Let's be introspective. Was the "be civil" experiment really a success? Is it really the specific words that matter, or how the words make the other person feel that matters most?
I'd contrast this approach with e.g. Product Hunt's community standards, where you're expected to be inclusive, make others feel good, and try to work as a group of makers who are "all in it together" instead of constantly arguing and putting each other down. Little mention of civility of the message delivery is mentioned at all - it's all about how the message affects the other person.
I know I'll get flack for saying this here, but I've found PH's approach to make far more sense and be 1000x better in practice.
(By the way, last I checked, I'm still ranked-banned for pointing out YC's reversal on their stance about board members, so this comment will stay at the bottom of the page no matter how you vote. - Edit, or the comment will tie for bottom of the page, along with the other rank-banned and dead users.)
On the other hand I find PH comments pretty useless and that it's usually a waste time to read them. The first thing I want to know about the new product is its limitations and possible pitfalls of its usage, and the product's page itself is unlikely to provide that. The "encouraging" comments from "carefully vetted" PH community are just as vacuous as the landing page copy.
Is that really appropriate for things that are just launched? Out of infinite possibilities, the number of things an app doesn't do are practically infinite. Is there really value in always whining about all the things a just launched app doesn't do yet?
Why am I talking about only new apps? Because that's what these kinds of sites are always going to mostly be about. Scoops on new things - news - is what drives votes on these kinds of news sites. Therefore, you're always going to get mostly new, incomplete things.
Encouraging people to point out the flaws, on a platform that only votes new flaw-filled brand new things to the top -- results in a very predictable outcome: incomplete stuff always voted to the top and people always whining about the incompleteness.
That sounds to me like PH's community standards are very close to "be civil", where they've unpacked the word "civil".
Can you give an example of something that you think would be considered civil by HN standards, but fail to meet PH's standards? (Note that a post being upvoted on HN, doesn't mean it meets HN's civility standards.)
I think it mostly has. You occasionally get the odd person who is clearly New At This™ as is a complete dick, or even a seasoned veteran who goes out of their way to ignore "being civil."
However, since I've joined I have been noticing that they are becoming fewer and farther between. Good debate comes out most comments: even if those comments are fringe or flawed at best. "All in it together" isn't conducive to extremely intelligent discussion: if I'm wrong or being a dick I want to know it and if everyone is pretending to be on my side I'll never find out. There is a nuance to breaking that kind of news and the HN community seems to be slowly working it out.
If "goodness", aka entertainment value to the reader is what you're judging based on, then yes, I suppose I agree. HN is good for reader entertainment.
In that case, HN is basically the equivalent of a tabloid. Written civilly, while communicating very bad things about whatever it's talking about, while the reader is throughly entertained.
> I'm still ranked-banned for pointing out YC's reversal on their stance about board members
I am deeply skeptical of this belief. I do not believe such a thing exists, and there are alternate explanations for the behavior you are seeing (other top-level comments have more points).
How skeptical? How much BTC will you, or anyone, be willing put down on either of these:
1) Just bet me that it's not real, and I'll give you some very strong evidence.
2) How about I write a web-app that exposes HN's rank-banning - who's getting rank-banned and what for. You'd be surprised at how it's being used. I found a way of proving it that I'm sure you'll agree is quite accurate, for cases where this approach can be used.
:)
Edit:
Re: lucb1e, the reason is that I'm far from being the only person who's rank-banned / dead here. Sometimes several comment in the same thread.
Re: scott_s, Hey man, no need to insult me. If you don't want to see the hard evidence, then I won't show it to you. Don't worry.
Looking at one of your most recent comments, it's not at the bottom of the page. And besides, if you're broke, perhaps betting is not the best thing to do.
I looked too, and solve's comments all seemed to be either at the bottom, or below every comment that wasn't downvoted or dead. Do you have a counterexample?
I think it's reasonably likely that rank-banning is real and that solve is rank-banned. I think it's unlikely that ve was rank-banned for pointing out YC's reversal on their stance about board members; but plausible that ve was rank-banned for other reasons, in a comment where ve did that.
As I said, deeply skeptical, as I rather like and respect the individuals who run this place. But I will not spend any effort betting someone on that, as it is not a good use of my time, and I feel it is insulting to those individuals who I greatly respect.
I will note, however, that I am continually disturbed by the preponderance of conspiratorial thinking that pervades discussion of how HN works. In particular, how often individuals tend to use their own theory for evidence of their own theory.
I know that some submissions can get penalized based on their domain, and that non-URL submissions have a penalty, but I am unaware of any point-penalty against particular user comments outside of banning. What makes you say rank-banning is a thing?
> Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks."
I've noticed downvotes recently on these style of comments. Like the above states, I think it's important we do not discourage the basic civility of a "thank you".
Edit: I think this is of particular import on comment threads, not submissions. I agree with s_dev and edpichler that an upvote is similar enough to a "thank you" to render the later unnecessary. However, my key point remains that downvoting a neutral comment is not the proper way to address it. Perhaps I'm wrong?
I think the concern is mostly having the comments overwhelmed by "Me too"/"Thank you"/"+1" comments. Appreciation is welcome, swamping interesting content in empty comments less so.
I agree. However, downvoting is not the same as not upvoting. I think it makes sense for "thank you" comments to eventually find their way to the bottom of the comment list because they don't add substantively.
But it also creates a community of enforcers of trivial rules who never contribute anything outside that. Good example of that is mathstackexchange. There are users on there whose sole existence on that site is to remove "thank-you"s from the questions.
The reason that's a problem is because mathstackexchange rewards people for moderating. HN doesn't (as far as I know) reward people for downvoting, so you're not going to get people downvoting thank-yous so they can get more internet points.
If I had had the chance to both win mathstackexchange AND the Internet.. The resultant joy would be so profoundly overwhelming that I would probably have to leave the grid and start a sustainable kale juicing company.
Several times, I've had my "Thanks" post downvoted on threads where the entirety of replies was less than a screenful. IMO courtesy is never a bad thing, particularly when someone takes the time to answer a question you asked. An upvote is (to my knowledge) anonymous.
An upvote should actually be more about wanting others to read a substantial comment, a thank you is more personal to me. It means, hey this really touched me in a profound way (which I might even explain) but I want you to know who it affected by leaving this comment.
Which is why I don't think downvoting is appropriate for them.
So are you in favor that people should use the comments to thank everything that touches them? You can send an email to the author on his profile page, if you want to. This attitude is good and will not ruin the page for other people that are just interested in good information.
I think pg is wrong here. We're all fans of brevity here but a simple thank you far too often simply lacks substance or insight to upvote.
Reiterating that strong effort needs to be made to resist the possibly inevitable decline in quality - simply getting rid of one or two word comments is actually good general rule even if it results in some otherwise courteous people getting downvoted.
An upvote should mean "Thanks" - saying it is redundant.
When I've had people explicitly say "thanks", that's meant more to me than upvotes.
There's a danger of arms races, and I wouldn't want an explicit thanks to be the default way to express approval, but it does seem valuable to have both available.
(Downvoting thank-you posts is one way to keep them available without losing their value, but I'm not sure it's the best way.)
Throwing an idea out there - I haven't received many thank-you comments, but my favourite along those lines came through my anonymous feedback form, http://sayat.me/philh. If there was a community norm of people having those, then people could easily make thank-you comments that didn't clutter the page.
(I wouldn't usually want someone using email for that, because then I'd feel obliged to respond.)
(This is kind of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but I'd like them to be a norm for other reasons too. Unfortunately they can also be used for bullying, so I don't know how realistic that is.)
Maybe Hacker News could have public and private comments. Private comments would essentially be dead comments that could only be visible and active for the person being replied to.
Which does more damage to the community, brief thank you comments or the tangential discussions that inevitably break out around them, when a single such comment is downvoted then the downvote is explained?
I think some allowance needs to be made for the fact that most comments lack much substance or insight, since most commenters are having conversations with one another, not engaging in formal debate or rhetoric. I personally suspect the threaded nature of the forums encourages this behavior, whether pg intended it to or not.
Perhaps a word limit could be added to the comments, but guaranteeing comments are more verbose doesn't really guarantee higher intellectual quality. If the noise caused by short comments is an issue then perhaps /newcomments could be filtered so that it only displays replies to the root post (which are most likely to be focused on the subject at hand) or doesn't display very short comments.
Given the assumption the site makes by increasing the posting timeout in deep threads (which i've come to grudgingly agree with) that incivility tends to increase the more deeply into a thread you go, this might also reduce the visibility of and engagement with toxic comments.
There are "Thanks" comments that are genuine appreciation for a correction or the revelation of a new piece of information - and then there are "Thanks" comments that are basically just a "This" in a slightly different form. The "This" pattern and anything like it should be downvoted with extreme prejudice.
I agree. But what I don't get is why your comment is being downvoted. An upvote really should be more of a"this" than a "thanks." A downvoted should be a "not this."
I have noticed a few of my comments being down voted because people disagree with them lately. I feel that they qualified as substantial and weren't blatantly incorrect, but weren't what other people were looking for.
Downvoting a comment should be reserved for comments that we don't want other people to read. Things that are rude, blatantly false, or in general against the guidelines.
I don't think we should downvote things we disagree with, because to some users a downvote says, your comment isn't wanted here please take it somewhere else.
This isn't about points but instead the message you want to send to the author of the comment. If you do want to downvote someone because you disagree, could that instead be turned into a comment that might enlighten them and anyone else reading the thread?
Edit: I don't want to say that these downvotes were unfair, but more about users not following my subjective definition of the real purpose of a downvote which is to discourage conversation on that thread.
And that kind of problem underlies a growing issue with HN.
>As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening.
There has always been a push for maintaining quality but more and more users are ignoring everything on this page. In your case that would mean that there's not only a growing amount of people who are downvoting who they disagree with but also that those users are getting a significant amount of karma. The theory is that by the time someone has enough karma to downvote posts they are already trustworthy to vote for content that adds to the discussion, this is starting to break down and it's only going to get worse.
This is the link I was referring to. There are a number of other comments I've made in there that have also been down voted.
I think it was downvoted based on disagreement instead of for the content. If I could have edited this comment I would have been a little more clear with you'd see in some of my subsequent comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9893764
This and a linked comment both received downvotes about the same time as I published this thread. The comments stopped and the conversation was over with a punctuated You are wrong! It's a bad way to be rewarded for trying to participate in a conversation.
But it happens. I don't want to blame anyone, I just think we need to think more when we vote as a community.
Edit: later comments even substantial ones can fail to attract upvotes just based on when you submit. And many of the people who read that far down tend to be the ones who downvote a day later (but this is only my opinion with no data to back it up).
The argument over the purpose of downvotes usually devolves into "it's OK to downvote to express disagreement" vs. "downvotes should only be used for bad (dumb, abusive, or inciteful) content". But I think there's a third option, and it's the way that HN actually behaves:
Voting is used to bubble good content up and bad content down.
That is to say, your comments don't fall under the umbrellas of "dumb", "abusive", or "inciteful", but they might be a distraction from the main thread, or they might not be carefully enough considered -- it's not just that voters disagree, but also that they don't think the comments belong near the top of the threads.
It doesn't look like the score went below maybe -2 ... that's really not that severe, and usually indicates a gentle "this isn't a good quality comment" signal.
Wouldn't it be more useful for someone to come along and say, "Hey this comment seems to be fairly low quality, do you mind editing it to clarify your opinion so it's easier to understand?"
I've actually had this happen to me on HN before and I was able to take a breath, take some time and improve the content of my comment, which helped improve HN as a whole on a very small level.
If we use gentle downvoting to indicate bad quality comments it's much harder to separate that from disagreement / negative comments. It might be time for HN to adopt a technical solution to keep the quality it has always had present. (I.E. private messages, or comments that aren't about content but directly to OP, or flags to indicate that a comment could use editing/rephrasing/deletion sent to the OP (along with a count of these flags))
This would everyone know what is wrong with their comment rather then having to speculate on what they did wrong, so they can learn and improve in the future.
Maybe, but HN suffers quite as a bit as a forum. It's not really productive to go back and edit a comment to improve its quality. The half-life of even a popular thread on the front page is only a few hours, with a very long tail, so you might spend ten minutes editing a comment you made an hour ago all so that only three people will ever read it.
For better or worse, downvote-to-sort-by-quality is a lot more efficient, and a lot less noisy.
Read this as less of a disagreement with you and more of a criticism of HN as a place for high-quality discussions.
In a small-group conversation thank yous make sense. When there are thousands of people reading the thread, not so much (e.g. it would be weird to say thank you to a conference speaker in the middle of their talk). Upvotes serve the purpose much better - they demonstrate gratitude, they make the receiver feel appreciated, but they don't waste everyone else's time. I would rather not see comments that are just "thanks", even to myself.
46 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 61.0 ms ] threadI'd contrast this approach with e.g. Product Hunt's community standards, where you're expected to be inclusive, make others feel good, and try to work as a group of makers who are "all in it together" instead of constantly arguing and putting each other down. Little mention of civility of the message delivery is mentioned at all - it's all about how the message affects the other person.
I know I'll get flack for saying this here, but I've found PH's approach to make far more sense and be 1000x better in practice.
(By the way, last I checked, I'm still ranked-banned for pointing out YC's reversal on their stance about board members, so this comment will stay at the bottom of the page no matter how you vote. - Edit, or the comment will tie for bottom of the page, along with the other rank-banned and dead users.)
Why am I talking about only new apps? Because that's what these kinds of sites are always going to mostly be about. Scoops on new things - news - is what drives votes on these kinds of news sites. Therefore, you're always going to get mostly new, incomplete things.
Encouraging people to point out the flaws, on a platform that only votes new flaw-filled brand new things to the top -- results in a very predictable outcome: incomplete stuff always voted to the top and people always whining about the incompleteness.
Can you give an example of something that you think would be considered civil by HN standards, but fail to meet PH's standards? (Note that a post being upvoted on HN, doesn't mean it meets HN's civility standards.)
I think it mostly has. You occasionally get the odd person who is clearly New At This™ as is a complete dick, or even a seasoned veteran who goes out of their way to ignore "being civil."
However, since I've joined I have been noticing that they are becoming fewer and farther between. Good debate comes out most comments: even if those comments are fringe or flawed at best. "All in it together" isn't conducive to extremely intelligent discussion: if I'm wrong or being a dick I want to know it and if everyone is pretending to be on my side I'll never find out. There is a nuance to breaking that kind of news and the HN community seems to be slowly working it out.
In that case, HN is basically the equivalent of a tabloid. Written civilly, while communicating very bad things about whatever it's talking about, while the reader is throughly entertained.
I am deeply skeptical of this belief. I do not believe such a thing exists, and there are alternate explanations for the behavior you are seeing (other top-level comments have more points).
1) Just bet me that it's not real, and I'll give you some very strong evidence.
2) How about I write a web-app that exposes HN's rank-banning - who's getting rank-banned and what for. You'd be surprised at how it's being used. I found a way of proving it that I'm sure you'll agree is quite accurate, for cases where this approach can be used.
:)
Edit:
Re: lucb1e, the reason is that I'm far from being the only person who's rank-banned / dead here. Sometimes several comment in the same thread.
Re: scott_s, Hey man, no need to insult me. If you don't want to see the hard evidence, then I won't show it to you. Don't worry.
I think it's reasonably likely that rank-banning is real and that solve is rank-banned. I think it's unlikely that ve was rank-banned for pointing out YC's reversal on their stance about board members; but plausible that ve was rank-banned for other reasons, in a comment where ve did that.
That could be yeah, but he isn't stuck at dead-bottom.
I will note, however, that I am continually disturbed by the preponderance of conspiratorial thinking that pervades discussion of how HN works. In particular, how often individuals tend to use their own theory for evidence of their own theory.
Some of the deleted comments are me not wanting to get drawn into a discussion about particular users and etc.
I've noticed downvotes recently on these style of comments. Like the above states, I think it's important we do not discourage the basic civility of a "thank you".
Edit: I think this is of particular import on comment threads, not submissions. I agree with s_dev and edpichler that an upvote is similar enough to a "thank you" to render the later unnecessary. However, my key point remains that downvoting a neutral comment is not the proper way to address it. Perhaps I'm wrong?
However, "Me too" is best done with an upvote.
Which is why I don't think downvoting is appropriate for them.
Reiterating that strong effort needs to be made to resist the possibly inevitable decline in quality - simply getting rid of one or two word comments is actually good general rule even if it results in some otherwise courteous people getting downvoted.
An upvote should mean "Thanks" - saying it is redundant.
There's a danger of arms races, and I wouldn't want an explicit thanks to be the default way to express approval, but it does seem valuable to have both available.
(Downvoting thank-you posts is one way to keep them available without losing their value, but I'm not sure it's the best way.)
(I wouldn't usually want someone using email for that, because then I'd feel obliged to respond.)
(This is kind of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but I'd like them to be a norm for other reasons too. Unfortunately they can also be used for bullying, so I don't know how realistic that is.)
"Thank you."
vs.
"Thank you for taking the time to write this, this topic has been on my mind recently and you really helped me figure this out."
The latter doesn't usually get downvoted, and sometimes even gets promoted a bit.
I think some allowance needs to be made for the fact that most comments lack much substance or insight, since most commenters are having conversations with one another, not engaging in formal debate or rhetoric. I personally suspect the threaded nature of the forums encourages this behavior, whether pg intended it to or not.
Perhaps a word limit could be added to the comments, but guaranteeing comments are more verbose doesn't really guarantee higher intellectual quality. If the noise caused by short comments is an issue then perhaps /newcomments could be filtered so that it only displays replies to the root post (which are most likely to be focused on the subject at hand) or doesn't display very short comments.
Given the assumption the site makes by increasing the posting timeout in deep threads (which i've come to grudgingly agree with) that incivility tends to increase the more deeply into a thread you go, this might also reduce the visibility of and engagement with toxic comments.
Downvoting a comment should be reserved for comments that we don't want other people to read. Things that are rude, blatantly false, or in general against the guidelines.
I don't think we should downvote things we disagree with, because to some users a downvote says, your comment isn't wanted here please take it somewhere else.
This isn't about points but instead the message you want to send to the author of the comment. If you do want to downvote someone because you disagree, could that instead be turned into a comment that might enlighten them and anyone else reading the thread?
Edit: I don't want to say that these downvotes were unfair, but more about users not following my subjective definition of the real purpose of a downvote which is to discourage conversation on that thread.
>As a rule, a community site that becomes popular will decline in quality. Our hypothesis is that this is not inevitable—that by making a conscious effort to resist decline, we can keep it from happening.
There has always been a push for maintaining quality but more and more users are ignoring everything on this page. In your case that would mean that there's not only a growing amount of people who are downvoting who they disagree with but also that those users are getting a significant amount of karma. The theory is that by the time someone has enough karma to downvote posts they are already trustworthy to vote for content that adds to the discussion, this is starting to break down and it's only going to get worse.
Don't forget that your comments didn't just attract downvotes - they also failed to attract upvotes.
This is the link I was referring to. There are a number of other comments I've made in there that have also been down voted.
I think it was downvoted based on disagreement instead of for the content. If I could have edited this comment I would have been a little more clear with you'd see in some of my subsequent comments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9893764 This and a linked comment both received downvotes about the same time as I published this thread. The comments stopped and the conversation was over with a punctuated You are wrong! It's a bad way to be rewarded for trying to participate in a conversation.
But it happens. I don't want to blame anyone, I just think we need to think more when we vote as a community.
Edit: later comments even substantial ones can fail to attract upvotes just based on when you submit. And many of the people who read that far down tend to be the ones who downvote a day later (but this is only my opinion with no data to back it up).
Voting is used to bubble good content up and bad content down.
That is to say, your comments don't fall under the umbrellas of "dumb", "abusive", or "inciteful", but they might be a distraction from the main thread, or they might not be carefully enough considered -- it's not just that voters disagree, but also that they don't think the comments belong near the top of the threads.
It doesn't look like the score went below maybe -2 ... that's really not that severe, and usually indicates a gentle "this isn't a good quality comment" signal.
I've actually had this happen to me on HN before and I was able to take a breath, take some time and improve the content of my comment, which helped improve HN as a whole on a very small level.
If we use gentle downvoting to indicate bad quality comments it's much harder to separate that from disagreement / negative comments. It might be time for HN to adopt a technical solution to keep the quality it has always had present. (I.E. private messages, or comments that aren't about content but directly to OP, or flags to indicate that a comment could use editing/rephrasing/deletion sent to the OP (along with a count of these flags))
This would everyone know what is wrong with their comment rather then having to speculate on what they did wrong, so they can learn and improve in the future.
For better or worse, downvote-to-sort-by-quality is a lot more efficient, and a lot less noisy.
Read this as less of a disagreement with you and more of a criticism of HN as a place for high-quality discussions.