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Ask PG: Implementing checkboxes to improve comment quality

4 points by kyro ↗ HN
I'm curious about how the overall quality of comments would be affected if you put 3 checkboxes, laid horizontally under the comment box, that must all be checked before submitting a comment. They'd be something like "My comment is: -civil -well thought-out -sincere". In addition to the psychology at play, maybe just having to check 3 boxes would curb some of the more trollish and emotional comments. Laying them out horizontally would also require a bit more focus than having them stacked vertically.

Of course, this might not work at all.

4 comments

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nicholassmith
It'd make it even worse to use HackerNews and comment from a mobile device at that stage, so it might curb some of the trolling but at the risk of annoying a subset of users.

Plus the community is fairly good at downvoting and flagging bad and unhelpful comments.

notahacker
I can think of sites that need such a feature more.

Reminding new users that "I agree", memes and other comments are frowned on each time they comment might be a good idea though.

krapp
Some users would fill them in believing their comments to be civil, well thought out and sincere, regardless of their actual content. Trolls would be perfectly happy to fill them out and then troll anyway. Then a few will just have a script bind to the select button that auto-ticks the checkboxes before submitting.

I don't think this is a problem that can be engineered away so easily.

zoltarburger
I think someone would develop a browser plugin to auto-check those boxes.

You could classify the text using a machine learning algorithm using a training set of downvoted comments, and if the comment is classified as likely impolite- then you could ask the user to make sure their comment is appropriate.

You could have a line of text which said "Thanks for being civil and courteous"