This story really provoked poor reactions on Slashdot, Hacker News and other supposedly "meritocracy"-oriented communities.
I don't have the evidence to support this, but my educated guess is that a proportion of it is driven by the fact that it was a Pakistani (and presumably Muslim) girl.
The meme pool for Pakistan and Muslims in general is driven by the terrorism / fear narrative; masking one's prejudice and engage in a self-satisfactory public bashing is easy when we also have a competing meme (Microsoft as borg) that can be used to mask the ugly aspects of it.
The other alternative (that people really do hate Microsoft so much that they would make these comments about a dead child) is so childish that I can't bring myself to believe it. It would be morally equivalent to.. well, cheering for people dying without health care. IE: A small group of people so wrapped in a narrative that they can't bring themselves to see how abhorrent their beliefs have become to the majority around them. Are those people us?
Pure speculation: I don't get the sense of racism at all. I think the age was the provoking factor. A younger girl who was able to accomplish something (Microsoft Certified Professional) and become noteworthy in a site filled with people (and businesses) trying to become noteworthy. Jealousy.
I'd say the attempts to diminish her coding abilities were driven more by the affiliation with MS than with her ethnicity or religion. But that may just be speculation on my part.
That's the weird thing. What she did was genuinely impressive, but only because of her age. For an experienced adult to do the same thing would be a mark against them, because it conveys they're probably a dud doing something distasteful in the hope of polishing a lackluster résumé.
I'll have to agree with thebigshane's speculation. Extrapolating from my own experiences, I think a lot of people here were doing great things (programming, writing, art, etc.) at a young age and didn't get nearly the recognition that they wanted. In my own childhood I saw people around me getting more recognition for less and poorer work, and others who got no recognition for excellent work.
There are at least two ways to approach this situation: the first, taken by the negative commenters on the other article, is to allow jealousy to take over. The second is to look at a lack of recognition as a simple problem to be solved, and learn from those who receive it. Let's quit whining about not getting the attention we wanted when we were programming at whatever young age, and try to learn how to market ourselves better. Above all, let's show some respect.
It seems that jealousy is becoming popular here. Looking at comments to this recent post about the guy who owns just 15 things[0], the top ones (hence the most voted for, I guess) mostly complain about ways in which he ‘cheated’ in counting his possessions. More or less constructive discussion starts at the very bottom.
Not sure what might be the reason of that, except jealousy.
I do think it's just use of the term "programming", when (while what she did was very impressive for a young girl, from her culture) she didn't appear to do much programming.
Obviously it's misdirected. People should be saying "What lousy reporting, celebrate what she actually did!"
Interesting post, and certainly a valid issue to discuss; however, although I can see where you're coming from and needing examples to draw on, the way it is written hard to read it without feeling like it's specifically bashing certain users. That's not to say I don't agree with the point you're trying to make, but maybe it would be more effective not to list user names specifically in the post.
Hacker News has its good days and bad days. It also is going to evolve as the world of technology evolves. For some, that means it gets worse. For others, it gets better.
There will always be people that think it used to be better, because it's easier to remember the good feelings than the bad. This happens on every online community all over the entire Internet and it's been happening since the Internet started.
My only advice for solving the problem is to stop feeding the trolls. Dextorious obviously is trying to get a rise out of people. Ignore it and it goes away. Anything else is just adding fuel to the fire.
I hadn't looked at the comments on the story about the girl who died till now. I am so embarrassed for this community. I feel like this is the worst I've ever seen people behave on this site.
Here's some general advice: if you find yourself beginning a comment on a thread about someone who has just died with a disclaimer of the form "I hate to be that guy" or "I hate to write this," just don't say it.
I find comments that start off like that extremely disingenuous. Whenever someone says "I <some adjective>, but..." I see that as "I don't want to offend anyone reading this because I don't want to get into an argument and/or don't want downvotes, but I'm going to say this anyway because this is how I really feel." Things like "I'm sorry, but...", "I hate to tell you this, but..." or "This is a great idea, but..." sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) have good intentions (like pointing out flaws in a website or bringing up an interesting point in the topic) but to me they end up sounding quite pompous and, in this case, offensive.
"All colors are made of light, but black is the absence of light."
"It looks like you covered all of the key issues, but you missed this one..."
"I agree with everything you said but this one thing..."
"I am not a lawyer, but it looks like it could be interpreted..."
I think you guys are just making these rules up, but maybe it is still good to keep them in mind, even if they aren't always true.
Would you consider adding that general advice to the official guidelines? The problem with "Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation." is that there are plenty of people in life (maybe just in hacker circles, but my sample is thoroughly biased) who would say outrageous things that they would start with a disclaimer in a face to face conversation.
Actually I feel one of the benefits of the internet is that one can say things that wouldn't go down well in a face-to-face conversation. Not everything that makes sense is easy to accept.
Perhaps it's valid to note that the story provoked polarized reactions and thoughts, and thus better avoid putting each other down for those reactions.
Those comments are lamentable. However one of those you mention was made by an extremely active 4 year old account. The other was made by a relatively young one.
These are examples of 'bad' comments, rather than just 'noise'. However I think they both have the same immediate cause - community acceptance. For some reason the posts with little content are being rewarded. Discussions on how to change this (via the voting system or otherwise) have happened many times but I think more needs to be done.
As to why the community accepted such a negative comment I have no idea - and fixing this may be much harder.
Quickly checking in to respond, as the "extremely active 4 year old account" in question...
The comment was clearly poorly phrased. When I made it, there were no negative comments on the story, and it was really just intended to question the "programmer prodigy" aspect, not to criticise the deceased or imply that she was not an impressive young person.
I hate (!) to discard any part of the english language; I think all expressions have their place, including "I hate to be that guy, but" - however, in hindsight, the net effect was to lump my relatively neutral comment in with all the haters on the thread, so, in practice, it was proven to be a poor choice.
That said, I do dislike the habit of idolising deceased people as perfect in every way. It reminds me of the "HN Salesmanship hero" story (where I commented that he wasn't my hero and I resented this attribution, for which I got badly downvoted). This person was clearly impressive without making stuff up about them. From all the comments and interviews, it in fact seems that her programming ability, far from being prodigy-like, was in fact the least impressive of her other personal traits.
To conclude: had I known that there would be a pile-up of hateful belittling following my comment, I wouldn't have made it, or if I felt the need to ask that question, I would have done so in a much more carefully phrased way. I fully take the blame for not realising that this type of thread could descend down to that level, but my intention was certainly not to belittle.
Death is generally a touchy subject, if you were commenting on someone that had not just passed away I don't think the comment would have come off nearly as bad.
I agree with the post about thinking before you add something and not being mean for the sake of being mean. I think we also have to be careful here about a culture of groupthink and censoring alternative opinions via very negative feedback.
An interesting quote from the half-beast, and slightly-insane Joseph Stalin -- "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
Maybe a little bit more understanding is due all around. If I can divide the world into two caricatured groups, we have:
"I can never stop feeling, but sometimes I'm too tired to think" -- rallying around the asinine "prodigy" headline.
"I can never stop thinking, but sometimes I'm too tired to feel" -- rallying around the emotionally tone-deaf responses.
I think we all tend to identify with one side more than the other, but instead of rallying ourselves on either side of the issue, we should see each side as a vital aspect of being human that each of us has, with one side often gaining the upper hand and then getting out of hand. If we want to measure the supposed "decline" of Hacker News by the fact that one side gets out of hand and provokes a response the other, I think both sides need to be held to account. Glurge begets callousness. A pervasive environment of callousness makes glurge seem like a welcome relief. If we want to avoid either, we should avoid both, and that means ignoring offenses instead of responding in kind.
They weren't bad comments at all. The circle-the-wagons "we're better than this" reaction is worse.
While a death is usually a tragedy, made magnitudes worse when it's a child, the title of that post was absurd, and it was a giant elephant in the room that simply had to be rationally diffused. Like others I went into that story primarily to read how she was a programming prodigy.
Tragic death. Not a programming prodigy. The misrepresentation was noticed by all, and it will be a sad day when social convention means we all have to carry forward the lie lest we offend someone's sensibility about death.
Upvoted - this [groggles' comment] hits the nail on the head.
PG, given that you gray-out comments that get torrentially downvoted, perhaps you could bold-face (or render in green?) those comments that get a certain number of upvotes, or perhaps those comments that exceed X% of the aggregate number of upvotes for the thread.
When I joined HN I decided to do an experiment. On reddit and slashdot, I go under a pseudonym except when I need to make an announcement. But on HN I always go by my own name. The result is dramatic: I'm much more careful and considerate on HN. It's a clear verification of Penny Arcade's famous theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/).
I think that the elimination of anonymity is ultimately the only thing which can keep HN from the inevitable slide toward 4chan that all comment sites are on.
One thing a lack of anonymity forces you to do is to present your entire feelings about a story, instead of the one point that you feel is missing or needs correction. When people present points in isolation, it's easy to get the wrong impression about how they feel.
I didn't comment in the thread under discussion, but if I felt there was one point that needed to be added to the original story, it was the one made by many posters, roughly, "This smells like glurge, and when people are mourning for an inspiring little girl, it's common sense not to take what they say about her at face value." Of course that wouldn't reflect my whole reaction as a human being.
And that's the difference between reacting as a non-anonymous human being, where you are careful to present your whole feelings about a topic, and reacting as a member of a message board, where you're like to dismiss most of what you think and feel as commonplace and not worth mentioning.
Like any problem in communication, it's a problem of readers as well as writers. Reading a message from "asdf1234" or "prgrmrd00d4u" (not real names AFAIK) and reading it as representative of a human being's feelings doesn't make any sense, but it's irresistible for a lot of people. If the nerds on Slashdot and HN can't resist parsing comments that way, I think it's time to give up and accept that as human beings we can only see each other as whole human beings and not merely as contributors to a conversation. So the burden of solving this communication problem is on the writers to act like whole human beings.
The primary psychological resistance -- and believe me, I do rebel against being "human" on a discussion board with every bit of my being -- comes from the fact that most of us would prefer to sound more like scientists than like politicians. Scientists say, "Here is my tiny marginal contribution." Politicians say, "This is who I am." Geeks roll their eyes when a politician answering a question about tax policy in a debate spends all of his allotted time talking about how much he loves his children and then caps it off with half a sentence stating his position on the issue. We hate that and don't want to be like that. We want to hear how he differs from his opponents. We don't want to hear everything he has in common with everyone else. We want the diff.
Our humanity is what we have in common, exactly what is excluded when we present ourselves as a diff. If you read the original discussion and read every comment as a diff, then you don't see comments by inhuman people. You see whole human beings whose common humanity was redacted by the diff filter running between their brains and their keyboards.
Maybe the need to relax that diff filter a little bit so we all sound like human beings needs to be part of a FAQ somewhere....
Facebook knows my True Name, therefore I'm so careful there that I don't say anything controversial or substantive at all. It just gets a bit of cheerful pap, and mostly I don't use it at all. HN get what I'm really thinking about precisely because it's pseudonymous.
I thought about this for a while and realized after sleeping on it that this quality problem seemed to occur only after points visibility was removed from comments. People can and should be able to say what they want, but if the only public feedback is greying out downvoted comments (negative) then you're losing the positive feedback cycle and hampering the ability of the cybernetic system to regulate itself.
From the discussion here, I conclude this quote is widely accepted among those who provide quality discourse: "I try to comment when I have useful, unique, original, or non-standard things to say." This represents a desire to deliver a certain promised value. When you post on a forum, (or send an email, for that matter) you are making an implicit claim: is worth the audience's time to read your post.
For users like me, there is friction in posting because I have to convince myself that I've satisfied the implicit claim. For others, I assume, this friction is absent. So add it artificially: somehow make the claim explicit.
Maybe require posters to select from a list of categories (e.g. Useful Information, Insightful, Civil Disagreement, ...), explicitly claiming their post meets that criteria. Or, less restrictive: a required checkbox that simply reminds you of the claim you're making with your post.
I think we've reached the stage for an "Ignore" button. Clicking it would make that user invisible to me in the future.
There are some people who I am never going to agree with. Their comments are invariably ignorant or proselytizing or cruel to my eyes. I'd rather not have that.
First, I'm still on the fence in regards to the quality of discussion here. I think there's a tendency for familiarity to breed contempt (the more familiar you become with HN, the more aware you are of things like mean discussions, and the more rose-colored your glasses will be when considering what it was like "before"). There have been a few attempts to objectively measure any degradation of the site, and so far they haven't found anything conclusive, as far as I know. So, it might not be as bad as you think.
Second, you start out with a really general point, but then halfway-through fall mostly into a single example. If that's the example that got you thinking about this, then you've let yourself turn a wasted moment reading a pointless comment into quite a large waste of your time. The friendliest way I can think of to respond to that is that it is a very silly thing to do. :-)
What are you even doing online, anyway? I mean, for me, at least, being online makes me feel pretty miserable afterward, especially compared to anything else I could be doing. I'll look at my threads page sometimes and the older my most recent comment is, the happier I am with myself. That means I've been spending time on better things -- and anything other than commenting on a website is a better thing. I don't want to chase you off, but at the same time, sometimes I sit back and think about all the time wasted worldwide since the invention of the online forum, and how little real positive impact there has been from all of that, and it kinda bums me out. I must've blown entire months on Slashdot way back when, and all I remember from that now is ... uhm ... Hellmouth? ... and ... hmm. I forget the second thing. I am literally a happier, better person, for every moment that I'm not online.
Thirdly, although your intentions are good, you are criticizing behavior which leads naturally from the design of the site. How much thoughtful discussion is really possible on a site like this one, where most threads come and go after just a few hours, never to be read again? Hell, I wrote about this 9 months ago (http://robsheldon.com/conversations-online), submitted it to HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423975), where it got a little bit of discussion, and then that was it.
Forums like this one are designed to be topical, not thoughtful. With the invention of internet points -- yay, karma, and all that other nonsense -- people have had more incentive than ever to quickly bang out a single-line joke, get a point for every chuckle, and move on. (One of the things which has gotten me the most yummy internet points was a joke -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102126 -- and, although it was pretty funny, it wasn't nearly as meaningful to me as, say, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132576).
HN is not a good place for thoughtful, meaningful discussion. It maybe says it wants to be, but the most important things about its design say otherwise. So at some point, you have to ask yourself, "What am I doing here?"
...Every time that I look at this comment for the next few days, I will be ashamed of myself, because I will know that I wasted 15 minutes writing a thing which would be read by a few people for a few hours and then never again, and I could have played a good game of Go instead.
I disagree when you imply we shouldn't expect thoughtful discussion. This is the only place on the web where I contribute at all and I do so just for the thoughtfulness. Ive always held HN up as a place where people smarter than me hang out and talk and where I could, and really have, learned a lot. Just because the topics don't stick around very long that doesn't mean thoughtful discussion can't be had. It's all over the place around here! I do feel there's been a decline in not just comments but submissions in general but so far it hasn't gotten to the point where it's even close to any other forum or whatever you want to call it.
And you didn't waste your time. I read what you wrote. I enjoyed it. It sparked a discussion, see? But I am going to bed now so I guess that's over... But had this been any other time of day we may have gone back and forth a bit and others might have joined in too. Hours are more than enough to be thoughtful.
I don't think that forming part of an online discussion is a bad use of time per se. In fact if done well it can be enlightening and stimulating to people beside yourself. It is in pursuit of this standard of excellent conversation that people join certain communities (like HN). If the standard falls they will leave. Many comments are not worth making, but that does not mean that we shouldn't strive to write comments that are.
You could have made an awesome point but you ruined it. I agree that there's been a decline but the examples you pull out to support it don't help you much. The comments on the young girl who died were deplorable but I think that's a very rare case and I wouldn't say that happens often around here. But even that doesn't hurt your point as much as going after Dextorious like you did. You make a good case for him being a great example of the problem but this article comes off as you being disgruntled by him and going off on a personal attack. I don't think it's right to name names like that unless the person being named has a certain degree of notoriety. You could have left his name out of this, still used the quotes, maybe pull out some more quotes from other users exhibiting the same pattern and then this article would look far more like the commentary I'm sure you meant it to be rather than Mr. Siegler getting pissed off at and attacking someone. I'm disappointed. I'm not disappointed in your opinion, because there's a lot of truth to it but I'm disappointed in the way you approached it. Hopefully most of us will see past the flaws and really dig deeper into your real point. Other than that, I thought you were right on.
Maybe there should be a comment rate limit based on your avg score. The higher your avg score, the more comments within a certain time period you can make.
This depends on current data for avg karma vs rate of comments which is not publicly available (to my knowledge). This also depends on whether users with the highest avg score actually give great constructive comments but I have not been able to find a way to list those users -- http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20612/list-users-...
I do not think this would work very well. I can't speak for others' habits, but my posting comes in bursts. Usually I post rather infrequently--just answering some comment or espousing my views on some moderately interesting subject. However, when I find something really interesting (like a Haskell article :)), I am likely to post in rapid succession.
However, I think that my posts on such subjects are the most beneficial for the site--they're the ones where I have a decent amount of knowledge and direct experience; I am much more likely to contribute something insightful on a CS article than on a sociology one, for example. Rate-limiting would make it harder for me to post about my strongest subjects without changing how I post about random articles.
I'd note that one of the people who's behaviour was exactly the kind of behaviour that should be discouraged ('I hate to be the guy') has very overall high score and quite high avg score.
I think conflating comment score and article submission score is a mistake because of this kind of thing.
I would call myself a long time lurker on HN and have recently started commenting on stories. There's no real reason why I started, I think I just finally felt like it.
That said, I have been reading the comments for some time and I think the quality has changed when it comes to items that crack the front page. Beyond the first 30-40 items I think the discussion has remained far more useful than not. That's not to say that discussions worsen as stories move up, I think the volume tends to increase which invariably brings less helpful comments. This is not hard and fast, just my anecdotal observation.
I believe the primary cause of comment degeneration is celebrity. Which is to say the more 'popular' something is the more likely there will be people saying things just to have said something that they are sure someone else has read.
When I was competing on BattleBots I was amazed at how it magnified people's immaturity in their efforts to 'be on TV'. That really made me stop and look at the folks around me on the other teams, and at the show, and there was a very large difference between people who didn't care that they were possibly going to be on TV, and those who mostly cared that they were possibly on TV.
I tend to think of it as the 'celebrity' effect where someone gets their gratification from others noticing them. They troll popular newsgroups (back in the day), they make outrageous comments on community web sites, they seem to be trying desperately to prove somehow, someone, will know they exist. There is a lot of anger there too.
So they come places like here at HN and they comment poorly. They are particularly vocal around topics for which there are no definitive ways of measuring correctness, topics that are more emotion than reason. They are emboldened by anonymity.
Mostly they seem to want to be heard, to know that someone heard them, and ideally to be acknowledged as being heard.
Keeping them isolated, in their brokenness, makes for a better experience the community. But it also makes the broken ones more bitter and angry. I cannot see a way, in an anonymous, or psuedo-anonymous community with little face to face contact, to bring them through their insecurity and into a better place.
I want to be perfectly clear: I'm a relative newcomer here. If you want to stop reading on account of that, go ahead. I won't accuse HN of being reddit or digg. But I do want to give my perspective as someone on the fence about staying "active."
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, because I had to make a decision as to whether or not to be a part of this "community." Aside from some speech-and-debate oriented forums in high school, I've stayed away from online communities. They just don't seem to have high quality discussions, even at places where tech thrives, like xkcd. I suppose I'm lucky to have a job where I get to work with a lot of stimulating and highly intelligent people, with whom I can have conversations that last several days, so maybe my perspective is somewhat anomalous, but I doubt it. In any case, I stumbled upon paulgraham.com a few months ago, and what I enjoyed most in his essays was the reserved, focused quality, so I figured a forum/news site run by him might be interesting. I've also had an interest in open/accessible science via web-based applications, and becoming a good enough coder to write some of what I do on a Cray machine at work [1]. I am not a hacker. I learned Visual Basic in high school, and can get around basic web design/javascript/rails tutorials and stat scripting languages we use at work like R and Matlab, install Ubuntu and use Vim daily. This seemed like a good place to learn better techniques.
I've learned a lot, and I won't go on about that. Many of the comments have been thoughtful and informative, particularly the ones that point to relevant places to get more information (I've noticed user Joakal does this a lot [2]), or the ones that disagree substantively.
But the most frustrating kind of comment I've encountered on this site isn't meanness, or blatant stupidity, but the Hard-Not-To-UpVote kind. Most people can tell a troll, and most trolls get down-voted to the point of white-out. Most stupid one-line jokes get voted to the bottom of the page as well, or just ignored. Today's discussion[3] was extremely embarrassing, so much so that if I'd seen that discussion first I might never have joined the site, but the meanness was not among the most up-voted comments, and even though there were a some annoying individuals who felt the need to prove how unremarkable someone was, most were rather positive. And the rest of the community rallied around upvoting jaquesm's comment, and downvoting the inappropriate ones to oblivion (though not soon enough).
One unfortunate thing I've noticed: a lot of the very popular comments are sometimes of a "fluffy" quality. I'm a "scientist" and I get to sift through a lot of hype on a daily basis; what I appreciate most are focused rational arguments, even if I ultimately disagree; I don't like fluff, even if I've used it from time to time, and certainly I've fallen for it. I remember reading a few months ago a great passage in a PG essay:
The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.
Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.[4]
I think this applies to some comments I see here (maybe some comments I've made). Quickly shot off, and easy to judge, the ones that make you feel guilty not upticking. I don't know what to do about it - I have upvoted some comments of dubious quality because it's hard not to, but what I appreciate most is substantive disagreement. My favorite things to upvote are comments that disagree with me, even if my mind isn't ultimately changed. Comments I can't stand (and feel guilty for making at times) are the ones that say "great point!" or offer an emotionally charged appeal with nothing interesting or uni...
I've found similar thing. What surprised and frustrated me sometime is my "shallow" one liner got a lot more upvotes than my longer, more thoughtful comments. It seems people have extreme short attention span and won't bother to read the longer ones.
This is simply because long comments very rarely provide more value than short ones. In fact, I would wager that shortness is a good quality that shows the poster tried to condense his point into its true essence.
Example: The parent post could be ~ 5 lines and contain the same point. I really like the way 4chan handles this sort of thing: The so called "green text". On 4chan it is unspoken rule that nobody cares about you. In order to make your text interesting enough to be read, you have to make it as short as possible while still carrying your point across.
The inherent problem with this is that certain posts simply cannot be made shorter without omitting useful information. When users are expected to write short comments, you'll quickly find that one-liner jokes and the like are the most upvoted, not the ones with actual content.
While 4chan may be a fun way to pass time, it's hardly the place I go when I want to read/join intelligent discussions or learn new things.
The degeneration of HN is likely due to the influx of new users from 4chan and Reddit, where comments are very short and often appeal to the lowest common denominator.
[S]hortness is a good quality that shows the poster tried to condense his point into its true essence.
This is often true, but I think the value of brevity comes mostly from the context, a threaded comment page. In that context, users expect a discussion, not a monologue. They're not just looking to passively absorb information by reading, they're looking to sharpen their own understanding by actively articulating a response. That's harder to do when you're trying to respond to a comment that makes multiple points. Better to break a long-form comment into several more tightly focused short comments so that people can more quickly pick out the topics they want to respond to.
I've noticed this too. Unfortunately, my two most upvoted comments recently have been of the "throwaway" variety. Not mean, not trollish, but a couple of easy-to-agree with quickies that I banged off on the bus ride to work. One[1], perhaps legitimately upvoted so that the response would be more visible, was a simple statement that the submission was a couple years old and it would be interesting to see some newer data. The other[2] was a cheap, throwaway anti-SOPA line.
The danger here is that the easy-to-upvote throwaway comments become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like it or not, karma is social validation. A long, thought-out reply that gets no upvotes is somewhat depressing; it makes you think that, even at your most thoughtful, your thoughts are unappreciated. Contrast that with a cheap and easy line that gets 40 points, and the social feedback is clear: your considered opinion isn't valued, but your cheap lines are.
It makes me think that the karma system itself might be fatally flawed for its lack of scalability. What works for a small, mostly homogenous community breaks when that community becomes larger and more diverse. We can deny it all we like, but I'm sure most people feel pretty good when they log on and see their karma significantly higher than it was the last time they checked. It's an ego boost, and few people are immune to enjoying that. When playing to the lowest common denominator gives you that fix of social validation, and a more thoughtful comment doesn't, it's pretty strong positive reinforcement for the less-desirable behaviour.
I'm not sure how to combat this in a scalable manner. It's difficult to think of examples of community-moderated forums maintaining quality in the face of rapid expansion. My previous suggestions of weighting the votes of those who consistently upvote quality comments higher than those of people who upvote fluff has met with little traction, and I can see some pretty big potential weaknesses there, myself.
In reviewing this comment, however, I have had a thought of something that seems ridiculously trivial, but might just work: pg has stated before his belief that comment length is a relatively good indicator of quality. I notice, however, that the comment box is relatively tiny. It makes a long, thought-out post appear, prima facie, no more substantive than a 3-liner. I would be interested to see what the result of making the comment box significantly larger would be. Would people, upon seeing that much empty space surrounding a throwaway comment, be likely to reconsider posting it? Are there easy cues like this that can be used to hack the behaviour of commenters? I'd be interested in seeing the results of running an A/B test on a seemingly simple change like this: Make half the users' comment boxes two or three times as long. Leave it that way for a few months, then take a random sample of the resulting comments and see if there's a difference in quality. I wouldn't be surprised if there was.
I don't know that this social problem has a technical solution, but you're right that the "points" system encourages shallow comments. Unfortunately some people will always see a number as a score, and start gaming the system to increase it.
The problem with many submissions recently has been they are taken directly from reddit, and have content that sits well with reddit but not HN. The "Programming prodigy passes away at 16" story is a good example: it's tragic news, but the fact that someone has died is not necessarily a good HN submission. Although much of the discussion about Erlang and Haskell went right over my head, I think this site did better when those stories were oft-submitted, if only because it tends to push away the people who would prefer fluffy "human interest" stories. I personally have no intention of creating a startup but find pointers to useful technical ideas and tools here - more of those, please
So I think we need to concentrate on the submissions, removing stories of marginal interest to hackers, and being diligent in upvoting good stories and comments, and downvoting crufty comments.
Yeah, submissions may be where the solution lies. I'm not sure if it's just me but has anyone else noticed that the New page gets completely saturated with spam? I have show dead turned on and I used to see a handful of dead stories. These days it's not uncommon for me to see 5 live stories with the rest having been killed. A month or so ago there was a discussion about HN's rank on Google. I'd be happy to see it close to the bottom of the first page if at all.
"It makes me think that the karma system itself might be fatally flawed
for its lack of scalability."
The motivation to be part of an online community should be the enjoyment
at the discussions and not the number of points.
I hate the points, and I hate it, that I look after them. I think that
just the presence of a karma system has a bad effect on the quality
of the comments. You're getting what you ask for.
It's symptomatic how often I read 'Please don't downvote me' or
'I hate to say this, but' in the last time.
Personally, I try not to spend too much time on HN (sometimes I enable noprocrast), so I need to quickly decide whether it's more worthwhile to read a single ten-paragraph comment instead of ten shorter ones presenting different points of view.
Usually, if the first paragraph is not absorbing enough and there is a risk that the rest is going to be rambling, I simply stop reading without any regrets. For me it's not an attention span issue, it's a limited time issue.
This is a good point - one aspect of some political topics is the urge to upvote stuff you feel Very Strongly about. "Yeah! Go! You tell 'em!". That does not lead to good discussions though, and thus I feel those topics are best avoided here.
A great community is built by a focus on positive actions, on growing in a positive direction. To that end - let me take a stab at the definition of a 'value-added comment'.
I would define a value-added comment as lucidly conveyed viewpoint based on a simple set of logically-consistent principles ... that flies in the face of commonly-held understandings of the subject matter at hand. It's not enough to offer an opinion, or an adversarial opinion - it must be clearly stated and supported, so that the emotional weight of its disagreement prompts a healthy discussion where some measure of truth is found, where some insight is gained where there was none before.
This rests on the premises of intellectual honesty, trust, and emotional maturity within all involved, but I nevertheless think that kind of discourse is what would grow HN, and what we ought to focus on. Calling out non-value-added comments does nothing to create a culture of value-added comments.
This is not a new phenomenon. When I first found HN, I conducted an experiment: Along with ordinary attempt-to-contribute comments, I made a couple of content-free remarks whose only attractiveness was the shared premise that "startups are awesome". They immediately received nearly an order of magnitude more upvotes than anything else I had written.
I just checked, and my last comment was 906 days ago. This phenomenon is not new, and any reaction predicated on the idea that this is a relatively recent, relatively sudden decline are unlikely to succeed. It's a structural problem, possibly with human nature, and the best we can do is slow it down (at which HN has been successful, but that's probably only because it's not a business, and so explicitly does not share other sites' preoccupation with growth).
It's definitely business - back around the time Gawker got banned from YC for being trashy, there was some amount of opinion that TechCrunch stories should get the boot too - but it was never going to happen because of the exposure TechCrunch gives YC startups.
PG is not going to do anything that increases the quality of news.YC if it in any way could negatively impact YC's bottom line.
I think this is why Slashdot added the "Funny" upvote option. It doesn't add any karma points to the poster, but the voter still feels like they recognized or validated a clever comment.
I've noticed this with my comments too. My hypothesis is that if a person wants to optimise comments for upvotes, they need to be quick one liners because the discussion and therefore the eyeballs move on very quickly. If you write a high quality comment it takes time but less people read it because the top of the bell curve of the huge wave of eyeballs following the stream of the discussion has passed it by.
Humans are social, we have a need for acknowledgment from our peers so we can measure or opinions against others and to help develop our thinking on a particular point. As you suggest above, karma points are a crude replacement for the nods of agreement that you would get in a face to face conversation that signify that you or I are saying something interesting. It's a not a nice feeling to think you are saying something interesting only to find you are talking to yourself. Therefore, there is a strong incentive towards pithy one line comments that get seen quickly and appeal to the masses.
The trouble with karma points is there is no differentiation between the nods you get in drunken agreement from your friends when you say something funny in a bar and the nods you get from your colleagues when you say something insightful. We would value these differently in a face to face situation. On the internet it's just a competition for generic human recongition points where the short fast comments that 'press peoples buttons' are at an advantage.
The trouble with pithy one line comments that press peoples buttons is that they are hard to get right, not many people can strike the right balance. What's meant to be a pithy one liner actually just ends up saying nothing, something offensive, illogical or merely just voicing tribal agreement with Apple or Google or whatever.
Maybe it would be better to be able to see other peoples upvotes but not out own? What about a mandatory 1 hour before a comment appears, perhaps just display a '...' to signify that someone is preparing an answer? I don't know what the answer is, but I also miss the more challenging technical articles.
That's s disappointing. I usually spend less time on one liners than anything and thought everyone else did the same. I had no idea that one-liners got so much attention. But for all the people who express sentiments like yours and all the people who read it and all the people priding themselves on being the smartest people in the room, somehow stupidity still slips by under our noses. How? And, just as a hypothetical, you can find a comment much like yours then look back through that person's history and see they're a chronic fluff contributor. How is it that we know not to do something, speak out against it, and then do it anyway?
Also, I don't like your proposed solution. It assumes the worst in people. I tend to believe that if you cater to the lowest common denominator then that's what you get but when you assume the best in people they'll try to live up to that expectation. Of course people will be people and it's inevitable they we disappoint from time to time but... Well, but nothing. That's how it goes I guess.
Did you mean you spend less time on reading one liners? Yes me too, but there are lots of one liners now and not so many well written comments.
Regarding your second point. At the scale of HN now, I think we have to consider people not as individuals but as a swarm of actors; perhaps analogous to particles in a CFD analysis. Then ask the question 'what design changes need to be made to change the direction of these actors'. I don't personally assume the worst in people but I don't think people are naturally moral actors. They won't 'do the right thing' without any incentives. People are driven by the positive and negative consequences of their actions which they measure from the reactions of their peers. In the case of HN our peers are the crowd sourced 'off the cuff' opinions of a random sample of a few hundred thousand random people. Some people are horrified by the idea that morals don't exist and it is a bit of a scary concept being surrounded by potential monsters, but really I think it's just nature and lots of natural things are scary but can be mitigated by design.
The first is a veritable essay that compares how the failure of an ancient Swedish warship was directly comparable to the failure of the space shuttle Challenger. I think, out of all the comments that I've posted to Hacker News, I'm most proud of that one.
The second comment is essentially a throwaway criticism of the positioning of UI elements on the new Duck Duck Go search results page. It's not terrible, but it certainly took less critical thinking for me to write than the first comment. And yet it received 5 times as many votes.
How can we fix this? I don't know, but I do think that taking away comment scores was a mistake that exacerbated this issue. Now, when I see a long form comment such as yours, I have no idea if its score is +1 or +100. All I can tell is that the score is above zero, by the color of the text. This makes it harder for me to judge whether a comment is "underrated" (i.e. it has a score that is below what I'd expect for a comment of that quality) or "overrated" (i.e. it has a score that's unjustifiably high). I think bringing back comment scores would help fix the problem of long-form analytic comments being underrated.
What about, instead of comment scores, if the comment is among a top percentage of comments in the thread, the user's name is a different color, like orange? Kind of like how a new user's name is green.
I was baffled that the below got 25 upvotes where it's pretty clear (barring vote ring or anything insidious) almost nobody bothered to look at the Course links on the university page (1 times out, 1 404's, 1 has only German language content, but looks interesting
I have an unfounded theory that SOPA has acted as a tipping point in the trickling in of redditors looking for answers. SOPA is a big deal for the Internet and its communities but I find the discussions on those threads particularly shallow (moreso I think than most political-leaning threads here). Obviously the discussion in the mentioned thread above was far more shallow and outright mean, but I think those are the new extremes in this new environment.
I bring this up because I also have a theory on how to handle it. Temporarily restrict the number of political and hot-topic stories in HN through coordinated flagging. I realize this may be controversial (even borderline xenophobic), but I think it would dissuade those looking for a home here who don't want to adhere to the guidelines. If the hot-ness of the material on the front page decreased for a while, I think it would sufficiently bore those looking for spicy discussions until this SOPA topic fades.
Interesting- in spirit, though I suppose the danger in having a "standard" response is that by using it consistently in that particular context you're shifting its meaning over time to something like "You're being lame. Did you know that?". Probably better than "standard response" as a phrase, would be a standard response being calm socratic irony- a response that requires some thought and substance on the part of the writer, rather than just a quick "can you elaborate" boxed one liner that becomes a cargo cult.
There is only one possible way to solve this problem that has a shot at working and I'm developing/testing it as quickly as I can.
It requires a combination of crowdsourcing and machine learning (NLP is cool, but optional).
It is part rating, voting, tagging, reputation, recommendation and more.
It sounds complicated, it isnt for users (~2 clicks from ~10% of readers) but is for me to build (3rd week with rails, so relative).
It is mostly still theory at this point but the math checks out and user tests have exceeded expectations but are very early stage.
If you've read this and think I'm crazy, you're right (best to accept it).
If you think I'm naive, it's a possibility that's kept me up many nights over the past year.
If you are interested in learning more on the off chance I'm right, you can reach me at (Mat . Tyndall at gmail).
I am in San Francisco working on this full time after dropping out from grad school.
I will tell you in excruciating detail in person or via Skype how it works and why.
I have not slept very much in the past week so I have no idea if posting this is a good idea but I doubt I'll get even 5 votes or any takers but thanks for reading.
I must admit you've made me a bit curious, though I have a feeling that whatever it is you're proposing will probably just go straight over my head anyway.
Since you're in SF though, have you thought about holding a small group discussion about it over at noisebridge sometime? People there are always so insightful, friendly and willing to help, I'm thinking that holding a think-tank at a place like that might help you get the sort of 'back-and-forth' feedback it seems you're looking for.
As for the prototype going over your head, first order it looks pretty simple, second, third and fourth, ... Hey, even I'm not sure I've mapped out all the possible dynamics but the possibility is unquestionably there.
Noisebridge is cool, hung out there a few times. I'm super busy now but maybe in a week or two though I am a sucker for coffee chats (hint hint). Basically I suck at writing and would rather connect through any other medium.
Also to add a few details, I'm doing this as a startup (Tagbax, don't mind the landing page, I'm really not trying to drive traffic yet). Community comment moderation isn't necessarily my first choice to apply the tech $ wise (I really ought to drop by disqus one of these days), but it was designed specifically for user-generated content.
Before you lose any more nights losing sleep about this idea you have and its third or fourth iteration, maybe you should just release the idea in its original form and see how people react. I'm sure your idea is great, but I worry that it's a perfect solution to an imperfect userbase...meaning people value worthless, soundbite comments more than well thought out responses.
It's kinda like how people complain about how politics are only about soundbites. Sure, it's great to argue that among friends, but who really spends the time understanding the facts about every issue a candidate debates?
The solution is to align the interest of the individual with the group. I've run this past hundreds of people, it's pretty solid as theory but coefficients matter so it's gotta be tested.
Consider another, simpler way to solve the problem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3473753 . Self-organizing, no extra steps required, and mostly transparent to the users.
HN is still the only place where I'll often read the comments first, because they're very likely more valuable than the article. I'd rather have it than my RSS reader.
Having said that, there is some room for anti-jerk improvements. Maybe very high-karma users can downvote further than the general minimum, or they get a special "really, don't do this" double-down-arrow to use in special occasions.
Sadly, people can accumulate pretty high points just because they post articles every hour or two. Therefore, maybe extra superpowers have to be invite-only.
This is just the type of blog post that we don't need on HN. People said some mean things in that thread, they basically all got downvoted and the top comment is one admonishing them (so do we need it to be dug up again by this article?). Isn't that the comment system working well? Isn't that the proof of where the balance in the community lies? It's a forum open to anyone, not some elite club; if it were a invite only real-name club the voting would hardly be necessary. If it gets to the point of reddit, where ugly things (often disguised as or put inside jokes) are upvoted, then there'd be a point. But it's not at that point and this article is just moral high horsing, performing moral purity in front of an audience.
I see one annoying meme comment per HN session (so maybe 20 comment threads/2-300 comments), and that's only when I choose to highlight the down-voted text myself usually. In an open pseudonymous/anonymous forum that's a pretty decent signal-to-noise ratio. Use the voting system, ban repeat offenders, keep calm and carry on.
I think it's just a matter of numbers. HN links have, on average, always had relatively few comments, so growth is more obvious, even if there were no other difference but numbers. The comment counts number in the dozens to the low hundreds - reading a typical full comment thread doesn't take long.
So if HN doubled in users over the last N months, then even if 95% of the comments are non-abusive, that means the story that used to get 20 comments and have 1 abusive comments now gets 40 comments and 2 abusive comments. And when it comes to mean, shitty stuff like this, 2 seems like a lot more than 1. And that's with 95% good-guys. When a bigger story happens and gets 240 comments, at 95% positive comments, that's 12 worthless or mean or needlessly sarcastic comments. Ugh.
I run a much less successful site than this and have dealt with and thought a lot about comment issues. HN does a brilliant job, for the most part, in handling comments. I would say that some people are unfairly hell banned (I see dead people) or slow banned, but it's for the greater good of the community and you can always get a new account.
My one possible suggestion would be to make HN more social. That way all the people who like to be trolls can troll each other and people not interested can unfollow, etc... Although, the Google+ Hacker News Circle has basically done this for me, and I like it a lot.
The guidelines state that "HN is becoming reddit" is a subject that should be avoided unless you have something really interesting to say. This article has something interesting to say and, I suppose, there has been other similar interesting threads in the past.
Aside from this article, what are the other past submissions that are worth reading to see how community deterioration has been felt through the years?
“”"”The more recent readers don’t, or a critical mass of people is developing who don’t work to contribute substantive material. I hadn’t really thought about the issue until about a month ago, in this comment thread, where I pointed out that single-function devices can still have utility. “”"
You pointed it out, alright.
But:
besides the obvious observation that pointing out that “single-function devices can still have utility” is not “substantive” in itself (gee, we know it already, we use forks, knives, socks, pens, and a million other single-function devices everyday)
you also failed to notice that the topic of the thread (as set by the parent) was not the utility of single function devices, but the notion of “brainwidth”. Of which you said: “My brain is not a passive entity that is ‘being sucked up.’ People either let themselves be sucked up, or they don’t”.
And your proof of your brain NOT being “sucked up” was to …recite your use of every hipster cliche: the inevitable moleskine, the wrist watch, plus an iPhone. You even responded with point 3, regarding moleskine’s variable/declining quality, another hipster concern that lead to alternatives such as “Field Notes”, etc.
Is irony completely opaque to you?
“”" Dextorious has a lot of problems with reason; he tends to post things like “Thanks for the “democratic” downvoting.””"”
Yeah. I have tons of problems with reason. But you seem to have problems with proper identification of the relevance and purpose of a comment and/or comment thread.
For example, I didn’t argue that downvoting is undemocratic in itself and in general, I posted that in thread about how America is not cutting it as a model for democracy. Downvotes to that comment meant that “no it’s cutting it, and we’ll prove it by downvoting contrarian opinions”. See the irony this time?
Have you also missed the general discussion on HN about using downvotes to flag out off topic or bad argumentation, instead of using it to fade into oblivions opinions you don’t agree with? The second can be called undemocratic, in the way it violates the, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” principle.
Or, let’s take:
“”"”He calls Facebook “hyper-valued web crap,” but not in the context of providing real insight.”"”"
Over-valued crap is enough real insight about Facebook. You’ll thank me one day.
But you seemed to have missed the general idea, cutting my sentence in half. Why would you do that now, jseliger? Why?
My quote was: “As if this has worked well in the past for other hyper-valued web crap…”, ie suggesting we learned from the history of other hyper-inflated over-valuations. I even mentioned the flagship example of VA Linux, circa 1999.
“”"I looked through his comment history; there are many one-line, two-sentence comments like this one, which led to a pointless flame war. “”"
How offensive, my two sentence comment. You happened to miss that it was a reply to a one sentence comment, about how: “[Python] made the mistake of making whitespace significant thereby driving off people in droves”.
Which is more insightful,
1) that people avoided Python (a highly successful, widely used language with a huge community) because of whitespace,
or my comment that says that
2) that was a concern (and frequent “religious” issue) in the nineties, nobody really cares about that kind of thing re: python now?
“”"Others tell him that he’s not being very nice, as in a comment where Dinkumthinkum says, “You’re missing the point.” “”"
Someone told somebody else on the internet “you’re missing the point”. News at 11. And this somehow translates to “I’m not being very nice”?
Well, I might not be nice.
But I’m not a finger-pointing, cry-baby, stalking-idiot about it.
“Boo-hoo somebody pooh-poohed on one of my comments, I’m gonna search their comment history, present it out of c...
I think you are being a bigger jerk than dextorious. You are just angry because he called you a hipster.
I checked his history and he is far from being a troll. You on the other hand wrote a content-free rant full of self-praise ("I try to comment when I have useful, unique, original, or non-standard things to say") and then posted it to HN too.
Pratical approach: How about adding a link to the Guidelines from the "new comment" page? And maybe putting the most important part right next to the submit / reply button, like "Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation" or "If you have nothing of value to say, don't say anything"?
(making this into a separate comment since it's a different, related idea)
How about having a "flag" link for comments with a drop-down list of points from the guidelines that the comment violates?
It would reduce the noise from other replying to the comment stating why they think it's inappropriate, and would still let the commenter know what they did wrong while burrying the comment.
There is a spanish Digg-like site, Menéame [1], which offers this same option. I think it works pretty well as it keeps the site clean of news which don't obey the rules. Despite that, people will still reply explaining why they flagged the comment (and I think this is the correct way to behave: you should explain why the comment is wrong and how to improve it in order to improve the community)
Like crcsmnky [1], I've been reading HN for a while now but have contributed little. The extant comments from domain adepts generally precludes my ability to add anything constructive to these discussions.
I too have noticed a shift in the timbre here lately. The degradation of civil and apropos discourse is marked. Criticism based on logic and rhetoric (ad hominem, straw-man, etcetera) has lost some ground to internet-acronyms (IANAL, IIRC, and such) Since culling sources takes work, this warrants addressing for risk of losing this relevance.
I've been thinking about this problem recently in the face of web searches that yield forum discussions. I'm begun to avoid forum results, due to endless threads that lack a solution to the specific problem (even sometimes incorrectly marked [Solved]).
Curated Q&A sites [2] address this successfully by putting the correct answer above the fold. But community discussions don't have a correct answer, so the problem here is not quite the same. I don't have a solution, but even revising sort order might do. I'd hazard to suggest an additional degree of community-based voting and editing should be added.
I don't understand this post at all. If I read the comments on the thread about Arfa, I see mostly positive, interesting and insightful comments. A few comments were bad and were downvoted.
In any thread, it would be surprising to get no bad comments at all. They'll always be there and you can do nothing but ignore them, even when they get upvoted. Just keeping adding your own insightful comments, ignore the other ones and I wonder whether things will deteriorate much further.
To throw a couple of ideas into the "tech solutions" pile, I wonder what would happen to the quality of comments in a community if a mandatory 1 minute delay was put in before the text area would appear. This would I think have two benefits: 1. it would for commenters to think about what they were saying for at least a minute. 2. It would raise the barrier of entry to the point that posting a worthless one liner doesn't seem worthwhile or satisfying.
Nice idea, unique solution to the problem. I'm working on a site right now that allows comments, when I release it I have the same concerns about comment quality. Time delays may be a great answer, perhaps also varying by the upvoted rating of the commentor: higher-karma users have the comment window appear after less time.
None of us want to see hacker news grow into reddit imgurl land, but I see that becoming more and more the case lately.
127 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadI don't have the evidence to support this, but my educated guess is that a proportion of it is driven by the fact that it was a Pakistani (and presumably Muslim) girl.
The meme pool for Pakistan and Muslims in general is driven by the terrorism / fear narrative; masking one's prejudice and engage in a self-satisfactory public bashing is easy when we also have a competing meme (Microsoft as borg) that can be used to mask the ugly aspects of it.
The other alternative (that people really do hate Microsoft so much that they would make these comments about a dead child) is so childish that I can't bring myself to believe it. It would be morally equivalent to.. well, cheering for people dying without health care. IE: A small group of people so wrapped in a narrative that they can't bring themselves to see how abhorrent their beliefs have become to the majority around them. Are those people us?
There are at least two ways to approach this situation: the first, taken by the negative commenters on the other article, is to allow jealousy to take over. The second is to look at a lack of recognition as a simple problem to be solved, and learn from those who receive it. Let's quit whining about not getting the attention we wanted when we were programming at whatever young age, and try to learn how to market ourselves better. Above all, let's show some respect.
Not sure what might be the reason of that, except jealousy.
[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469927
I do think it's just use of the term "programming", when (while what she did was very impressive for a young girl, from her culture) she didn't appear to do much programming.
Obviously it's misdirected. People should be saying "What lousy reporting, celebrate what she actually did!"
Says he doesn't pick on Dextorious.
Picks on Dextorious.
There will always be people that think it used to be better, because it's easier to remember the good feelings than the bad. This happens on every online community all over the entire Internet and it's been happening since the Internet started.
My only advice for solving the problem is to stop feeding the trolls. Dextorious obviously is trying to get a rise out of people. Ignore it and it goes away. Anything else is just adding fuel to the fire.
Here's some general advice: if you find yourself beginning a comment on a thread about someone who has just died with a disclaimer of the form "I hate to be that guy" or "I hate to write this," just don't say it.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/01/15/1937259/progra...
Perhaps it's valid to note that the story provoked polarized reactions and thoughts, and thus better avoid putting each other down for those reactions.
I'm working on an upgrade, details (or lack thereof) can be found lower on the page.
These are examples of 'bad' comments, rather than just 'noise'. However I think they both have the same immediate cause - community acceptance. For some reason the posts with little content are being rewarded. Discussions on how to change this (via the voting system or otherwise) have happened many times but I think more needs to be done.
As to why the community accepted such a negative comment I have no idea - and fixing this may be much harder.
The comment was clearly poorly phrased. When I made it, there were no negative comments on the story, and it was really just intended to question the "programmer prodigy" aspect, not to criticise the deceased or imply that she was not an impressive young person.
I hate (!) to discard any part of the english language; I think all expressions have their place, including "I hate to be that guy, but" - however, in hindsight, the net effect was to lump my relatively neutral comment in with all the haters on the thread, so, in practice, it was proven to be a poor choice.
That said, I do dislike the habit of idolising deceased people as perfect in every way. It reminds me of the "HN Salesmanship hero" story (where I commented that he wasn't my hero and I resented this attribution, for which I got badly downvoted). This person was clearly impressive without making stuff up about them. From all the comments and interviews, it in fact seems that her programming ability, far from being prodigy-like, was in fact the least impressive of her other personal traits.
To conclude: had I known that there would be a pile-up of hateful belittling following my comment, I wouldn't have made it, or if I felt the need to ask that question, I would have done so in a much more carefully phrased way. I fully take the blame for not realising that this type of thread could descend down to that level, but my intention was certainly not to belittle.
I agree with the post about thinking before you add something and not being mean for the sake of being mean. I think we also have to be careful here about a culture of groupthink and censoring alternative opinions via very negative feedback.
I dont think its a good idea to make statements like that on someone who is not here anymore to defend herself.
I dont want to make assumptions about everyone, but she was definitely a far far better programmer than me when I was 16.:(
"I can never stop feeling, but sometimes I'm too tired to think" -- rallying around the asinine "prodigy" headline.
"I can never stop thinking, but sometimes I'm too tired to feel" -- rallying around the emotionally tone-deaf responses.
I think we all tend to identify with one side more than the other, but instead of rallying ourselves on either side of the issue, we should see each side as a vital aspect of being human that each of us has, with one side often gaining the upper hand and then getting out of hand. If we want to measure the supposed "decline" of Hacker News by the fact that one side gets out of hand and provokes a response the other, I think both sides need to be held to account. Glurge begets callousness. A pervasive environment of callousness makes glurge seem like a welcome relief. If we want to avoid either, we should avoid both, and that means ignoring offenses instead of responding in kind.
They weren't bad comments at all. The circle-the-wagons "we're better than this" reaction is worse.
While a death is usually a tragedy, made magnitudes worse when it's a child, the title of that post was absurd, and it was a giant elephant in the room that simply had to be rationally diffused. Like others I went into that story primarily to read how she was a programming prodigy.
Tragic death. Not a programming prodigy. The misrepresentation was noticed by all, and it will be a sad day when social convention means we all have to carry forward the lie lest we offend someone's sensibility about death.
PG, given that you gray-out comments that get torrentially downvoted, perhaps you could bold-face (or render in green?) those comments that get a certain number of upvotes, or perhaps those comments that exceed X% of the aggregate number of upvotes for the thread.
When I joined HN I decided to do an experiment. On reddit and slashdot, I go under a pseudonym except when I need to make an announcement. But on HN I always go by my own name. The result is dramatic: I'm much more careful and considerate on HN. It's a clear verification of Penny Arcade's famous theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/).
I think that the elimination of anonymity is ultimately the only thing which can keep HN from the inevitable slide toward 4chan that all comment sites are on.
I didn't comment in the thread under discussion, but if I felt there was one point that needed to be added to the original story, it was the one made by many posters, roughly, "This smells like glurge, and when people are mourning for an inspiring little girl, it's common sense not to take what they say about her at face value." Of course that wouldn't reflect my whole reaction as a human being.
And that's the difference between reacting as a non-anonymous human being, where you are careful to present your whole feelings about a topic, and reacting as a member of a message board, where you're like to dismiss most of what you think and feel as commonplace and not worth mentioning.
Like any problem in communication, it's a problem of readers as well as writers. Reading a message from "asdf1234" or "prgrmrd00d4u" (not real names AFAIK) and reading it as representative of a human being's feelings doesn't make any sense, but it's irresistible for a lot of people. If the nerds on Slashdot and HN can't resist parsing comments that way, I think it's time to give up and accept that as human beings we can only see each other as whole human beings and not merely as contributors to a conversation. So the burden of solving this communication problem is on the writers to act like whole human beings.
The primary psychological resistance -- and believe me, I do rebel against being "human" on a discussion board with every bit of my being -- comes from the fact that most of us would prefer to sound more like scientists than like politicians. Scientists say, "Here is my tiny marginal contribution." Politicians say, "This is who I am." Geeks roll their eyes when a politician answering a question about tax policy in a debate spends all of his allotted time talking about how much he loves his children and then caps it off with half a sentence stating his position on the issue. We hate that and don't want to be like that. We want to hear how he differs from his opponents. We don't want to hear everything he has in common with everyone else. We want the diff.
Our humanity is what we have in common, exactly what is excluded when we present ourselves as a diff. If you read the original discussion and read every comment as a diff, then you don't see comments by inhuman people. You see whole human beings whose common humanity was redacted by the diff filter running between their brains and their keyboards.
Maybe the need to relax that diff filter a little bit so we all sound like human beings needs to be part of a FAQ somewhere....
For users like me, there is friction in posting because I have to convince myself that I've satisfied the implicit claim. For others, I assume, this friction is absent. So add it artificially: somehow make the claim explicit.
Maybe require posters to select from a list of categories (e.g. Useful Information, Insightful, Civil Disagreement, ...), explicitly claiming their post meets that criteria. Or, less restrictive: a required checkbox that simply reminds you of the claim you're making with your post.
There are some people who I am never going to agree with. Their comments are invariably ignorant or proselytizing or cruel to my eyes. I'd rather not have that.
First, I'm still on the fence in regards to the quality of discussion here. I think there's a tendency for familiarity to breed contempt (the more familiar you become with HN, the more aware you are of things like mean discussions, and the more rose-colored your glasses will be when considering what it was like "before"). There have been a few attempts to objectively measure any degradation of the site, and so far they haven't found anything conclusive, as far as I know. So, it might not be as bad as you think.
Second, you start out with a really general point, but then halfway-through fall mostly into a single example. If that's the example that got you thinking about this, then you've let yourself turn a wasted moment reading a pointless comment into quite a large waste of your time. The friendliest way I can think of to respond to that is that it is a very silly thing to do. :-)
What are you even doing online, anyway? I mean, for me, at least, being online makes me feel pretty miserable afterward, especially compared to anything else I could be doing. I'll look at my threads page sometimes and the older my most recent comment is, the happier I am with myself. That means I've been spending time on better things -- and anything other than commenting on a website is a better thing. I don't want to chase you off, but at the same time, sometimes I sit back and think about all the time wasted worldwide since the invention of the online forum, and how little real positive impact there has been from all of that, and it kinda bums me out. I must've blown entire months on Slashdot way back when, and all I remember from that now is ... uhm ... Hellmouth? ... and ... hmm. I forget the second thing. I am literally a happier, better person, for every moment that I'm not online.
Thirdly, although your intentions are good, you are criticizing behavior which leads naturally from the design of the site. How much thoughtful discussion is really possible on a site like this one, where most threads come and go after just a few hours, never to be read again? Hell, I wrote about this 9 months ago (http://robsheldon.com/conversations-online), submitted it to HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423975), where it got a little bit of discussion, and then that was it.
Forums like this one are designed to be topical, not thoughtful. With the invention of internet points -- yay, karma, and all that other nonsense -- people have had more incentive than ever to quickly bang out a single-line joke, get a point for every chuckle, and move on. (One of the things which has gotten me the most yummy internet points was a joke -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102126 -- and, although it was pretty funny, it wasn't nearly as meaningful to me as, say, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132576).
HN is not a good place for thoughtful, meaningful discussion. It maybe says it wants to be, but the most important things about its design say otherwise. So at some point, you have to ask yourself, "What am I doing here?"
...Every time that I look at this comment for the next few days, I will be ashamed of myself, because I will know that I wasted 15 minutes writing a thing which would be read by a few people for a few hours and then never again, and I could have played a good game of Go instead.
And you didn't waste your time. I read what you wrote. I enjoyed it. It sparked a discussion, see? But I am going to bed now so I guess that's over... But had this been any other time of day we may have gone back and forth a bit and others might have joined in too. Hours are more than enough to be thoughtful.
Okay, I'm done seeding responses, time to sleep like the dead.
Yeah.
And preferably he could have used my quotes in context and in their entirety, instead of cutting pieces here and there to present them as inane.
This depends on current data for avg karma vs rate of comments which is not publicly available (to my knowledge). This also depends on whether users with the highest avg score actually give great constructive comments but I have not been able to find a way to list those users -- http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20612/list-users-...
However, I think that my posts on such subjects are the most beneficial for the site--they're the ones where I have a decent amount of knowledge and direct experience; I am much more likely to contribute something insightful on a CS article than on a sociology one, for example. Rate-limiting would make it harder for me to post about my strongest subjects without changing how I post about random articles.
I think conflating comment score and article submission score is a mistake because of this kind of thing.
That said, I have been reading the comments for some time and I think the quality has changed when it comes to items that crack the front page. Beyond the first 30-40 items I think the discussion has remained far more useful than not. That's not to say that discussions worsen as stories move up, I think the volume tends to increase which invariably brings less helpful comments. This is not hard and fast, just my anecdotal observation.
When I was competing on BattleBots I was amazed at how it magnified people's immaturity in their efforts to 'be on TV'. That really made me stop and look at the folks around me on the other teams, and at the show, and there was a very large difference between people who didn't care that they were possibly going to be on TV, and those who mostly cared that they were possibly on TV.
I tend to think of it as the 'celebrity' effect where someone gets their gratification from others noticing them. They troll popular newsgroups (back in the day), they make outrageous comments on community web sites, they seem to be trying desperately to prove somehow, someone, will know they exist. There is a lot of anger there too.
So they come places like here at HN and they comment poorly. They are particularly vocal around topics for which there are no definitive ways of measuring correctness, topics that are more emotion than reason. They are emboldened by anonymity.
Mostly they seem to want to be heard, to know that someone heard them, and ideally to be acknowledged as being heard.
Keeping them isolated, in their brokenness, makes for a better experience the community. But it also makes the broken ones more bitter and angry. I cannot see a way, in an anonymous, or psuedo-anonymous community with little face to face contact, to bring them through their insecurity and into a better place.
It is a problem worth solving though.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, because I had to make a decision as to whether or not to be a part of this "community." Aside from some speech-and-debate oriented forums in high school, I've stayed away from online communities. They just don't seem to have high quality discussions, even at places where tech thrives, like xkcd. I suppose I'm lucky to have a job where I get to work with a lot of stimulating and highly intelligent people, with whom I can have conversations that last several days, so maybe my perspective is somewhat anomalous, but I doubt it. In any case, I stumbled upon paulgraham.com a few months ago, and what I enjoyed most in his essays was the reserved, focused quality, so I figured a forum/news site run by him might be interesting. I've also had an interest in open/accessible science via web-based applications, and becoming a good enough coder to write some of what I do on a Cray machine at work [1]. I am not a hacker. I learned Visual Basic in high school, and can get around basic web design/javascript/rails tutorials and stat scripting languages we use at work like R and Matlab, install Ubuntu and use Vim daily. This seemed like a good place to learn better techniques.
I've learned a lot, and I won't go on about that. Many of the comments have been thoughtful and informative, particularly the ones that point to relevant places to get more information (I've noticed user Joakal does this a lot [2]), or the ones that disagree substantively.
But the most frustrating kind of comment I've encountered on this site isn't meanness, or blatant stupidity, but the Hard-Not-To-UpVote kind. Most people can tell a troll, and most trolls get down-voted to the point of white-out. Most stupid one-line jokes get voted to the bottom of the page as well, or just ignored. Today's discussion[3] was extremely embarrassing, so much so that if I'd seen that discussion first I might never have joined the site, but the meanness was not among the most up-voted comments, and even though there were a some annoying individuals who felt the need to prove how unremarkable someone was, most were rather positive. And the rest of the community rallied around upvoting jaquesm's comment, and downvoting the inappropriate ones to oblivion (though not soon enough).
One unfortunate thing I've noticed: a lot of the very popular comments are sometimes of a "fluffy" quality. I'm a "scientist" and I get to sift through a lot of hype on a daily basis; what I appreciate most are focused rational arguments, even if I ultimately disagree; I don't like fluff, even if I've used it from time to time, and certainly I've fallen for it. I remember reading a few months ago a great passage in a PG essay:
The most dangerous thing for the frontpage is stuff that's too easy to upvote. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some work by the reader to decide whether or not to upvote it. An amusing cartoon takes less. A rant with a rallying cry as the title takes zero, because people vote it up without even reading it.
Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.[4]
I think this applies to some comments I see here (maybe some comments I've made). Quickly shot off, and easy to judge, the ones that make you feel guilty not upticking. I don't know what to do about it - I have upvoted some comments of dubious quality because it's hard not to, but what I appreciate most is substantive disagreement. My favorite things to upvote are comments that disagree with me, even if my mind isn't ultimately changed. Comments I can't stand (and feel guilty for making at times) are the ones that say "great point!" or offer an emotionally charged appeal with nothing interesting or uni...
Example: The parent post could be ~ 5 lines and contain the same point. I really like the way 4chan handles this sort of thing: The so called "green text". On 4chan it is unspoken rule that nobody cares about you. In order to make your text interesting enough to be read, you have to make it as short as possible while still carrying your point across.
While 4chan may be a fun way to pass time, it's hardly the place I go when I want to read/join intelligent discussions or learn new things.
The degeneration of HN is likely due to the influx of new users from 4chan and Reddit, where comments are very short and often appeal to the lowest common denominator.
This is often true, but I think the value of brevity comes mostly from the context, a threaded comment page. In that context, users expect a discussion, not a monologue. They're not just looking to passively absorb information by reading, they're looking to sharpen their own understanding by actively articulating a response. That's harder to do when you're trying to respond to a comment that makes multiple points. Better to break a long-form comment into several more tightly focused short comments so that people can more quickly pick out the topics they want to respond to.
The danger here is that the easy-to-upvote throwaway comments become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like it or not, karma is social validation. A long, thought-out reply that gets no upvotes is somewhat depressing; it makes you think that, even at your most thoughtful, your thoughts are unappreciated. Contrast that with a cheap and easy line that gets 40 points, and the social feedback is clear: your considered opinion isn't valued, but your cheap lines are.
It makes me think that the karma system itself might be fatally flawed for its lack of scalability. What works for a small, mostly homogenous community breaks when that community becomes larger and more diverse. We can deny it all we like, but I'm sure most people feel pretty good when they log on and see their karma significantly higher than it was the last time they checked. It's an ego boost, and few people are immune to enjoying that. When playing to the lowest common denominator gives you that fix of social validation, and a more thoughtful comment doesn't, it's pretty strong positive reinforcement for the less-desirable behaviour.
I'm not sure how to combat this in a scalable manner. It's difficult to think of examples of community-moderated forums maintaining quality in the face of rapid expansion. My previous suggestions of weighting the votes of those who consistently upvote quality comments higher than those of people who upvote fluff has met with little traction, and I can see some pretty big potential weaknesses there, myself.
In reviewing this comment, however, I have had a thought of something that seems ridiculously trivial, but might just work: pg has stated before his belief that comment length is a relatively good indicator of quality. I notice, however, that the comment box is relatively tiny. It makes a long, thought-out post appear, prima facie, no more substantive than a 3-liner. I would be interested to see what the result of making the comment box significantly larger would be. Would people, upon seeing that much empty space surrounding a throwaway comment, be likely to reconsider posting it? Are there easy cues like this that can be used to hack the behaviour of commenters? I'd be interested in seeing the results of running an A/B test on a seemingly simple change like this: Make half the users' comment boxes two or three times as long. Leave it that way for a few months, then take a random sample of the resulting comments and see if there's a difference in quality. I wouldn't be surprised if there was.
[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458644
[2]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462700
The problem with many submissions recently has been they are taken directly from reddit, and have content that sits well with reddit but not HN. The "Programming prodigy passes away at 16" story is a good example: it's tragic news, but the fact that someone has died is not necessarily a good HN submission. Although much of the discussion about Erlang and Haskell went right over my head, I think this site did better when those stories were oft-submitted, if only because it tends to push away the people who would prefer fluffy "human interest" stories. I personally have no intention of creating a startup but find pointers to useful technical ideas and tools here - more of those, please
So I think we need to concentrate on the submissions, removing stories of marginal interest to hackers, and being diligent in upvoting good stories and comments, and downvoting crufty comments.
The motivation to be part of an online community should be the enjoyment at the discussions and not the number of points.
I hate the points, and I hate it, that I look after them. I think that just the presence of a karma system has a bad effect on the quality of the comments. You're getting what you ask for.
It's symptomatic how often I read 'Please don't downvote me' or 'I hate to say this, but' in the last time.
Usually, if the first paragraph is not absorbing enough and there is a risk that the rest is going to be rambling, I simply stop reading without any regrets. For me it's not an attention span issue, it's a limited time issue.
I would define a value-added comment as lucidly conveyed viewpoint based on a simple set of logically-consistent principles ... that flies in the face of commonly-held understandings of the subject matter at hand. It's not enough to offer an opinion, or an adversarial opinion - it must be clearly stated and supported, so that the emotional weight of its disagreement prompts a healthy discussion where some measure of truth is found, where some insight is gained where there was none before.
This rests on the premises of intellectual honesty, trust, and emotional maturity within all involved, but I nevertheless think that kind of discourse is what would grow HN, and what we ought to focus on. Calling out non-value-added comments does nothing to create a culture of value-added comments.
That was all it took to convince me that Giles Bowkett's original critique of HN was entirely correct, when he said several years ago that this transformation was inevitable: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...
I just checked, and my last comment was 906 days ago. This phenomenon is not new, and any reaction predicated on the idea that this is a relatively recent, relatively sudden decline are unlikely to succeed. It's a structural problem, possibly with human nature, and the best we can do is slow it down (at which HN has been successful, but that's probably only because it's not a business, and so explicitly does not share other sites' preoccupation with growth).
So, in some ways, your free speech is moderated by private interests. This is not a critic, just a valid point I think.
PG is not going to do anything that increases the quality of news.YC if it in any way could negatively impact YC's bottom line.
I think this is why Slashdot added the "Funny" upvote option. It doesn't add any karma points to the poster, but the voter still feels like they recognized or validated a clever comment.
Humans are social, we have a need for acknowledgment from our peers so we can measure or opinions against others and to help develop our thinking on a particular point. As you suggest above, karma points are a crude replacement for the nods of agreement that you would get in a face to face conversation that signify that you or I are saying something interesting. It's a not a nice feeling to think you are saying something interesting only to find you are talking to yourself. Therefore, there is a strong incentive towards pithy one line comments that get seen quickly and appeal to the masses.
The trouble with karma points is there is no differentiation between the nods you get in drunken agreement from your friends when you say something funny in a bar and the nods you get from your colleagues when you say something insightful. We would value these differently in a face to face situation. On the internet it's just a competition for generic human recongition points where the short fast comments that 'press peoples buttons' are at an advantage.
The trouble with pithy one line comments that press peoples buttons is that they are hard to get right, not many people can strike the right balance. What's meant to be a pithy one liner actually just ends up saying nothing, something offensive, illogical or merely just voicing tribal agreement with Apple or Google or whatever.
Maybe it would be better to be able to see other peoples upvotes but not out own? What about a mandatory 1 hour before a comment appears, perhaps just display a '...' to signify that someone is preparing an answer? I don't know what the answer is, but I also miss the more challenging technical articles.
Also, I don't like your proposed solution. It assumes the worst in people. I tend to believe that if you cater to the lowest common denominator then that's what you get but when you assume the best in people they'll try to live up to that expectation. Of course people will be people and it's inevitable they we disappoint from time to time but... Well, but nothing. That's how it goes I guess.
Regarding your second point. At the scale of HN now, I think we have to consider people not as individuals but as a swarm of actors; perhaps analogous to particles in a CFD analysis. Then ask the question 'what design changes need to be made to change the direction of these actors'. I don't personally assume the worst in people but I don't think people are naturally moral actors. They won't 'do the right thing' without any incentives. People are driven by the positive and negative consequences of their actions which they measure from the reactions of their peers. In the case of HN our peers are the crowd sourced 'off the cuff' opinions of a random sample of a few hundred thousand random people. Some people are horrified by the idea that morals don't exist and it is a bit of a scary concept being surrounded by potential monsters, but really I think it's just nature and lots of natural things are scary but can be mitigated by design.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3414355 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460773
The first is a veritable essay that compares how the failure of an ancient Swedish warship was directly comparable to the failure of the space shuttle Challenger. I think, out of all the comments that I've posted to Hacker News, I'm most proud of that one.
The second comment is essentially a throwaway criticism of the positioning of UI elements on the new Duck Duck Go search results page. It's not terrible, but it certainly took less critical thinking for me to write than the first comment. And yet it received 5 times as many votes.
How can we fix this? I don't know, but I do think that taking away comment scores was a mistake that exacerbated this issue. Now, when I see a long form comment such as yours, I have no idea if its score is +1 or +100. All I can tell is that the score is above zero, by the color of the text. This makes it harder for me to judge whether a comment is "underrated" (i.e. it has a score that is below what I'd expect for a comment of that quality) or "overrated" (i.e. it has a score that's unjustifiably high). I think bringing back comment scores would help fix the problem of long-form analytic comments being underrated.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468210
I bring this up because I also have a theory on how to handle it. Temporarily restrict the number of political and hot-topic stories in HN through coordinated flagging. I realize this may be controversial (even borderline xenophobic), but I think it would dissuade those looking for a home here who don't want to adhere to the guidelines. If the hot-ness of the material on the front page decreased for a while, I think it would sufficiently bore those looking for spicy discussions until this SOPA topic fades.
[Disclaimer: I regularly comment on SOPA threads]
It requires a combination of crowdsourcing and machine learning (NLP is cool, but optional).
It is part rating, voting, tagging, reputation, recommendation and more.
It sounds complicated, it isnt for users (~2 clicks from ~10% of readers) but is for me to build (3rd week with rails, so relative).
It is mostly still theory at this point but the math checks out and user tests have exceeded expectations but are very early stage.
If you've read this and think I'm crazy, you're right (best to accept it).
If you think I'm naive, it's a possibility that's kept me up many nights over the past year.
If you are interested in learning more on the off chance I'm right, you can reach me at (Mat . Tyndall at gmail).
I am in San Francisco working on this full time after dropping out from grad school.
I will tell you in excruciating detail in person or via Skype how it works and why.
I have not slept very much in the past week so I have no idea if posting this is a good idea but I doubt I'll get even 5 votes or any takers but thanks for reading.
Since you're in SF though, have you thought about holding a small group discussion about it over at noisebridge sometime? People there are always so insightful, friendly and willing to help, I'm thinking that holding a think-tank at a place like that might help you get the sort of 'back-and-forth' feedback it seems you're looking for.
Noisebridge is cool, hung out there a few times. I'm super busy now but maybe in a week or two though I am a sucker for coffee chats (hint hint). Basically I suck at writing and would rather connect through any other medium.
Also to add a few details, I'm doing this as a startup (Tagbax, don't mind the landing page, I'm really not trying to drive traffic yet). Community comment moderation isn't necessarily my first choice to apply the tech $ wise (I really ought to drop by disqus one of these days), but it was designed specifically for user-generated content.
It's kinda like how people complain about how politics are only about soundbites. Sure, it's great to argue that among friends, but who really spends the time understanding the facts about every issue a candidate debates?
Having said that, there is some room for anti-jerk improvements. Maybe very high-karma users can downvote further than the general minimum, or they get a special "really, don't do this" double-down-arrow to use in special occasions.
Sadly, people can accumulate pretty high points just because they post articles every hour or two. Therefore, maybe extra superpowers have to be invite-only.
I see one annoying meme comment per HN session (so maybe 20 comment threads/2-300 comments), and that's only when I choose to highlight the down-voted text myself usually. In an open pseudonymous/anonymous forum that's a pretty decent signal-to-noise ratio. Use the voting system, ban repeat offenders, keep calm and carry on.
So if HN doubled in users over the last N months, then even if 95% of the comments are non-abusive, that means the story that used to get 20 comments and have 1 abusive comments now gets 40 comments and 2 abusive comments. And when it comes to mean, shitty stuff like this, 2 seems like a lot more than 1. And that's with 95% good-guys. When a bigger story happens and gets 240 comments, at 95% positive comments, that's 12 worthless or mean or needlessly sarcastic comments. Ugh.
My one possible suggestion would be to make HN more social. That way all the people who like to be trolls can troll each other and people not interested can unfollow, etc... Although, the Google+ Hacker News Circle has basically done this for me, and I like it a lot.
Aside from this article, what are the other past submissions that are worth reading to see how community deterioration has been felt through the years?
You pointed it out, alright.
But:
besides the obvious observation that pointing out that “single-function devices can still have utility” is not “substantive” in itself (gee, we know it already, we use forks, knives, socks, pens, and a million other single-function devices everyday)
you also failed to notice that the topic of the thread (as set by the parent) was not the utility of single function devices, but the notion of “brainwidth”. Of which you said: “My brain is not a passive entity that is ‘being sucked up.’ People either let themselves be sucked up, or they don’t”.
And your proof of your brain NOT being “sucked up” was to …recite your use of every hipster cliche: the inevitable moleskine, the wrist watch, plus an iPhone. You even responded with point 3, regarding moleskine’s variable/declining quality, another hipster concern that lead to alternatives such as “Field Notes”, etc.
Is irony completely opaque to you?
“”" Dextorious has a lot of problems with reason; he tends to post things like “Thanks for the “democratic” downvoting.””"”
Yeah. I have tons of problems with reason. But you seem to have problems with proper identification of the relevance and purpose of a comment and/or comment thread.
For example, I didn’t argue that downvoting is undemocratic in itself and in general, I posted that in thread about how America is not cutting it as a model for democracy. Downvotes to that comment meant that “no it’s cutting it, and we’ll prove it by downvoting contrarian opinions”. See the irony this time?
Have you also missed the general discussion on HN about using downvotes to flag out off topic or bad argumentation, instead of using it to fade into oblivions opinions you don’t agree with? The second can be called undemocratic, in the way it violates the, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” principle.
Or, let’s take:
“”"”He calls Facebook “hyper-valued web crap,” but not in the context of providing real insight.”"”"
Over-valued crap is enough real insight about Facebook. You’ll thank me one day.
But you seemed to have missed the general idea, cutting my sentence in half. Why would you do that now, jseliger? Why?
My quote was: “As if this has worked well in the past for other hyper-valued web crap…”, ie suggesting we learned from the history of other hyper-inflated over-valuations. I even mentioned the flagship example of VA Linux, circa 1999.
“”"I looked through his comment history; there are many one-line, two-sentence comments like this one, which led to a pointless flame war. “”"
How offensive, my two sentence comment. You happened to miss that it was a reply to a one sentence comment, about how: “[Python] made the mistake of making whitespace significant thereby driving off people in droves”.
Which is more insightful,
1) that people avoided Python (a highly successful, widely used language with a huge community) because of whitespace,
or my comment that says that
2) that was a concern (and frequent “religious” issue) in the nineties, nobody really cares about that kind of thing re: python now?
“”"Others tell him that he’s not being very nice, as in a comment where Dinkumthinkum says, “You’re missing the point.” “”"
Someone told somebody else on the internet “you’re missing the point”. News at 11. And this somehow translates to “I’m not being very nice”?
Well, I might not be nice.
But I’m not a finger-pointing, cry-baby, stalking-idiot about it.
“Boo-hoo somebody pooh-poohed on one of my comments, I’m gonna search their comment history, present it out of c...
I checked his history and he is far from being a troll. You on the other hand wrote a content-free rant full of self-praise ("I try to comment when I have useful, unique, original, or non-standard things to say") and then posted it to HN too.
How about having a "flag" link for comments with a drop-down list of points from the guidelines that the comment violates?
It would reduce the noise from other replying to the comment stating why they think it's inappropriate, and would still let the commenter know what they did wrong while burrying the comment.
[1] http://www.meneame.net
I too have noticed a shift in the timbre here lately. The degradation of civil and apropos discourse is marked. Criticism based on logic and rhetoric (ad hominem, straw-man, etcetera) has lost some ground to internet-acronyms (IANAL, IIRC, and such) Since culling sources takes work, this warrants addressing for risk of losing this relevance.
I've been thinking about this problem recently in the face of web searches that yield forum discussions. I'm begun to avoid forum results, due to endless threads that lack a solution to the specific problem (even sometimes incorrectly marked [Solved]).
Curated Q&A sites [2] address this successfully by putting the correct answer above the fold. But community discussions don't have a correct answer, so the problem here is not quite the same. I don't have a solution, but even revising sort order might do. I'd hazard to suggest an additional degree of community-based voting and editing should be added.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469618
[2] http://www.question2answer.org/
[edit] formatting
In any thread, it would be surprising to get no bad comments at all. They'll always be there and you can do nothing but ignore them, even when they get upvoted. Just keeping adding your own insightful comments, ignore the other ones and I wonder whether things will deteriorate much further.
None of us want to see hacker news grow into reddit imgurl land, but I see that becoming more and more the case lately.