Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?

#61

Post by SapphireSun » Mon, Jan 23, 2012, 4:59 AM UTC

moe wrote: post #51

SapphireSun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been here for several years and one of the things that initially drew me here was the way people were respectful, on topic, and focused on the issues in a dispassionate way. If you want passion, there's plenty of it on the internet. The people with self control and an analytical bent are hard to come by and are thusly valued. Calling pg an ass is crossing the line for this community. Not because he's privileged,…

Everything you say is correct, but there's a middle-ground between "youtube comments" and "lifeless group-think". There's still interesting discussion on HN for me (otherwise I wouldn't be here), but I'm finding it's drifting towards the latter. Now recently with a monthly meta-discussion bemoaning its own demise. Name-calling is obviously not the way to go. But the immortal words of Dr. Strangelove aren't either: "G…

This is very true, but I feel that the group think isn't so much mediated by style as it is by what people are actually saying; this is a harder problem to solve. :-(

Respectful discussion prevents people from flying off the handle and getting distracted from the main topic. Me-too'ers and yes-men are too agreeable, but still on topic. I wonder if it's possible to analyze a paragraph for agreeableness and automatically reduce its visibility if it's too extreme on either end. That might force people to post a more balanced view (assuming that the people gaming the system are down-voted by human moderators).

This actually seems like something a machine could reasonably do. Agreeableness is vague enough that it wouldn't need domain knowledge of the conversation, and there are probably enough key words and phrases to train it.

I wonder what effect that would have?

Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?

#62

Post by tokenadult » Mon, Jan 23, 2012, 5:16 AM UTC

pg wrote: post #17

tokenadult wrote: post #5

Is something happening to the quality of this community lately? I opened up my username account here 1161 days ago, after lurking once in a while for at least several weeks beforehand. As far as I know, NO ONE has read every Hacker News comment exhaustively for years, although some members of the curating team and some of the high-karma participants may come pretty close to reading most of the most active threads. My…

We read all comments that get sufficiently negative scores. So I have a decent handle on how bad that kind of bad comment is. What worries me more is bad (= mean and/or stupid) comments that actually get upvoted.

What worries me more is bad (= mean and/or stupid) comments that actually get upvoted.

Thanks for explaining what data points you and the curation team observe closely, and what trends you have noticed. You mentioned above about the goal of increasing comment quality that "There's a lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet undiscovered. This is somewhat uncharted territory." I'll renew a suggestion here that I think would be helpful.

I've been a moderator one place or another online since 1993, and I've seen a lot of online discussion forums attempt to acculturate newbies to civil, thoughtful discussion. One of the most helpful practices that I have observed over the years is making sure that people who use factual assertions to back a position in a discussion are accountable for where one would look up the facts to verify them and ensure they are not made up. (A HUGE percentage of all real-world discourse about controversial issues is based on made-up factual premises.) With that in mind, I'm trying to encourage a culture here of asking people for sources when they make a factual assertion, and providing sources in a first comment when there sources on the issue. (I try to stud most of my comments with links to sources to exemplify this.) So any time any of us see a comment that is dumb, an essential thing to do is to ask the person who made the dumb comment what the basis for the comment is. ("Do you have a source for that?" or the more abrupt "[citation needed]" as occasion demands, or "What about [detail of assertion]?" if that is better for raising the quality of the discussion.) Another thing to do is to share the growing online literature about evaluating sources, such as my very favorite link for Hacker News discussions,

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

and links about constructive online participation.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

A lot of stupid comments (and, alas, I have a particular user's example in mind) result from the convenience of reading blogs rather than reading serious scholarly literature. And the paywalls around serious scholarly articles only exacerbate this problem. So I routinely upvote any comment that points to a reliable source, and especially comments that teach other HN participants how to find and access reliable sources.

In general, promoting an information-based culture here will have two effects that will help reduce the problem of dumb comments: (1) it will raise the karma and visibility of the better comments that include good information from reliable sources (or that ask for that as follow-ups to worse comments), and (2) it will be off-putting to people inclined to make it up when they are put to their proof for the things they say.

Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?

#63

Post by AndrewDucker » Mon, Jan 23, 2012, 8:54 AM UTC

People on HN are frequently happy to support rudeness in their own interests. I remember debates here over rudeness in code and in bug reporting (someone was banned from Bugzilla over their language) and a lot of HN people seemed to feel that was fine.

So I don't believe that the levels of civility are going down - but the level of vapid pointless comments is definitely going up. Fortunately I mostly see them being modded into oblivion.

Re: Ask HN: Are the HN forums losing their civility?

#64

Post by polyfractal » Mon, Jan 23, 2012, 6:23 PM UTC

pathdependent wrote: post #37

pg wrote: post #2

The quality of comments has been declining very gradually for years. There's a lot we already do about it, and probably other techniques that are yet undiscovered. This is somewhat uncharted territory. I'm medium hopeful.

A few years ago, posting on HN felt like posting to a small community. Reputation and civility seemed to matter a lot. When people posted something offensive or rude, they were sanctioned to the point that they would often delete the offending comment. (I remember deleting a comment I made on an old account merely because, without tone, it seemed inflammatory; I felt compelled to delete it even though it had no malic…

I participate in several different forums and find that avatars really help me feel more connected to other users and their comments. On the SA forums, I quickly recognize various posters by their avatar.

Different subforums have their respective groups, which you learn once you spend some time inside the subforum. Despite being a huge ecosystem, they have managed to keep many of the subforums feeling small.

On HN...I rarely notice who is posting. A few influential posters stand out but for the most part I do not remember names well. Everyone blends together.