HN Explorer

Hacker News Comments are a Mess

2 points by ajaimk ↗ HN
The #1 post on Hacker News regarding how Instacart engineered their way into YC is a good read but jump into the comments and the top comment thread (which is also the longest and a third of all comments) has become a rant about sexism/misoginism.

It would be great if we can easily get rid of these comment threads that are indeed irrelevant to the primary discussion.

I've gotten some great feedback through HN comments in the past but this is just another bit of proof of the degradation of HN comments.

3 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 18.9 ms ] thread
queensnake
Indeed; why doesn't it have Reddit's ability to collapse whole threads?
tokenadult
It would be great if we can easily get rid of these comment threads that are indeed irrelevant to the primary discussion.

Downvoting (for users who enough karma to downvote comments) is one response to such an issue. Flagging the particular comment (which can be done by going directly to the comment through the "link" link on it to its direct URL), for users who have that power, can also help. Both powers are better exercised if users develop a consensus (which I share with many veteran users here) that the site guidelines are important. The Hacker News welcome message

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

gives an overview of the community experiment here, summarizing the site guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The Hacker News FAQ

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

gives some additional details about how Hacker News is administered. The welcome message distills the basic rules into a simple statement: "Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

waterlesscloud
Downvoting doesn't solve this kind of problem though. The irrelevant subthread still takes up most of the real estate of the page. The problem comes in when the subthread is attached to a highly rated parent thread.

It doesn't help that so many people feel compelled to jump into the irrelevant subthread as they're usually emotional topics.

Perhaps if the community as a whole downvoted every response in the subthread such behavior would stop. As it is, only the half that the majority disagrees with is punished, but the entire subthread is a problem, whether you agree with the individual posts or not.

More than once I've given up on a comments section under a post from "irrelevant subthread fatigue".