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 eventually go voted back up to a neutral score of 1), which left me questioning the wisdom of doing that. And the sad thing is, the comment in question was one of those that centered around one of those possible "group think" scenarios... so I don't know if I just got downvoted by members of the "other camp" or by (more or less) neutral observers who don't support leaving replies explaining why you find a comment troublesome.
Uuugggh.... there's no way to win. Maybe we need /. style moderation so you can tag a comment as "off topic" or whatever when you downvote...
As to the bigger question of eliminating the "tribalism," hhhmmm... I wish I had an answer, but sadly I can't say I do. Maybe your post will at least raise awareness of the issue and will help a bit?
>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 dragging things away from the OP main point but I feel this is not unrelated to it.
I agree, invisible comment scores add noise, because if I read something I agree strongly with I feel compelled to show my approval. In the old days clicking the up-arrow would show a suitable quantum of approval, but nowadays I sometimes feel compelled to add a comment which just says "I agree" and perhaps adds some minor extra point.
While typing this comment it occurred to me that this comment falls into that very category. Whoops.
Going even further and showing the actual voters, in addition to the score (like kuro5hin does) can also sometimes remove the need to post. I especially miss it here at the end of an exchange, where I want to say something like "good point" or "well I still disagree but your argument is a good one". On k5, I'd just vote "3" on that comment, which they would then be able to see I upvoted. Here it feels like I need to post an acknowledgement, or else it feels like I've rudely just ignored a good criticism or went off in a huff, because there's no silent way to signal that I'm breaking off the conversation amicably.
I also find it useful as a way of recognizing names. If a comment of mine gets 10 upvotes here, I know that some amphormous subset of readers liked my comment, but I don't build any recognition of who.
I'm not sure I care about the voters per se but perhaps about the filtering ability that one gets by taking extra note of recognised voters. I think that I'd prefer to be able to, say, give a bonus to votes by people who I've also upvoted ... the more I think about it the more I'm thinking how good slashdot's voting system is, OK I wouldn't adopt it wholesale but it's vastly superior to what we have here now I think.
Is there any reason I can't have something vote numbers and vote inflation whilst others have only flagging with no vote scores?
The problem is that you're having a difference of opinion with someone, who uses the downvote to disagree with you in the strongest possible way. As long as HN allows up/down votes this problem will exist. They are two fundamentally flawed tools that result in quarrels and mistrust.
One approach would be to separate content-based comments from meta comments, and create a culture where if you post a meta comment in the mainline, you're likely to get down voted.
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.
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.
Not everyone looks at it as a popularity contest though. A lot of people look at it as "holy shit, there are a hundred comments in this thread, I don't have time to read them all, and I'm glad I can see what the collective opinion is about which ones are worth reading first". The "popularity contest" aspect of it is a problem, but the "popularity" aspect of it isn't.
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.
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.
If it can't be supported with relevant examples or detailed rationales, then what is it contributing? And if it is not contributing, then isn't downvoting appropriate?
And a comment score debate is pulsu equus mortuus.
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).
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.
I agree with the sentiment but here's the thing...
The type of person to post an insult or an ad hominem is probably not the type of person who would read this post much less care what it has to say. Because for someone to read this they'd have to care about the impact they have on the community and there's no way an insult or ad hominem can have a positive impact on the community. They are, by definition, expressions of pure negativity so their intent is unquestionably negative.
(and don't even get me started on the people who upvote such posts)
So you can't just say "lets all get together and fix this" because the people who would answer your call aren't the people causing the problem. Then the question becomes "how do you deal with the people causing the problem".
The only answer I can see is banning. Because said group is made out of two types of people: Those who don't care about the community and those who care about the community but care about expressing their own anger more. So the first group just won't care and the second group can't help themselves.
But then the question is "Do you really want Hacker News to be a place where people get banned on a regular basis?". First I don't think pg even has the time for that and second I think most would find that off putting.
So (and pardon me for the long comment here) we end up where we started. Trying to be civil and interact with the civil members of the community while trying to ignore those who don't care about civility.
I wonder what this would look like in a two-column view, with one column for discussion, and a smaller margin to the side for metadiscussion. Maybe some kind of mechanism to boot a single comment to one side or the other, and an option as a reader to ignore metacommentary.
As communities grow they need to fragment. Without fragmenting, how a story does becomes sensitive to initial conditions and subject to information cascade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade). We still don't know how to manage this gracefully.
I mean that I am making myself feel worse for reading HN...
<lightHeartedAttemptAtEmpathyAndEncouragement>
That's a signal that your focus has shifted a little too much from your own work to HN. Take a day off and invest that energy back where it belongs. We'll be here when you get back. Promise.
Rather than interpreting his essay as a sign of HN becoming too important in his life, I think it's more accurate to say that he values HN and feels that a blog post is a good way to contribute useful ideas back to the community.
Correct, but sometimes it is best to just ignore what is happening and accept that these are just opinions. Once you let it go once or twice, it becomes much easier to just ignore threads that add no value.
Yes, but it's also reasonable to say that HN is a distraction, and the more time you spend on it, the more you tune in to the various tribes and trends and stuff -- whether they actually exist, or not.
(Every attempt so far to objectively measure any decline in discourse on HN has failed, so I try to remain consciously skeptical of any claims to that effect.)
I do this as a conscious self-correction now. Any time I find myself getting wound up by something on HN -- which, fortunately, isn't very often any more -- I try to leave it for a few days, or more. When I come back, it's magically a better place.
Not that I want raganwald to go away for a while. His name is one that I appreciate seeing in comment threads. :-)
>That's a signal that your focus has shifted a little too much from your own work to HN.
Amusing that to be the only reason is significantly oversimplifying.
The HN community is at best corrosive to the reader that is looking for technology and some buisness discussion. I made the mistake of assuming thats what I'd find here; once I got rid of silly notion, I found I no longer had a ill feeling when I went back to work after my lunch break.
More important than the civil discourse is that HN discussions are generally intelligent due to the high number of really fucking smart people who participate. That along with the karma system keeps much of the trolling in check.
We are all going to nod our heads to this post, but as 'raganwald knows, nothing is going to change as a result. The inoculations against tribalism and tribal drama are cultural. Whatever vaccine HN had against this, it's worn off.
My take is, flag these topics off the site. Cut them off like a gangrenous limb. We want to keep the leg, but even more, we want our heart to keep beating.
But then, a vocal subset of HN users is offended by the idea that story upvotes don't mean it's OK to debate libertarianism vs. liberalism here, so don't misread this comment as prescriptive. We're not going to fix this problem. I'm also fine with that.
Ed's right too, of course. Are you here to hear what the average HN'er thinks about Steve Jobs? No, you're not. I read HN in two ways, both of which still work for me:
* I scan for stories I have something to contribute to, and
* I read a shortlist of users whose presence on a thread have been reliable signifiers of quality. (The list is on my profile.)
Try doing that. You'll miss a lot of HN; a good thing!
It's funny that you write this b/c I hadn't read any of those threads myself. I have a filter where I don't often read the comments on stories from major media that make it to HN. There's rarely anything much to discuss and you're absolutely right that I do not care what anyone on HN thinks of Steve Jobs.
As a side note, I'm happy about the removal of point visibility on comments... but I wonder if perhaps increased tribalism might be a result of users in search of social meaning... which used to be easier to obtain via points.. and over time has been replaced by an emergent tribal system, wars, etc.
My first impression of the lack of displayed scores was that it was triggering slightly more short, redundant comments of agreement or disagreement, as people scratched an itch for public display of assent/dissent.
I suspect you're right that a change in tone and increase in the use of tribal-loyalty-signifiers might also be a side-effect of invisible scores. An upvote or downvote was only ever a coarse grunt or shake of the head, but in many social situations, there's a feeling one must send such signals to be 'present'.
Often when one outlet for a behavior is closed, the behavior flows elsewhere. Perhaps no visible point-effect means more signalling via tone and word choice: publicly upvoting via fanboyish tone, and publicly downvoting via snark.
I think you're spot-on. This has to be a part of it. Whatever its issues, the visible point system was a way for readers to interact with the site in a way that produced a response for all to see. Whether this encouraged herd behavior or changed the shape of discussions in an unfavorable way is another issue.
Comment-dimming notwithstanding, that feedback has been removed. There's a class of reader whose desire for a kind of interactivity is no longer satisfied by the voting system; for them, pile-on voting has been replaced by pile-on posting (albeit often in the more thoughtful HN style). Which in turn begets more such posts, and thus a more polarized conversational shape.
I think you guys are falling in love with a clever narrative about voting and comments and socialization and aren't remembering all the pointless and objectively stupid arguments we were having about transient down and up fluctuations in comment scores when we could see them all.
I suspect at least a part of increased tribalism is that, without visible comment scores, people aren't being shown as clearly that "that's not the HN way" and "this is the HN way".
On the rare occasions that a tribal comment gets downvoted to gray, this is often misinterpreted as "tribal downvotes", and therefore the tribe responds by upvoting (a power even new users have). As long as the comment gets back to 1, it appears the same as comments at 5, 10, or 100 -- so the tribe doesn't see how differently tribal and non-tribal comments are treated, and therefore doesn't learn the community standard.
I think visible comment scores would help. I also think it would help to aggressively flag such comments, and to respond to such comments with "this sort of tribalism doesn't belong on Hacker News" (especially if that response was, visibly, upvoted to 10 or 20 points!)
"We're not going to fix this problem. I'm also fine with that."
Just thinking out loud here in terms of potential ways to stem this although perhaps this is futile.
What if HN had a checkbox for ad-hominem and/or off-topic comments?
Check boxing a comment as an ad hominem would add to your "ad hominem" score (separate from karma). Likewise for off-topic. This wouldn't stop a person from posting ad hominem or off-topic comments, but the idea of accumulating points for bad behavior could dissuade (some) people from making too many. Who would want to be branded the off-topic or ad-hominem gal?
Perhaps it wouldn't work -- but at minimum I think it would be an interesting experiment in promoting civility and thoughtful discussion.
Because we're a community of geeks, these threads always fill up with random technical countermeasures. I am dubious that any of them will work. I think showing other people's comment scores was a bug and I'm glad we fixed it†, but I don't think we need more features to address the cultural issues.
I do think we'd benefit from more guidance, but 'pg is pretty hands-off on this stuff. Graham could say today "no Apple vs. * debates", and about 100 people on HN would immediately start actively shutting down pointless Apple debates.
But he doesn't want to do that. I'm sure there's a reason for it. Part of it is probably that no matter what the ratio of light to heat, YC benefits from having HN active and perceived as open and unmoderated.
The system he is suggesting is exactly what /. had, and that didn't work out too well. I have a theory that the decline of any great community begins with a conflict. In the case of /. when the SCO matter started, the issue was so black and white that there was no need of discussing it - and the community itself was so homogeneous in their opinion on this matter that there was no real discussion going on. In the case of HN, I think we're seeing a variation of the same thing - it's Apple vs everybody else, and the issue is so polarising that the discussions are almost never real discussions, they're just a bunch of people trying to prove they're right. And that is where the rot starts.
I am as guilty of this as anybody else - since I find myself rarely able to comment on any technical discussion on HN, most of my posts have been on these topics, where one does not need any more than an ideological standpoint from which to talk. Perhaps the recent precipitous decline in the quality of the comments is directly linked to the kind of stories that we've been discussing, and the kind of people who tend to comment on them.
> Graham could say today "no Apple vs. * debates", and about 100 people on HN would immediately start actively shutting down pointless Apple debates. But he doesn't want to do that. I'm sure there's a reason for it.
Yeah, because having a bunch of righteous do-gooders flagging topics as inappropriate isn't as much of a feature as you'd think.
I think we should all have the ability to add arbitrary meta-data to other posts and to write/tweak our own scoring system to recognize the pieces of other user's rankings we saw as useful.
I think that the vaccine HN had was size. Just like a modern republic vs. ancient Athens, HN has grown to the point where the obvious answer just doesn't seem to work. I think that Slashdot has already had to deal with these growing pains, and HN(and reddit) chose to ignore /.'s problems and pick the obvious solution. Unfortunately the behavior of mobs/tribalism tears this choice down.
Which limiting yourself to a set of must-read users and not consuming all of HN might not be a replacement for that vaccine, but it sure helps keep the plague rats at bay.
Any strict voting/counting based system is going to be biased to highly popular (vs. interesting) articles.
A Likert-scale ranking system (vote on some scale, usually 1-3, 1-5, 1-7, etc., occasionally even (to exclude uncommitted median votes), and including a multiplier (log-based) for popularity) seems to be one of the more reliable ways of meaningfully indicating general interest in content.
Tracking the variance / standard deviation in votes is also helpful in identifying whether an item is of low interest (or disliked), vs. polarizing.
Mine disappeared too after I started using it extensively in the 'new' section for dupes & spammers, it came back briefly but it's been gone for weeks.
Thanks for the list. It's been a while since I've spidered HN into another good daily read, but I've got a good candidate in http://www.corante.com/, via 'idlewords.
Sorry, but I don't see this as a big issue. Discussing Apple is disproportionately interesting because of the reactions it invokes.
Whenever there is a major story about Apple, there will typically be a tribal war because Apple has positioned itself as a tribal artifact (e.g. think differently, I'm a Mac, dolphin shorts v. grey suits)...
And forgive me for being a cynic, but it wouldn't surprise me if Job's resignation had been sitting in a can to be used in the case of fire...and yesterday morning, Apple's security incompetence regarding OSX Lion had all the makings of a major PR fire which has now been swept off everyone's radar screen like so much anthrax after 911.
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 disagreement, but since downvoting not only compromises someone's reputation (via karma) but also minimizes the visibility of the comment, the effect is punishment for that disagreement, which again motivates me at least to avoid controversial topics where I seem to hold an uncommon view.
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.
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. Even if you disagree with the content
of the comment, don't respond to it. If its a thread; scroll past it without
stopping. If enough people do this, the HN algorithm will push these off-topic
threads to the bottom, where they'll slowly wither away.
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.
This problem is easy to solve. Downvote bad comments and bring in active moderators whose job is to message users that show a pattern of writing bad comments and help them do better. If the user doesn't improve over time, ban. There must be a hundred competent people who would be willing to assume this position.
>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.
Yeah, this is why I wish HN had collapsible comments (like Reddit, or even Slashdot). In that way, you could simply collapse irrelevant comments and ignore them. Having comments that can't be collapsed makes this much more difficult, as even a comment that's been downvoted into oblivion still takes up space and forces you to scroll more in order to get to the stuff that you are interested in.
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.
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.
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.
Two problems with this post:
1-it severely exaggerates the personal attacks
2-it ignores the comments that led to the 'ad-hominem attacks'
The comment that started the 'attacks' was: "Steve Jobs touched people lives in a way no other can, sometimes at a very personal level". I find this comment completely ridiculous. I own an iphone and use a mac, I'm not an apple hater, but I do hate irrational fanboys. Comments that drip fanboyism and go well past rational discussion should be downvoted, not people posting responses. The responses were slightly aggressive, but they were responses to a terrible comment.
"Fanboy" is the most destructive meme to rational discourse ever to emerge on the Internet. In a single word we reduce any debate to YouTube-style mudslinging. The concept of "fanboy" has some limited utility in that people do clearly blind themselves to flaws in products (or ideologies!) in order to avoid cognitive dissonance and protect their own identity, but any tiny value in expressing this concept is overwhelmed by the destructive nature of its use in discourse. The fact is everyone has blind spots, and "fanboy" is just shorthand for "your opinion is meaningless noise, but I'm going to respond to it anyway with my own meta noise." Furthermore, the word is most often used by people who are equally as irrational as the one they are accusing.
Downvoting any comment calling someone else a "fanboy" is a good idea, and I think one concrete action that can help HN if only in a small way.
I suggest we use the word "lemming" instead. If someone is willing to walk off a cliff to obtain a new phone, it seems like the right word to use. Also, you can press that button at the bottom of the screen and they all blow up.
instead. in-stead. Okay, if you absolutely must go ad-hominem then I suppose "sheep" or "lemming" is less vapid. But seriously this sentiment is way overused.
I see the potshots, but it's mostly confined to threads spawned from potshot bait.
I think the issue is that the potshot bait is starting to overwhelm the first few pages like a lazy bacteria. And we just ran out of antibiotics. I know I've been reading HN a lot less over the last several months. It might not be reflective of any real reality, but an idea can turn real if enough people start to believe it.
My sense is that the threads of discussion raganwald mentions have increased since losing the comment karma score. The absence of a number next to each comment has made it impossible for me to instantly filter what's worth reading and what isn't. When I see a long thread of comments responding to a low karma comment, I know it's a debate I can probably ignore.
The last poll pg ran asking if people wanted karma totals back demonstrated overwhelming support for them. That was months ago, so there must be some compelling reason they're not back, but I certainly think they would go a long way to making HN comments more readable. At least, they do for me, and I'm the only one I can speak for!
Would be cool to A/B test the comment scores. All HN readers would see identical frontpage. Half of HN readers would see comment threads with scores. Other half of readers would see comment threads without scores. After a day or so the most active/interesting threads would be compared. How did threads with comment scores evolve vs. threads without comment scores?
The results could be interesting. My opinion is that comment scores should be absent (like the current state). I think they lead to snow-balling effects. Lazy readers just go with the group's opinion instead of forming their own.
I'm having a similar thought, there may be a UI fix for such things. While I dislike reddit, one of the features I miss is the 'collapse thread' - sign. Once I realize a thread is unlikely to contain useful info, I collapse the whole thing and move on to the next thread.
On HN, i have to scroll past the rest of the thread and do visual/mental work to figure out where it ends.
HN members' opinions of themselves are inflated and entertaining. I really enjoy the stream of sometimes-interesting links posted on the front page. I also get a kick out of the navel-gazing, the smug self-congratulations, the herding, the tempests in various teapots, while kettles are black.
The content contributors think the site is about them, while it is really about maintaining a halo effect for a startup incubator.
HN members' opinions of themselves are inflated and entertaining. I really enjoy the stream of sometimes-interesting links posted on the front page. I also get a kick out of the navel-gazing, the smug self-congratulations, the herding, the tempests in various teapots, while kettles are black. The content contributors think the site is about them, while it is really about maintaining a halo effect for a startup incubator. <<<
I don't mean to be condescending, but you do know that you just proved his point, right?
"But here's the thing. It's a big world. Like a democracy, you have to go along with where everybody goes."
I don't agree with how this sentence is formulated. Most of the time I haven't personally really liked to go in the same direction as everybody else. It's just boring. Most of the time I prefer to take a path that hasn't been walked by anyone else and discover something new for myself.
Of course, in the context of the article the sentence is to be regarded narrower and the point is illustrating is to have a HN Community that's organized and follows some rules.Which I agree with. But the way it's formulated illustrates this mindset that in this big world we should all embrace whatever the crowd likes, which IMHO is just wrong.
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[ 48.7 ms ] story [ 1230 ms ] threadBut the last time I left a reply to something I downvoted, my reply in turn got downvoted pretty quickly (although it eventually go voted back up to a neutral score of 1), which left me questioning the wisdom of doing that. And the sad thing is, the comment in question was one of those that centered around one of those possible "group think" scenarios... so I don't know if I just got downvoted by members of the "other camp" or by (more or less) neutral observers who don't support leaving replies explaining why you find a comment troublesome.
Uuugggh.... there's no way to win. Maybe we need /. style moderation so you can tag a comment as "off topic" or whatever when you downvote...
As to the bigger question of eliminating the "tribalism," hhhmmm... I wish I had an answer, but sadly I can't say I do. Maybe your post will at least raise awareness of the issue and will help a bit?
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 dragging things away from the OP main point but I feel this is not unrelated to it.
While typing this comment it occurred to me that this comment falls into that very category. Whoops.
I also find it useful as a way of recognizing names. If a comment of mine gets 10 upvotes here, I know that some amphormous subset of readers liked my comment, but I don't build any recognition of who.
Is there any reason I can't have something vote numbers and vote inflation whilst others have only flagging with no vote scores?
Members should, however, be able to flag comments that violate the guidelines so that the mods can deal with spam and other transgressions.
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.
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.
And a comment score debate is pulsu equus mortuus.
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).
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!
a) Not everybody has time to read every comment on every thread, and
b) The scores provide a slight psychological reward for writing good comments, thus encouraging that sort of behaviour.
Forums without comment scores usually wind up looking like a complete mess.
The type of person to post an insult or an ad hominem is probably not the type of person who would read this post much less care what it has to say. Because for someone to read this they'd have to care about the impact they have on the community and there's no way an insult or ad hominem can have a positive impact on the community. They are, by definition, expressions of pure negativity so their intent is unquestionably negative.
(and don't even get me started on the people who upvote such posts)
So you can't just say "lets all get together and fix this" because the people who would answer your call aren't the people causing the problem. Then the question becomes "how do you deal with the people causing the problem".
The only answer I can see is banning. Because said group is made out of two types of people: Those who don't care about the community and those who care about the community but care about expressing their own anger more. So the first group just won't care and the second group can't help themselves.
But then the question is "Do you really want Hacker News to be a place where people get banned on a regular basis?". First I don't think pg even has the time for that and second I think most would find that off putting.
So (and pardon me for the long comment here) we end up where we started. Trying to be civil and interact with the civil members of the community while trying to ignore those who don't care about civility.
<lightHeartedAttemptAtEmpathyAndEncouragement>
That's a signal that your focus has shifted a little too much from your own work to HN. Take a day off and invest that energy back where it belongs. We'll be here when you get back. Promise.
</lightHeartedAttemptAtEmpathyAndEncouragement>
EDIT: Added tags (Lighten up you guys).
(Every attempt so far to objectively measure any decline in discourse on HN has failed, so I try to remain consciously skeptical of any claims to that effect.)
I do this as a conscious self-correction now. Any time I find myself getting wound up by something on HN -- which, fortunately, isn't very often any more -- I try to leave it for a few days, or more. When I come back, it's magically a better place.
Not that I want raganwald to go away for a while. His name is one that I appreciate seeing in comment threads. :-)
Amusing that to be the only reason is significantly oversimplifying.
The HN community is at best corrosive to the reader that is looking for technology and some buisness discussion. I made the mistake of assuming thats what I'd find here; once I got rid of silly notion, I found I no longer had a ill feeling when I went back to work after my lunch break.
My take is, flag these topics off the site. Cut them off like a gangrenous limb. We want to keep the leg, but even more, we want our heart to keep beating.
But then, a vocal subset of HN users is offended by the idea that story upvotes don't mean it's OK to debate libertarianism vs. liberalism here, so don't misread this comment as prescriptive. We're not going to fix this problem. I'm also fine with that.
Ed's right too, of course. Are you here to hear what the average HN'er thinks about Steve Jobs? No, you're not. I read HN in two ways, both of which still work for me:
* I scan for stories I have something to contribute to, and
* I read a shortlist of users whose presence on a thread have been reliable signifiers of quality. (The list is on my profile.)
Try doing that. You'll miss a lot of HN; a good thing!
As a side note, I'm happy about the removal of point visibility on comments... but I wonder if perhaps increased tribalism might be a result of users in search of social meaning... which used to be easier to obtain via points.. and over time has been replaced by an emergent tribal system, wars, etc.
I suspect you're right that a change in tone and increase in the use of tribal-loyalty-signifiers might also be a side-effect of invisible scores. An upvote or downvote was only ever a coarse grunt or shake of the head, but in many social situations, there's a feeling one must send such signals to be 'present'.
Often when one outlet for a behavior is closed, the behavior flows elsewhere. Perhaps no visible point-effect means more signalling via tone and word choice: publicly upvoting via fanboyish tone, and publicly downvoting via snark.
It's a theory!
Comment-dimming notwithstanding, that feedback has been removed. There's a class of reader whose desire for a kind of interactivity is no longer satisfied by the voting system; for them, pile-on voting has been replaced by pile-on posting (albeit often in the more thoughtful HN style). Which in turn begets more such posts, and thus a more polarized conversational shape.
On the rare occasions that a tribal comment gets downvoted to gray, this is often misinterpreted as "tribal downvotes", and therefore the tribe responds by upvoting (a power even new users have). As long as the comment gets back to 1, it appears the same as comments at 5, 10, or 100 -- so the tribe doesn't see how differently tribal and non-tribal comments are treated, and therefore doesn't learn the community standard.
I think visible comment scores would help. I also think it would help to aggressively flag such comments, and to respond to such comments with "this sort of tribalism doesn't belong on Hacker News" (especially if that response was, visibly, upvoted to 10 or 20 points!)
Just thinking out loud here in terms of potential ways to stem this although perhaps this is futile.
What if HN had a checkbox for ad-hominem and/or off-topic comments?
Check boxing a comment as an ad hominem would add to your "ad hominem" score (separate from karma). Likewise for off-topic. This wouldn't stop a person from posting ad hominem or off-topic comments, but the idea of accumulating points for bad behavior could dissuade (some) people from making too many. Who would want to be branded the off-topic or ad-hominem gal?
Perhaps it wouldn't work -- but at minimum I think it would be an interesting experiment in promoting civility and thoughtful discussion.
I do think we'd benefit from more guidance, but 'pg is pretty hands-off on this stuff. Graham could say today "no Apple vs. * debates", and about 100 people on HN would immediately start actively shutting down pointless Apple debates.
But he doesn't want to do that. I'm sure there's a reason for it. Part of it is probably that no matter what the ratio of light to heat, YC benefits from having HN active and perceived as open and unmoderated.
† Not interested in debating this; take it to 'pg
I am as guilty of this as anybody else - since I find myself rarely able to comment on any technical discussion on HN, most of my posts have been on these topics, where one does not need any more than an ideological standpoint from which to talk. Perhaps the recent precipitous decline in the quality of the comments is directly linked to the kind of stories that we've been discussing, and the kind of people who tend to comment on them.
Yeah, because having a bunch of righteous do-gooders flagging topics as inappropriate isn't as much of a feature as you'd think.
I think we should all have the ability to add arbitrary meta-data to other posts and to write/tweak our own scoring system to recognize the pieces of other user's rankings we saw as useful.
I think that the vaccine HN had was size. Just like a modern republic vs. ancient Athens, HN has grown to the point where the obvious answer just doesn't seem to work. I think that Slashdot has already had to deal with these growing pains, and HN(and reddit) chose to ignore /.'s problems and pick the obvious solution. Unfortunately the behavior of mobs/tribalism tears this choice down.
Any strict voting/counting based system is going to be biased to highly popular (vs. interesting) articles.
A Likert-scale ranking system (vote on some scale, usually 1-3, 1-5, 1-7, etc., occasionally even (to exclude uncommitted median votes), and including a multiplier (log-based) for popularity) seems to be one of the more reliable ways of meaningfully indicating general interest in content.
Tracking the variance / standard deviation in votes is also helpful in identifying whether an item is of low interest (or disliked), vs. polarizing.
I'd like to do this. I tried doing it a while ago on the new tab. I spent 20 minutes each day flagging off topic posts.
I didn't mind doing this as it was my way of making the community better.
Sadly the flag link seems to have gone away:(
You have more karma than me, and I can see it.
Speculation: it may have been taken away for "abuse", either automatically or by an editor who disagreed with too many of your flags.
Hmmm I guess no good deed goes unpunished:)
Whenever there is a major story about Apple, there will typically be a tribal war because Apple has positioned itself as a tribal artifact (e.g. think differently, I'm a Mac, dolphin shorts v. grey suits)...
And forgive me for being a cynic, but it wouldn't surprise me if Job's resignation had been sitting in a can to be used in the case of fire...and yesterday morning, Apple's security incompetence regarding OSX Lion had all the makings of a major PR fire which has now been swept off everyone's radar screen like so much anthrax after 911.
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 disagreement, but since downvoting not only compromises someone's reputation (via karma) but also minimizes the visibility of the comment, the effect is punishment for that disagreement, which again motivates me at least to avoid controversial topics where I seem to hold an uncommon view.
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.
"Off-topic" "Rude" "Ad Hominem" "Straw Man"
If enough flaggers agree on the lack of value (and the reason for it), punt it AND ALL OF THE REPLIES.
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. Even if you disagree with the content of the comment, don't respond to it. If its a thread; scroll past it without stopping. If enough people do this, the HN algorithm will push these off-topic threads to the bottom, where they'll slowly wither away.
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.
Yeah, this is why I wish HN had collapsible comments (like Reddit, or even Slashdot). In that way, you could simply collapse irrelevant comments and ignore them. Having comments that can't be collapsed makes this much more difficult, as even a comment that's been downvoted into oblivion still takes up space and forces you to scroll more in order to get to the stuff that you are interested in.
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.
It's entirely meta.
My head is exploding.
The comment that started the 'attacks' was: "Steve Jobs touched people lives in a way no other can, sometimes at a very personal level". I find this comment completely ridiculous. I own an iphone and use a mac, I'm not an apple hater, but I do hate irrational fanboys. Comments that drip fanboyism and go well past rational discussion should be downvoted, not people posting responses. The responses were slightly aggressive, but they were responses to a terrible comment.
"Fanboy" is the most destructive meme to rational discourse ever to emerge on the Internet. In a single word we reduce any debate to YouTube-style mudslinging. The concept of "fanboy" has some limited utility in that people do clearly blind themselves to flaws in products (or ideologies!) in order to avoid cognitive dissonance and protect their own identity, but any tiny value in expressing this concept is overwhelmed by the destructive nature of its use in discourse. The fact is everyone has blind spots, and "fanboy" is just shorthand for "your opinion is meaningless noise, but I'm going to respond to it anyway with my own meta noise." Furthermore, the word is most often used by people who are equally as irrational as the one they are accusing.
Downvoting any comment calling someone else a "fanboy" is a good idea, and I think one concrete action that can help HN if only in a small way.
I think the issue is that the potshot bait is starting to overwhelm the first few pages like a lazy bacteria. And we just ran out of antibiotics. I know I've been reading HN a lot less over the last several months. It might not be reflective of any real reality, but an idea can turn real if enough people start to believe it.
The last poll pg ran asking if people wanted karma totals back demonstrated overwhelming support for them. That was months ago, so there must be some compelling reason they're not back, but I certainly think they would go a long way to making HN comments more readable. At least, they do for me, and I'm the only one I can speak for!
The results could be interesting. My opinion is that comment scores should be absent (like the current state). I think they lead to snow-balling effects. Lazy readers just go with the group's opinion instead of forming their own.
On HN, i have to scroll past the rest of the thread and do visual/mental work to figure out where it ends.
HN members' opinions of themselves are inflated and entertaining. I really enjoy the stream of sometimes-interesting links posted on the front page. I also get a kick out of the navel-gazing, the smug self-congratulations, the herding, the tempests in various teapots, while kettles are black. The content contributors think the site is about them, while it is really about maintaining a halo effect for a startup incubator. <<<
I don't mean to be condescending, but you do know that you just proved his point, right?
I don't agree with how this sentence is formulated. Most of the time I haven't personally really liked to go in the same direction as everybody else. It's just boring. Most of the time I prefer to take a path that hasn't been walked by anyone else and discover something new for myself.
Of course, in the context of the article the sentence is to be regarded narrower and the point is illustrating is to have a HN Community that's organized and follows some rules.Which I agree with. But the way it's formulated illustrates this mindset that in this big world we should all embrace whatever the crowd likes, which IMHO is just wrong.