria. Ideally, we'd all only care about our karma insofar as it helps us avoid making lousy posts, and ignore it entirely otherwise, but idealism doesn't scale.

"How will this influence my average?" is definitely an oversimplified heuristic for deciding what is worth contributing, but it's reasonably accurate and I think it's the best one we've got. (Better than total karma at the very least.)

As I said in the above comment, the voting on comments is the closest thing we have to an indication of their quality. It obviously doesn't always reflect reality, but what that points to is that some comments--the ones that we want around here but that would bring your average down--are undervalued. Those comments should result in positive feedback (via average karma or otherwise), but they don't.

That is to say: The site has a reward mechanism (karma). There is desirable behavior that is not being rewarded or is under-rewarded (e.g. replying to less popular Ask HN posts). Is there some way to reward that desirable behavior?

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#257

Post by ahoyhere »

mkr-hn wrote: post #214
ahoyhere wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're talking about is the primacy of emotional alignment vs intellectual improvement. That is, identifying with the emotional content (like you said - "RIGHT ON!" or "NO WAY!") vs reading content that causes emotions. The former is, of course, the Twinkie of human growth. HN is becoming Twinkie-ville. Reddit is Twinkie-ville already, but it's Twinkie-ville with a sparkling sense of humor, which HN lacks (cultu…

That's something I wish HN could find a middle ground on. I _like_ Reddit. It's fun, and if you don't like the conversation, you can hide it and move on. On HN, I can chat with some of the most influential people in technology, and it's great. But the moment anyone cracks a joke? Downvoted, sometimes in to oblivion. I find it hard to believe such a sharp group of people would be so averse to humor, but the votes seem…

The reason seems to be that HNers feel like they have to project an ultra-logical persona at all times. Even Spock-like. How'd it get started? I wish I knew.

It's not just jokes. I've experimented: I can make the most insightful and practical comment in the whole thread, but if I use "cuz" or "gonna," or "man," or more than a single (maybe two) exclamation points in the whole thing, no upvotes for me! But the more pseudo-intellectual trappings I pile on -- for example, eschewing contractions -- the more votes I get.

Mentioning a logical fallacy, even if it is itself fallacious, always works a treat.

It's pretty silly.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#258

Post by ihodes »

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 want to measure the worth and contribution of a comment; here's how I tried.

    (defn v-rat
        [uv dv] 
        (/ (expt uv 3/2) 
           (+ uv dv))))

    (define nest-weight
        [comment]
        (/ 1 (+ (nest-level comment) 
                (/ 3 (nest-level comment)))))

    weight::
    (+ (/ ak 2)
       (v-rat uv dv)  
       (reduce + (map (fn [c] (* (nest-weight c) 
                                 (v-rat (upvotes c) (downvotes c))))
                       (remove (fn [c] (= user (user c)))
                               comments))
Where ak is the average karma of the user (only on comments, if possible), uv and dv are upvotes and downvotes respectively, and comments is a list of comments in reply to the comment we're weighing.

=====

Abstractly, I'm trying to consider the comment based on both its individual value as well as how much good discussion it generated. I also take into account, plainly, the average past worth of their comments.

This could certainly use some tweaking, but I like the values I've plugged in so far, and it promotes discussion as well as thoughtful contribution, and gives a nod towards users who have high quality comments in the past.

I'd be interested in tweaking it some more if this seems at all a step in the right direction. I think I could use a better heuristic for replies, as well as a more sophisticated v-rat. I also wonder if it would be possible to see which users downvote and upvote, and give those votes more power (technically possible, that is), and also take into account the users who are replying, and to what effect. This would require a lot more testing, and maybe more CPU cycles than PG would like.

I'm not sure taking time into account is a great idea past the first ~10 minutes of submission. For those first ~10 minutes, perhaps weigh the comment solely using the avg karma of the user + some constant. After those first x minutes, rank by the algorithm.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#259

Post by awakeasleep »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #224
maxklein wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you get it? Anonymous and non-anonymous comments have equal ranking. The point of my system is just to encourage most people to be non-anonymous. This means that the vast majority of comments will stay civil, and when most comments are civil, the tone will tend to stay that way. If you need to make commentary on drug policy or your salary, then simply make an anonymous account and say all you want to say. There…

> Don't you get it? That was a fine example of what people have been complaining about recently. (And you're not even anonymous! :-)

Ah, to be fair neither one of us took the time to fully explain our understanding of each other's points, and I sort of attacked with the disagreement phrasing when I could have only asked him what he thought of my issues.

Re: Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

#260

Post by forensic »

resdirector wrote: post #227
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…

We had a saying in physics: "there are no stupid questions, (only stupid people)". We encouraged people to ask stupid questions, because (a) quite often that's the only way you learn, (b) it encourages shy people to speak up, and, (c) sometimes a stupid question isn't stupid at all, and leads to a deeper insight. I'm a little disappointed that HN isn't like this. Most of the time I have a "stupid question", but I don…

But "in physics" sounds like a university class where people are paying money to learn.

Is Hacker News about teaching people things? Or does it have some other goal?

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