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To my fellow Hacker News contributors

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#31

Post by brudgers »

hugh3 wrote: post #26
ForrestN wrote: post #17

I definitely share this experience, for instance in many of the recent "Groupon is a scam" threads, or anything having to do with Android. It becomes a disincentive to participate in conversations about certain topics. I think one thing that might help, and that often spurs relatively useless chains of comments, is to clarify exactly when a post should be downvoted. I think some people use downvoting to express disag…

I definitely share this experience, for instance in many of the recent "Groupon is a scam" threads, or anything having to do with Android. It becomes a disincentive to participate in conversations about certain topics. I find that the worst area of discussion is intellectual property law.

>I find that the worst area of discussion is intellectual property law.

IP discussions are a veritable oasis of circumspection compared to "Macbook Pro gets new battery" threads.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#32

Post by tokenadult »

My suggestion is to upvote all that you find here that is thoughtful and helpful. Upvote a comment (or story) that makes you think. Upvote a comment (or story) that "gratifies [your] intellectual curiosity." Upvote comments that ask other commenters please to provide information backing up their opinions. Upvote other comments that provide other thoughtful guidance to the discussion or new information beyond what is already posted in the submitted article or in other comments. Upvote to mark and thank the good. Since no one has the time to read the site exhaustively, not even any one of the curators, mostly ignore the bad and crowd it out with the good.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#33

Post by St-Clock »

arkitaip wrote: post #18
arkitaip wrote: post #4

Comment down/up votes have to go. People should be adult enough to be able read a post without someone telling them what's readworthy or not. Life is not a popularity contest where you tally how many points you've gotten for playing the game well. Members should, however, be able to flag comments that violate the guidelines so that the mods can deal with spam and other transgressions.

Just to prove my point, I'm getting downvoted for the comment above :) Some people simply cannot handle the downvote.

Yes. Even if I partly disagree with you, I upvoted you. Actually, I find myself upvoting comments that are in a negative territory and that present a valid point more often than good comments that are in a positive territory!

I believe we need upvotes for the reasons hugh3 mentioned. Regarding downvotes, there should be a cost, like with StackOverflow where each downvote costs you one reputation point.

Another orthogonal dimension to voting could be agree/disagree. I saw this on a national news forum and it's quite useful (e.g., 5 people agreed, 100 people disagreed).

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#34

Post by hugh3 »

brudgers wrote: post #28
arkitaip wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to prove my point, I'm getting downvoted for the comment above :) Some people simply cannot handle the downvote.

What the downvotes probably indicate is that your argument is not well supported with detailed rationales and relevant examples. In other words, downvotes are a sign that your post could benefit from additional editing in the near term. Taking downvotes as either a failure to communicate your ideas, or as the price for saying what you feel you must is the healthiest approach. BTW, I didn't vote on it.

This isn't really the sort of thing that can be supported with relevant examples. It's just an idea. And I think it's an idea worth discussing -- what might happen to the discussion if moderation were removed completely?

But I happen to disagree (for reasons stated elsewhere) and suspect that the folks who did downvote this also disagreed. And that's the other problem with invisible comment scores -- I think it's legit to downvote something merely for disagreeing if it has +30 karma, but not if it has just +1. But you can never tell.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#35

Post by jdp23 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #6
mindcrime wrote: post #2

Yeah, it's hard to say what - if anything - to do about this. Like you say, if you post a reply to a comment that you downvoted, you are - arguably - just adding more noise. But, then again, people always complain about "ninja downvoting" and say "if you're going to downvote me, at least tell me why." But the last time I left a reply to something I downvoted, my reply in turn got downvoted pretty quickly (although it…

> Like you say, if you post a reply to a comment that you downvoted, you are - arguably - just adding more noise. // Personally I think HN has degraded vastly since we lost scores. I see far more downvotes for disagreement and apparently less interest in supporting good argument. It's really hard now to read HN and get much from it unless the topic is one you want to read every single comment on. I hope I'm not dragg…

I strongly agree as well.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#36

Post by hugh3 »

quanticle wrote: post #30

Doesn't this post simply contribute to the problem, though? I mean, if Raganwald wants the community to be more focused on content, rather than pointless meta-discussion, shouldn't he or she post content ? I mean, all this post serves to do is give even more attention to the hipsters and trolls. My recommendation? If you see a comment that's clearly off-topic, vote it down if you're able or ignore it if you're not. E…

Only works for top-level threads though. A bad response to a highly-rated OP will continue to hang out near the top of the page.

It's a genuine problem, what do you do with bad comments? The average bad commenter is a fifteen-year-old boy with strongly held yet poorly developed opinions. If you downvote them without replying, then you wind up with an angry commenter who thinks their opinions are being shut down by the community, and they'll probably feel compelled to keep posting them LOUDER and MORE EXTREME. But if you reply to them and explain why their comments are bad, you start a rather boring thread.

Neither option seems particularly good.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#37

Post by hugh3 »

St-Clock wrote: post #33
arkitaip wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to prove my point, I'm getting downvoted for the comment above :) Some people simply cannot handle the downvote.

Yes. Even if I partly disagree with you, I upvoted you. Actually, I find myself upvoting comments that are in a negative territory and that present a valid point more often than good comments that are in a positive territory! I believe we need upvotes for the reasons hugh3 mentioned. Regarding downvotes, there should be a cost, like with StackOverflow where each downvote costs you one reputation point. Another orthog…

I like this idea. Four buttons: "good comment", "bad comment", "I agree" and "I disagree".

Agreement vs disagreement would be displayed but would not determine comment position or commenter karma. Comment quality would determine comment position and give the commenter karma, but it would not be displayed.

I don't know if it's right for HN, but I'd like to see a site which did implement this kind of two-dimensional voting.

PS. Good comment, I agree!

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#38

Post by juliano_q »

Unfortunately the Apple x non-Apple discussion is spreading all over the internet. I avoid almost all discussion about Android or Apple topics because of it. Engadget became an unbearable flame-wars hell and I really, really hope that HN don't follow this path. As someone who like both sides, owning android phones and mac computers, I really don't understand why some people are so fiercily defenders of one of this sides instead of trying to find the best from both.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#39

Post by Vivtek »

espeed wrote: post #7
kiwidrew wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metafilter seems to have a fair amount of success with this strategy ("take it to meta"), but often it requires the moderators to intervene and remove a few comments. I suspect that having active moderators and a clear procedure for handling "off-topic" posts is key.

Do it algorithmically like a flag -- if enough people click "move to meta" it gets moved automatically.

Yeah, I think that would work here. Might not on MeFi.

Re: To my fellow Hacker News contributors

#40

Post by DanielBMarkham »

I've read so many meta articles (including ones I've written) that I'm beginning to get a bit lost. Didn't raganwald already write something like this? Maybe a couple of times?

I float in and out of the community, sometimes being gone for a week and sometimes checking everyday. For many years. As we all know, meta commentary is not new here.

Yes, the magic sauce has worn off. People who spend weeks working on things are treated with easy criticism -- there's a reason PG asked for us to "be nice" to the new bunch of YC guys. People who post fluffy group-think are rewarded. What this leads to is more and more fluff, less and less real work that we can help with by commenting. Since we are more likely to be emotionally moved by things that are higher on the list, we feel as if we must comment [insert self-serving reason here]. This leads to comment-bloat, especially as traffic numbers soar.

I wish I had some secret formula to make it all better, but the way the site is structured, emotional response rules, not quality. When you vote up, you are saying "hell yeah!" not "my logical brain has deduced this to be of higher quality than average" -- at least in the aggregate. So the site is performing exactly as it should, sadly.

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