Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

Or as the saying goes "Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."

This site is not in a state of nature. There are all kinds of things I do to keep meanness at bay, and the situation would be a lot worse if I didn't. Preventing the site from declining into a swamp of meanness and stupidity (I believe the two are closely related) is something I think about constantly.

Unfortunately this is often the case, however it should still be possible to make some sort of judgment based on rationality, patience, and communication skills of the people involved in a debate. If one side is constantly irrational and/or impatient then they are often also described as mean-spirited. This is why comments/complaints like the op's can be valid and important; though (ir)rationality/(im)patient/lacking communication skills are my preferred terminology over "mean-spirted" and other similar descriptions.

I usually upvote the comments I disagree with because a healthy debate always helps me fill gaps in my knowledge. But when passions and emotions rule, "healthy debate" is simply impossible. Some people seem to be too stuck up with their beliefs.

Come On guys, many times it is good to be _wrong_.

You can never prove anything unless you have the logs so there's not much point worrying, just play with and enjoy the furore. The best defence, if there is any, is to have a lot of karma and only engage with these folks if you can bear to lose some of it.

[Edit: I think one way to mitigate this might be to make a user's votes viewable.]

I often hear comments along these lines, I fear that people who write and read them then think that there is nothing to be done. That there is not point in trying, that there is no cultural or satisfactory technical solution possible.

If nothing else it is better try/do something then do nothing at all.

1. Avoid meta threads.

2. Downvote off-topic meta-discussion in other threads.

3. Do not add to the meta-discussion; just downvote and move on.

In this way, you can express your distaste for such discussion and avoid most of it with very minimal effort.

Otherwise... aggressively ban people that don't contribute well enough. It is literally the only non-fragmentary way to fix the problem, because it's not a technical issue. People are just terrible. (I'm of the opinion that fragmenting is simply a less aggressive version of banning: leave the trolls to their shit-heaps, forge new ground.)

I'd say you should be banning at a rate over half of the new users you see. And if you look at my posting history, you'll probably see that I'm not exactly grade A material, so I'd expect to get chopped off eventually, probably sooner than later.

Then perhaps a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral would rank lower than a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral. The idea being that, all things being equal for two comments, the one with more indifferent voters is considered less valuable, and is thus ranked lower. Maybe a neutral vote simply works by increasing n when judging the size-weighted score that HN uses to calculate rankings now.

I'm sure there are flaws in this line of reasoning..perhaps someone would be so kind as to point them out?

My suggestion, similar to that experiment in the past, and similar to twitter, add a "verified user" badge in the users profile. However, to become verified requires a simple step: add a link to your facebook, linkedin or xing profile. Any already verified user can then verify you.

Non-verified users then have a very minor voting hit, for example a comment karma cap at 50 or so.

This will encourage people to associate their real life accounts with their hacker news accounts, and will result in conversation that more accurately reflects what one would say in real life.

The fundamental dynamics of the site would not change, since the advantage to being verified are not that major.

I guess the success of that strategy would depend heavily on whether a user's karma is a good indicator of the likelihood that they will make a mean-spirited comment in the future. It would also depend on whether the low-karma disincentive is actually undesirable to a potentially mean-spirited poster.

What I mean by "rah rah" things includes political articles that make people think "right on!" Paul B's article on Proposition 19 falls into that category for me: I strongly agree with him.

But when I step back and look, I think that I don't want to read everyone's "rah rah" articles because they tend towards flame wars, and, if opposing views are trampled to the point where those people go elsewhere, group think. I also think that, since they are topics that anyone can have an opinion on, that they are much more likely to draw people only marginally interested in the core topics of "hacker news". Those people in turn will submit more articles about politics. At a certain point a few days ago, between Prop 19, John Carmack's libertarianish views, and something else I don't recall, the top three spots on HN were occupied about articles that were essentially political in nature.

I would much prefer that articles like that one, much as I agree with it, and think Paul B is an awesome guy and a great contributor here, were ruthless pruned from this site.

I would suggest having a "tone" button that downvotes for tone. The level of fading applied to a comment will be bases on whichever of the two scores is the lowest, tone or voting - so a post with 10 upvotes but -4 tone will be invisible. To avoid abuse of the "tone" feature, it should be possible to recover the user names of those that flag a post for tone.

Ex [of what to prevent]. someone submits the latest tech-crunch article first and gets upvotes from everyone else trying to submit it. They can then downvote in comments without first being subjected to a socialization period of earning upvotes from thoughtful comments.

EDIT The previous experiment and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 (4 Feb 2009)

  Does this comment add value/insight/healthy debate to this topic?

When people reply to a -4 comment it makes it harder to ignore that comment. It effectively pushes it up on the page. So disable replying to -4 comments. It's probably also necessary to hide any existing replies.

Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852305

Edit: I also think that the effect of the first downvote on a new comment is (or was) to powerful. Especially when the leading comments have many replies.

Put troll threads/comments at the bottom of the page, or hide them. Or use spam ratings to amplify users' votes who up vote non spam comments.

Short of that, add the ability to minimize entire threads.

The goal could be something like Google's Beer Goggles, but for comments: "it looks like you're writing a flame, are you sure you want to do that?"

Another thought: there's a big difference between a comment at -1 with 10 upvotes and 12 downvotes vs. one that has occasioned 2 downvotes. Might be interesting to see the effect of showing both the number of up & down votes rather than just the sum. The idea is that genuinely trollish comments at -1 will be differentiated from minority points of view.

Don't bother trying to do fancy stuff like connecting votes between communities; if something is really good people from each community will submit it separately. Also, it might be nice to be able to move between communities... but that sounds like something for version 2.

You could have these smaller communities run in parallel with the main site if this seems like too big of a shift.

Possible solution 2: Not sure if this really addresses the issue squarely -- but what if, when ranking stories and/or comments, you factor in the number of votes in the intersection between the current user and the submitter/commenter. Something like:

define votes(username): return ids of last n upvoted items for username

item_score *= (length(intersection(votes(user_x), votes(user_y))) / (n / 2))

Just use the original algorithm if the user hasn't yet cast n votes.

One man's garbage is another man's gold, as they say.

You could do something similar by checking downvotes as well. If two people are polar opposites (one person upvotes stuff the other downvotes), then comments by one could be greyed out or hidden for the other.

If there were simply a box I could check to make my votes public, then maybe somebody could write a Chrome or Firefox extension to pull this data and handle the re-ranking.

Neither of these two ideas would be perfect, but I think they would improve the user experience significantly. If nothing else they would be interesting experiments.

Then, put a heavy fine on it: for example, if a user has a comment eliminated due to flagging, he loses a big amount of karma (20%?) and he cannot comment/submit for one day.

Users should be encouraged to comment LESS, only if they have something useful to say.

That's what I'm doing anyway, because I really don't care about karma and speak only when I have something worth to say, would be cool if anyone was acting like this since we have no shortage of users.

Not of the form "You must do this". But rather of the form "The mission of HN is to supply stimulating, insightful, {insert mission here}... Therefore always be polite, thoughtful, engaging and supporting".

That'll be enough I think. It's currently not immediately clear what the mission is unless you explore and delve deeper.

Points from comments should have way more weight than karma points from submissions. It's easy to get massive karma points if you submit something interesting. On the other hand, you could spend a lot of time writing a comment and you wouldn't get than many points from it.

I suggest a "flame" flag for every comment, which can roll up into a user's rating as a "flamer." The flag would only be available to HNers with a low flame rating themselves and a significant history of comments.

By default, no one would see comments that have high flame ratings. Users that accumulated flame points would get a time out from commenting, leading to a permanent ban if the behavior doesn't stop.

The site is wonderfully minimal at the moment, but using a UI graphic such as a fireball or flame could draw attention to the importance of civility.

Limit the number of times one person can post in the same thread to once (or maybe twice), either from the top node or a sub-node. Example:

PersonA says, "blah blah blah..."

PersonB says, "You're an idiot because blah blah blah..."

PersonA is locked out from replying to PersonB.

This will do 7 things:

1. It will eliminate argument strings between 2 people.

2. It will remove the incentive to flame because your flame can't turn into an argument.

3. It will encourage people to think through what they have to say, anticipate counter-arguments, and address them in their original comment (or with an update in the 2 hour edit window).

4. It will foster a greater sense of community by encouraging people to stick up for each other. (PersonA made a good comment, PersonB trolled, PersonA can't reply, so I will.) PersonB will get the message much better when confronted by the community instead of PersonA. (Of course, if no one sticks up for PersonA, then maybe they really were wrong.)

5. It will encourage 2 people to take their legitimate discussion (of little interest to others) off-line.

6. It will reduce the length and indentation of threads making them easier to read.

7. It will encourage everyone to slow down and think a little. Those who don't will stick out (not in a good way). Trolls will get more satisfaction somewhere else.

(This is already working by accident. I have gotten so busy that I only visit hn in short bursts. Often, when someone challenges me, I don't reply because I have left and returned much later. But others have replied for me. The resulting thread is invariably better than if I had replied myself.)

Downvotes change how you think about reading comments. Instead of "was this helpful?" you're thinking "do i love this or hate this?". It's polarizing, and as the number of users increases, it's easy for a comment to hit -4 in a couple minutes.

People feel bad when they get downvoted (often because they feel the downvotes are unjust), and some of them turn to trolling or flaming as a defense mechanism. This spreads across threads and infects the whole community. Emotions are contagious.

Also, add the ability to undo your upvote.

The mechanism is, counter-intuitively, to allow people to rate their own comments. However, this rating is not to be directly used to affect how the comment is displayed, since that would obviously be easy to game. Instead, it would be used to identify people who can't restrain themselves from engaging in a low quality discussion; ie, replying to a troll or similar.

Obviously we can't expect trolls to rate their own post as trollish, but we can expect at least some people to have the self-knowledge required to admit when they are posting while annoyed or similar.

So, the system assumes that a comment is only as good quality as its parent, or at least, not much better. Obviously, one can make a good contribution in reply to a bad one, but it's not necessarily a problem to discourage this - since the reader of such a contribution has to read the bad contribution to get to the good one.

Internally, each user has their own scale, which their replies - and the replies to their comments - relate to the scales of other users, using the above assumption. A user would then be shown only comments to which they are likely to reply; this means trolls see all the trolls, but quality users see only other quality comments.

There are a couple of potential problems. One is that it would bias people against replying to deeply nested comments; and ultimately, towards making submissions instead of replies. One rather drastic way to deal with this would be to remove the submission mechanism, and only have one conversation tree; the frontpage items would then be the roots of current discussions inferred from the structure of the tree.

The second problem is that while this mechanism would help current users filter out trolls, it would do nothing to help new users find the best discussions. There is a conflict between preventing the system being gamed, and allowing new users to find the best discussions; because the former would prefer the ratings to be secret, but the latter would allow information about them to be public. It is not obvious that there is a workable trade-off.

It cuts down trolls who snipe in lots of different threads at once.

It cuts down on me too commenters, or the know it all contigent who seemly does nothing else but post on HN, again hitting lots of threads at once.

It encourages people to think abiut what they're writing, instead sending out one sentence snark, or writing a long missive they feel they can "clarify" later in a pointless semantic debate.

This isnt a complete solution... I have no idea how to correct for mean spiritedness, for example. But some kind of limit that tells people that they should stop venting/pontificating and take a walk might help.

It occurs to me that the main failure of karma-type systems in general is valuing quantity over quality. This is perfectly rational for a commercial site that seeks to maximise engagement and page views, but it seems to actively harm both comment quality and the community dynamic.

It seems that the prime concern we have for HN is maintaining a high S/N ratio; Why should the karma system not make that desire more explicit? I may be completely wrong here, but I think most of us would like to see a community where people think carefully before they post. If we want to discourage flaming and poor-quality comments, I think we need to think harder about behavioural prods to discourage them.

I propose removing the display of a users' total karma on their user page and replacing it with their average karma. I would like to see voting privileges made contingent on average karma and would be interested to hear possibilities for punishing users with a high proportion of low- or negative-karma comments.

It is of course dangerous to use heavy-handed technical changes because of the myriad possible unintended consequences, but we all know that internet communities almost inevitably fail. As a community, we should be considering our options now while things are generally OK, perhaps even designing a 'nuclear option' for the possibility that HN experiences some sort of Eternal September scenario.

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 suspect HN already does this)

Anonymous posting: I like the way MetaFilter handles anonymous posting instead of people making throwaway accounts. The downside of this is that 1) Posters have to really trust the site admins; 2) This becomes more work for the admins

Disallow noob posting articles: What % of the [DEAD] articles were posted by users with a very low karma? What % hit the front page?

(Yes, those last two are not directly related to the OP's comment but I feel they're ideas worth throwing out there)

This would allow two things. First, users can downvote for specific reasons - mean spirited/dumb/insulting/off-topic. If a comment is technically correct, but unnecessarily mean, then I can its disposition.

Secondly, it would provide feedback to the commenter. If my 'me too!' comments are being downvoted, it'd be great to have some reason why.

edit: Jon Stewart is generally quite mean spirited, in that he goes out of his way to get people fired and treats people he disagrees with like little kids, but if he were an HN contributor would he really make the community worse?

Of course, the commenter should see it immediately and should be able to correct it (or even delete it) in the meantime. But everyone else should see it only after 10 minutes.

This will slow down A-B-A-B-... types of conversation which are usually only productive when being written thoughtfully and thus slowly anyway.

Mean-spirited comments can quite possibly be the response to the rampant favoritism that exists on HN and that can be as dangerous to maintaining discussions balanced and interesting.

"Are you sure you want to downvote this comment? Doing so will push its karma into negative figures. At HN we don't encourage this type of downvoting except in response to abusive content. "

In my experience some people just don't have a clue how to behave online and it's not even expected of them in most places. HN is different.

One way to invest in handles would be to add more social features like points you can give to awesome comments (you can only give 1 point a day or something), etc. Then again, all these social mechanics are complex and easily gamed.

Another way would be simply to promote handles more: make an easily searched HN users list etc.

If you can identify troll-feeders, you might be able to stop them from feeding the trolls (just a text reminder above a comment field might be enough), hence create less incentive for trolls.

Not an easy problem to solve though, I've tried myself and didn't succeed. May try again.

Alternately, what are voting ratios looking like? Are there some people downvoting more than up? If so, a notice above the comment field letting them know could help.

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. Consistently good is encouraged. Lousy comments (like one-on-one arguments and "Me too!") are discouraged even if nobody votes them down.

This bridges the gap between two existing forms of feedback: total karma (which nobody really cares about, even though it's on every page) and the voting on individual comments (which is the closest thing we have to an indicator of comment quality), and gives the user continuous feedback on how much value they are adding to the site. It makes it much easier to know if your commenting is getting better or getting worse. That is, it is much easier to tell that my average is up or down from the last time I looked than it is to detect the fluctuation in the rate at which my karma accumulates.

Even if lousy comments get voted up--as happens when, for instance, someone first-posts an opinionated quip on a controversial submission and people swarm to vote in agreement--the impact on the user's average karma (which better reflects their value to the community) is much lower than the immediate spike in their total karma (the feedback they currently see). You don't have to stop people from writing such comments--just give them a smaller cookie when they do.

Obviously you can't make anybody alter their behavior over a number, but I think most here would if given a number that they could trust as representative of the shared goal of keeping this place from sucking.

tl;dr average karma is better feedback than total karma

You can try to raise awareness and ask people to not be evil on your site, but that's almost as effective as asking the tide not to come in. There are many bitter people in the world and they outnumber the well adjusted people who would rather spend their time building up a project instead of tearing down someone else's. These trolls crave attention - the negative attention they get by aggravating people on-line - so it's really not affective to point out the problem and ask them to stop or to ask the community to gang up on them; that's what they want.

We need a solution that frustrates these people. I've seen some sites where the comments a troll posts look like they are live on the site to the troll but they are hidden from everyone else. I think this is a very effective technique because it denies the troll the attention he is seeking and it saves the rest of the site from his attacks.

But, perhaps the best response is to remember Margaret Thatcher's advice about people trying to make you angry (i.e. no one can make you angry without your permission). If you see something that's not in the spirit of hacker news, just ignore it. Don't respond; don't show it to other people; just let it die a bitter and lonely death.

1) a metric based on account age, submission karma, and comment karma. less weight on submission karma, since that is easier to manipulate. make this metric the barrier of entry for features instead of basing it purely on karma. it makes manipulation harder, and it encourages actual community participation/development.

2) add another meta-moderation tool similar to the "flag" option. i mostly use flagging for spam or offensive posts. i'd like to see something else (unlocked by #1) that allows you to mark something that is off topic, non-contributing, or otherwise adding to "the decline". accounts accumulate these like points, and the more points an account has, the more features get revoked from it as punishment (which leads up to a temp ban). points decay with time, and have a hard cap on how many can be obtained in a single day or by a single comment, but a long history of points leads to more points being obtained per flag.

edit: just to add some thoughts -- the only way to prevent people from being anonymous internet idiots and adding noise to the signal is either with a carrot or a stick. there's not much we can offer as a carrot that other sites can't, or that they can't get by non-participation (just reading the site). that is, unless you want to implement a private karma-barrier section of the site (unless you already have an i'm not in it... :( but then i wouldn't know about that carrot and wouldn't change my actions to reflect wanting to obtain that reward).

the only real alternative is the stick, hence the revoking of features.

Additionally, I've been thinking for a while that it would be cool if threads were ranked a little differently, and not just on the points/time of the parent. Sometimes there are really, really great comments that are replies to low-ranked ones, and the resulting thread gets kicked to the bottom of the page. Something like Avg points/time or just accounting for the average points of next-level comments when determining rank of a reply at each level.

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

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.

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.

    (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))

=====

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.

This will balance out the uneven distribution of karma that is talked about above, as new comments will be seen and given a chance to voted on even well into a conversation.

Having done this, comments that stop being relevant to the conversation should drop to the bottom and naturally attract less attention. Ideally, this will leave trolling posts ignored. (This can be helped further by having user selected timeout apply. If comment / responses are mapped as a tree, hide all branches that have no new activity for the past x hours, allowing users to change x as they choose. Give visual feedback to a comments age by fading old comments)

This solves the 'income' end of the system, as karma should now be distributed a little more evenly over time.

Seeing the points doesn't add value and it distorts the opinions and upvotes (people tend to like more what other people recommend).

I stopped bothering after a few incidents where content-free snarky bullshit written in response to my genuine comments was upvoted, and pg was unwilling to remove any of it.

Then, I got banned for some very genuine, but negative, opinions. I don't expect people to agree with them, but banning me for them again seemed asinine.

I didn't bother changing my proxy, so this will probably auto-dead, but that's true. pg's lack of action was an endorsement of shitty, snarky, content-free behavior. Unsurprisingly, shitty, snarky, content-free behavior has grown since then.

Want to fix HN? Fire pg.