It should be easier for a late-arriver on a post to add a useful comment, and have it be promoted. Have you considered using randomization to adjust the score of certain comments?

HN comments seem to exhibit a rich-get-richer phenomenon. One early comment that is highly rated can dominate the top of the thread. (I will note that, qualitatively, this doesn't seem as bad as a few months ago.)

The problem with this approach is that late commenters are less likely to be able to meaningfully contribute to a discussion, because their comment is likely to be buried.

One thing interesting about the way FB feed appears to work is that they use randomization to test the signal strength of new posts.

Have you considered using randomization in where to display a comment? By adding variation, you should be able to capture more information from voters about the proper eventual location for a comment. It also means more variation is presented to people who are monitoring a post's comments.

Once example, I created a new HN account a little over a year ago to switch from a slightly unprofessional name to my current one. Some of my early comments got upvoted a decent amount giving me a higher comment score. That higher comment score led to appearing closer to the top of comment chains. That in turn resulted in more visibility and again more upvotes. I don't think the quality of comments is any different between the two accounts, but the comment score on this one is 2.5x higher simply because I started out with a lucky advantage.

I am not sure if people will view this as a problem, but I certainly wasn't aware of how big advantage having a high average comment score was until I had one.

I'm pretty sure it is something like the average of your last $X posts that matters rather than average score of every post you've ever made. So while it may still result in a "rich get richer" situation, it isn't quite as dire as it would be if your entire post history worked into the average.

I suppose it's not technically possible, but I for one would not mind a possibility to update your user name (even if only once).

And/or indicate posts made in the past X minutes.

Maybe these could be toggle options to quickly show/hide or just shrink/lighten to the background older/read posts.

This is something I've been wanting since day one, but may impact performance too much, unless they handled the indicators/toggle client-side based on a last read timestamp cookie (or similar implementation).

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bappiabcodbpphnojd...

edit: and as I post this, my own post is marked as new. For those interested, new posts seem to be denoted by an border on the left

Once an article is on the frontpage, it is likely to stay there. People are much more likely to upvote a frontpage article than something in new, simply because they are far more likely to look at the frontpage.

What you really want is to estimate the probably that a reader will click and/or upvote a link, not the total number of clicks/upvotes. You might also want to discount this by time, but this discounting might not be necessary---there might be a natural decay in the probability, particularly if you compute a moving average.

If you'd like my feedback about how to model this, feel free to email me. I'm happy to provide you with a more concrete methodology.

I.e. a particular comment/story has it's normal score + X% chance of being promoted to somewhere near the top. You can vary X depending on age & actual score.

This seems much easier to implement, and many more stories/comments would get exposure (each to fewer users).

Perhaps this is already happening, but my (probably simplified) understanding of the system was that it only took into account time since the story was posted, not the number of views it's had, compared to votes.

Recently I have noticed that the front page will look dramatically different (story wise) than it did five minutes ago. By dramatically different I do not mean story #3 is #15 five minutes later, but that stories #2-12 will be completely different some of which I remember reading 8 hours before.

While you are here I should take the opportunity to thank you for making my favorite corner of the internet even better. Thanks dang...

    P(upvote | good post) = P(good post | upvote) * P(upvote) / P(good post)  
  

But this begs the question: what does it mean to "float to the top" if highly-rated comments are being placed in a random location?

What it doesn't address is the quality or relevance of the upvotes themselves. Spend much time on reddit and it's clear that there are a great many people who are voting on stories and content with little regard to its significance or truth.

As a measure of popularity or agreement, the metric is ... better than most. As an indicator of true quality it continues to inherit the faults of virtually all online moderation systems. Absent either creating a class of users who are considered "trusted moderators", or a means of finding agreement between a given reader's preferences and those of the raters indicated, that's pretty much a persistent issue. The better subreddits, in my opinion, address this through guidelines, posting policies, and very strict subreddit moderator policing: removing nonconformant or low-quality posts, banning individuals who troll or don't follow posting / commenting guidelines.

Even subreddit mods cannot change the voting on submissions or comments themselves (nor can they see who's voted on what), but they can influence what is visible within the sub -- editorial prerogative.

A moderator deleting someone's comment should be the last resort. It's irritating to spend 5 minutes writing a comment in a subreddit, press post, then see "the comment you're replying to no longer exists" because the moderator decided deleting a thread of 10 comments was more appropriate than taking some time to write a comment with their own opinion. It's also irritating when one's own comment with 4 upvotes is deleted while someone else's comment with 6 downvotes remains untouched although collapsed. This recently happened to me twice, a week apart, on a subreddit I'd been visiting intermittently for the last 4 yrs, and very occasionally commenting in, without any trouble.

> Even subreddit mods cannot change the voting on submissions

Perhaps this is the real reason a subreddit moderator deletes upvoted comments they don't agree with, while leaving downvoted ones. Downvoting and replying should be the means to control quality, with a moderator deleting a comment as the last resort.

The tune's a bit different in /r/economics, where while posts aren't deleted, there's a very strong bias toward economic orthodoxy, despite the many, many, many flaws it contains (full disclosure: my degree is in economics).

For my own subreddit, the focus is on intelligent discussion. I make no bones about deleting trolls, or even just vapid comments. I'm not looking to win any popularity contests.

And in some subs it is iust a lot easier to delete posts that are almost trolling than to allow a large angry thread to spawn. Often those are the same tedious meta topics, or very simple beginner topics, that have been covered very many times and which are not interesting but which are flamebaity.

But green is not reliably "new". It tends to be strongly correlated to newly created accounts, but I've seen weird behavior (like a child comment is marked green... whereas the comment thread was started by the same commenter in gray in the first place), which leads me to believe there's something subtler going on. I thus have no idea what the difference in color is supposed to indicate at all.

The Reddit discussion model is completely oriented towards providing the fast food of news commentary, where your enjoyment of the first look you take at a comment page is prioritized over active participation. That's great if you're trying to attach ads to pictures of cats, but if you're trying to have a real conversation, it just gets in the way. I can read, I don't need an algorithm to tell me which comments are notable and which ones are junk. If I see a troll post on any other site, I don't seize up and have an aneurism, I just scroll past it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I can easily follow 50+ page PHPbb threads that drag on for months or even years, or 4chan threads with hundreds of posts and more on the way every time you refresh, but a small conversation (in reality; I considered it huge by my HN standards) I had on here the other day with about 10 comments or so made my head spin. I wrote half the posts and it was still hard to follow! Oh, and of course, no one but the people I responded to will ever read the things I wrote hours after the thread dropped off the front page.

I think that the community, not the particulars of the software, is the reason for this site's success, and things would have turned out the same or better if it were a barebones BBS with a flat discussion model. You don't need complex ranking systems or update notifiers to browse those, you just need to be able to scroll down.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/

But one major disadvantage of a flat BBS is that after a while, it becomes difficult to keep track of who's replying to whom. This is especially dreadful when two or more discussions are going on at the same time and they get interleaved; it's catastrophic when the moderators merge several loosely related threads. That's why most forum users make extensive use of quotes. Without quotes, you quickly lose context. So after a few pages, half the text on the page is made up of quotes nested inside one another. A forum archive will probably compress very well ;)

Of course, this can probably be fixed with a better UI. But if so, the threaded discussion model could also be greatly improved by a better UI. So I think it all ultimately boils down to how good the UI is. The ability to highlight new comments and collapse threads, for example, will probably help a lot. I also like the way Reddit notifies you of replies. It helps you avoid missing replies in the mess of a large thread.

This is one thing I wish HN did. This is a good post, and I care far more about the replies I get here (when I have generally at least tried to provide thoughtful input) than the ones I get on reddit, but those confront me more directly as a result of the UI.

Put it all together and a typical thread might look something like this:

  Anonymous No. 1   Replies: >>2, >>3
    I like posting here a lot better than posting on Hacker news.
  
  Anonymous No. 2
    For what reason, >>1_(You)?

  Bob Saget No. 3   Replies: >>4
    >>1_(You)
    I don't really like multi-threaded discussion models either. Way too hard for me to follow.

  Anonymous No. 4
    >>3
    >I don't really like multi-threaded discussion models either. Way too hard for me to follow.
    I strongly disagree, you are stupid.

>I also like the way Reddit notifies you of replies. It helps you avoid missing replies in the mess of a large thread.

4chan has a few similar systems. You can set a thread to automatically update every few seconds, or you can "watch" a thread so that even if you close the tab, you can see when new posts arrive. Also, in addition to the (You) next to links to your posts, when a thread updates, any posts that link to your posts are colored differently until you scroll past them. So these systems make it easy to follow entire threads in progress, not just the people directly talking to you.

I totally get that 4chan and company are not everyone's thing, but I don't understand why very few sites that aren't already 2chan or futaba clones borrow elements from its design. They're very usable while being minimalistic and low-tech; even without javascript and most of the goodies I mentioned disabled, its still very easy to use. Meanwhile, web forums are huge and clunky and filled to the brim with verbatim block quotes and obnoxious avatars, the average mailing list email is an enormous email quote followed by a single line of commentary, etc...

Someone made a post about your suggestion here: http://danluu.com/randomize-hn/

And another person suggested an even better algorithm here: http://www.bayesianwitch.com/blog/2013/why_hn_shouldnt_use_r...

That'd be nice, but not important enough to the discussion for me to recommend a feature. It'd just encourage threads to last even longer and with even more bickering.

Plus everyone has been asking for a way to collapse sub-comments (and many plugins do it already).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-comment-col...

Its aesthetics are, well, not the best, though. Consider just a solid line?

I've been using the Hacker News Enhancement Suite extension for Chrome with pretty good success.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-special-an-addi...

Disclosure: I've contributed to HNES before.

I've made a few tiny edits so that it works with https (the github repo has this, but not on userscripts.org), as well as the threads page. Also, I put slightly less space between the [-] and the commenter name, it looks a bit better/more reddity.

I didn't bother making it work for anything but the greasemonkey script, or trying to upload it to userscripts.org. But it might still be useful: https://github.com/zwegner/HN-Comment-Hider

Also, thread folding is reversible - maybe someone folds a thread but decides to periodically check it* if you count folded threads against it you have to recount every time someone reopens a thread as well. Downvotes, at least, are meant to be explicit and non-reversible, in that you can't directly un-downvote something (unless you can at some mystical karma level)

I can see how in extreme cases it would be a signifier but I don't really see many of those cases which wouldn't also have a lot of downvotes anyway, so i'm thinking it would be repeated work.

* a feature to let you peek at the last posted comment in a folded thread, btw, might be very handy...

the reason comments at the top stay at the top is because of scrolling attrition -- the more you make people scroll to see more comments, the less they're likely to do it.

if comment threads collapsed like reddit (for example) then they'd be much easier to read through -- giving more exposure to new / low voted comments near the bottom

While I support introducing collapsible threads, I don't think they should have any weight on the ranking.

The ability to collapse the top thread would help the next thread (and all subsequent threads) get some much needed visibility. Right now, the top comment and its replies often take up so much vertical space that I get tired before I ever get to the second thread.

That's interesting to me because I find myself downvoting much more often than I used to. But the comments I downvote are not that often toxic in the sense of being nasty. They're more often low-content or low-value comments that don't add to the conversation.

The jerks and trolls are out there but I'm not positive they're most pernicious problem.

I personally have a much higher threshold for comments which are worded aggressively, sarcastically, or humorously. I occasionally find myself upvoting comments which have been downvoted by the community due to "tone," if I think the core statement has a bunch of validity.

Where I am most tempted to downvote is statements that repeat sticky memes that have been repeatedly disproven, but "sound true" within areas I have the most expertise, especially when they are presented as fact. Those kinds of comments lower the bar more than any other, IMO, by forcing a debate over whether the sky is in fact blue every single time the community attempts to discuss weather patterns and cloud formation. However, it is unclear to me whether that is valid criteria for downvoting, so I rarely even do that.

TL;DR I am unsure when to downvote so I mostly don't.

I've seen downvotes on my comments even when they're neutral statements of fact ("dang is a moderator, recently announced" got a downvote from some HN denizen). Most people seem to follow the criterion you lay out though. Ultimately if a good comment gets a downmod that makes it less visible (why, oh why, does only one single downmod do this?) someone else usually comes along and 'corrects' it back to normal visibility.

I do tend to downvote comments that contain obvious factually-incorrect information, though, even if the information seems to have been provided in good faith.

I don't think people do that enough and it leads to comment-bloat. "I'll make my point and then add in a platitude to draw in the upvotes, hopefully balancing out the downvotes I'll get for my opinion."

I haven't seen a recent comment where pg spoke against the practise, but it'd be very easy to miss in the firehose of content (which is why I specified 'I haven't noticed'). Do you have a link to the relevant post?

In other contexts, I often have a much higher threshold both for what I think is appropriate and how much civility plays a role in filtering what I post. But that's because elsewhere on the internet incivility often provides a substantial portion of the entertainment value. On HN, the entertainment value is largely in thoughtful discourse.

I down vote the same as you, but I would hesitate to assume that the algorithms are tuned one way or the other. In reality it's probably more about velocity or even the voter.

I have noticed the absence of low value comments near the top (except in fresh threads) so to me, it's working.

The community is nice, but I'd rather focus on the interesting comments and stories I wouldn't see on any other site.

(I spent a few days at exactly 500 wondering why I couldn't downvote yet...)

  (> (karma user) downvote-threshold*)

[0] Based on this handy Github repository: https://github.com/wting/hackernews Original: http://arclanguage.org/install

I have a couple of handles* on HN. One of them is this one, which has enough karma to downvote, and the other has too little karma to downvote. After being really thoroughly raked over the coals for a time, I began mostly logging in under my other handle in part because some people had been really horrible to me and I found myself going "YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE -- DOWNVOTE!" I didn't like interacting with the site that way and was also worried it would have negative consequences for me personally, especially since pg was not handling things in a transparent manner and there was no clear, easy way to get with a mod and sort anything out. I returned to active use of this handle at a point where I was less bitter and also the culture seemed less toxic and I no longer felt like I was just being consistently shit on, all the time. So that isn't an issue for me anymore.

And my main point is that moderating is a human thing. Karma and other technical tools are just that -- tools. There are no magic solutions. Algorithms and what not have their uses but we are all human and building community is more about how people treat each other and making judgment calls and all that then about any specific technical anything.

* This is not a secret and there is no reason to believe they cannot be readily connected to each other -- it was not done to fool anyone here, it was done for other reasons.

If they wanted to make an adjustment to the downvote karma threshold, I would suggest "require comment with down-vote" would be an interesting thing to test.

I would of course assume that less people downvoting + more specific complaints would lead to more moderator action on the more obnoxious/distracting posters, if that wasn't the case I wouldn't recommend the change either.

I'm aware this is how the majority of HN members use the down-vote feature, but the first time I've seen it presented as working-as-intended.

The fact that you're saying this makes me think we need more formal guidelines on the proper use of this feature. More often than not I see it claimed that down-voting should be an expression of "adds value" vs. "does not add value".

If I had to choose, I'd pick the latter.

Actually, that may not be a bad way of putting it. Comments that are blatantly false do not add value. Comments that get something wrong, but are otherwise high-quality, still add value. So this distinction may capture the nuance we want here. Let's think about it.

I get that not all downvotes NEED a comment categorically but there's some meat on the "downvotes deserve comments" bones.

Also: A couple times I have accidentally hit the down arrow. There is no undo. How does this relate to comment quality? The only remedy is to add a "Sorry, I downvoted you accidentally" comment, which I've seen people do. Although it's good etiquette that's a relatively low-quality comment.

- Cannot downvote comments in threads older than 24 hours

- Cannot downvote comments in response to you

Troll: Disagrees with individual or community. No/little/inadequate attempt to soothe egos potentially damaged.

Toxic: Disagrees and presents an alternative that is dangerous to the ego of the individual or community.

This comment is now considered "trolling" and I, a "troll".

Edit: An especially correct "troll" (as above) can be promoted to "toxic" without presenting an alternative if the disagreement is particularly damaging to the ego of individual or community.

It's not that they disagree or "hold an unpopular opinion", it's how they express said opinion.

Some people can champion unpopular opinions in insightful and interesting manners. Others are kneejerk contrarians and collect opinions that are likely to get themselves the negative attention they seek.

The avg score is the average amount of points from the previous X comments a user has made. However, this disincentivizes user from posting in new threads which are unlikely to receive upvotes. I've lessened my own commenting in new threads because of this.

Anytime there is a proxy metric, quirky incentives will crop up. (Such as lines-of-code as a metric of productivity; time spent in office as metric of work commitment; comment average score as metric of contribution to civil and interesting discussion.) My hope would be that when possible, people would realize that the metric used is not the real goal, and make conscious choices which get us closer to the real goal, but are irrational if we only value the metric itself.

I will also point out that your username was not lost on me.

That's enough to encourage a change to my commenting habits, anyways.

I use fluctuations in my comment karma average as a reality check on how I am doing recently in making constructive, helpful comments. But I burn average karma sometimes in

a) mentioning duplicate submissions (this kind of comment rarely gets an upvote, although I try to upvote most of Colin Wright's comments of the same kind)

or

b) answering direct follow-up questions someone asks me (which often aren't even upvoted by the person who asked the question).

You can tell I care (at least a little) by the examples I'm providing here, but I try not to worry about it too much. The single best thing to do for average comment karma score (for whatever that's worth) appears to be to make consistently good comments.

It's not that I think page placement doesn't have an effect, it's that writing a ten point comment when my average was two still tended earn ten points. Likewise my three point comments when my average is four tend to earn three points.

That said, the habit of deleting my more or less useless comments is a practice that became more permanent at a time when I was attempting to stay above four. But the idea that I was not helping people because I was worried about average internet points, became too strange...my worrying about accumulating internet points turned out to be absurd enough for me. So that's the absurdity I stick with.

Anyway, I understand where you are coming from and I suspect that you'll let yourself fully enjoy HN again.

Now I view comments as a means of continuous practice, so even if there's no recognition by means of votes, I'm still improving my ability to contribute positively.

I say semi-true in the sense that it's not wholly inaccurate. Valuable and thoughtful posts are rewarded and up-voted.

However, if my goal were to game the system for maximum karma per unit of time & post, I would contribute comments to hot-button issues that were in line with the prevailing mentality.

This is not to be facetious at all. I'm sure the moderators are well aware of this, but it's quite astounding how many up-votes are thrown around in discussions on polarizing topics (e.g. gender issues, NSA surveillance, etc.).

Often I see threads in new submissions which ask for quick feedback to a startup idea or blog post. They would never get upvotes enough to hit the front page normally, and so I would rarely get more than 1-2 upvotes for them.

I agree, it would be nice to address this, although I have a feeling I really shouldn't care.

re: deleted comments should still count toward karma

>The other day I saw a user making comments that struck me as factually questionable. I'm not an expert in that field, so I asked for an explanation. The user had an avg over 5, so there was reason to believe the user might have known something I didn't. All of a sudden, the user's comments on that topic started getting downvoted. Despite the initial downvotes one of the comments was still at the top of the thread (my understanding is that a user's avg impacts the comment ordering). The user never responded to requests for more information or reputable sources, and then all of a sudden, all of his/her comments on that thread were deleted.

>Curious, I went and looked up the user's previous comments. In multiple fields this person put on an air of expertise. Maybe he/she is and then again, maybe not. But the comments were almost all disparaging, with this air of expertise. So, the user makes definitive claims that come across like an expert, if their comments start getting downvoted, they delete the comment and don't get penalized. Otherwise, they reap in the upvotes and have an avg that appears to the world to justify their expertise.

I mostly only downvote spam or abuse; I try to ignore "no-op" comments, and would rather reply to someone with information about why they might be wrong vs. downvote, but I'm not sure if this is universal.

There's arguments for and against that.

On the one hand, we do want to minimize the mental effort put into making a valid vote by a good community member. Up/Down is the simplest, and it is mentally the easiest. When you ask someone to put that vote into a category, that person may or may not then choose to vote at all, and we've missed the opportunity to capture a bit of information.

On the other hand, requiring a little bit more thinking effort may yield more information on average, and help better quality comments rise.

We do kind of have a two-tier vote system now anyway. You can downvote a comment that is just crap. And you can flag a comment that is awful (spam, etc.).

I probably upvote 20x more than I downvote, if not more. (this would be an interesting statistic to show the user on his own profile page, or even to make globally visible).

How about downvoting requiring a reply? I reply to everyone I downvote, the exception being copypasta, strictly-copypasta. A one-word variation on copypasta gets a reply.

Be anti-echo.

Thanks for doing that. I really hate it when a comment that I put some thought into gets downvoted without a single reply. I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything obviously wrong, so if somebody still doesn't like my comment (e.g. they have a reasonable disagreement), I would like to know why.

Requiring downvotes to be accompanied by a reply would also make trolls hesitate before they downvote something just because. Otherwise they themselsves will be downvoted for their failure to provide adequate justification for their downvotes.

But it might also have unintended side effects. For example, all those replies will take up valuable screen space without actually adding anything useful to the discussion, especially if the downvoted comment is worthless to begin with, and especially in the downvote-the-downvote scenario that I just outlined above.

This is exactly why I have that personal policy. If you pass the CAPTCHA, the 'post-to-account-age' ratio, and whatever tests you took to post then you deserve a reason when someone clicks 'DOWNVOTE'. Let the software take care of the real shit-posts.

>Requiring downvotes to be accompanied by a reply would also make trolls hesitate before they downvote something just because.

If you think "trolls" are doing a statistically appreciable amount of downvoting, I would suggest they aren't. "Disagreeable" people are more interested in making their point than they are with suppressing the ability of others to make theirs.

>For example, all those replies will take up valuable screen space without actually adding anything useful to the discussion

'folding' comment branches would fix this. Not folding by default (unless nested deeply enough to justify it anyway); That's just another way to hide 'undesirable' content.

>especially if the downvoted comment is worthless to begin with, and especially in the downvote-the-downvote scenario that I just outlined above.

Put the power in the user's hands. Downvote-the-downvote comments create transparency.

I try to give constructive replies generally, but some people freak out over even positive advice so I just save the low-content back and forth "something is wrong on the internet I must comment on this!" that would make everyone else miserable and downvote them.

I try to avoid downvoting reasonable people.

But I do think that downvotes should require the downvoter to leave a comment-reply in order to downvote.

As opposed to selecting from a menu of reasons; they need to actually type something.

Not only does it require a bit more overhead on the downvoter's part, but the reasons can be used by the algorithm.

I also think that some sort of feedback for the comment's poster could really help comment quality.

edit to add: It also reduces the possibility for 'accidental' downvotes, which I see on a regular basis.

----------

On a related note, deleted comments should still count toward a user's Karma and avg.

The other day I saw a user making comments that struck me as factually questionable. I'm not an expert in that field, so I asked for an explanation. The user had an avg over 5, so there was reason to believe the user might have known something I didn't. All of a sudden, the user's comments on that topic started getting downvoted. Despite the initial downvotes one of the comments was still at the top of the thread (my understanding is that a user's avg impacts the comment ordering). The user never responded to requests for more information or reputable sources, and then all of a sudden, all of his/her comments on that thread were deleted.

Curious, I went and looked up the user's previous comments. In multiple fields this person put on an air of expertise. Maybe he/she is and then again, maybe not. But the comments were almost all disparaging, with this air of expertise. So, the user makes definitive claims that come across like an expert, if their comments start getting downvoted, they delete the comment and don't get penalized. Otherwise, they reap in the upvotes and have an avg that appears to the world to justify their expertise.

Is the thread you are referring to the Lavabit appeal discussion?

Make this a user option. If you want fine-grained downvoting (or at least downvote confirmation), enable it in your user profile. If you don't care that much, don't.

As were the +1 mods, for that matter, save "+1, Funny".

Spam, Mean/Abusive/Rude, Incorrect would cover the vast majority of reasonable downvotes, I think, and are fairly distinct and intuitive. There are some gray areas about downvoting (something which is interesting but offtopic: is that spam?), but I don't think those gray areas usually are between two of these categories.

slashdot user id = #8912

Yes this will be great. Any comment that has personal attacks,abusive language, racial slurs, trolling, off-topic self-promotion/marketing etc. should allow downvotes to be more powerful. Usually, comments like these get a lot of downvotes pretty quickly but I am sure there are a few who upvote those comments as well for their own reasons.

May be comments like those should not be allowed upvotes once it reaches a number of downvotes ? Also, not sure if you guys already do this but really bad comments should be killed automatically once downvoted a certain number of times within a short time span ?

Now, when it comes to unpopular comments which are not necessarily outright bad, I am sure those are tough to program because how do you handle the sudden upvotes and downvotes at the same time ?

It is also the case that comments with poor tone can be rehabilitated and getting people to edit poorly presented thoughts to be presented more clearly and directly.

Hopefully the algos take into account that sometimes one just holds views which go against the community but aren't malicious.

> Any comment that has [xyz] should allow downvotes to be more powerful.

Hmm, that's an interesting interpretation of that phrase. I assumed that "make some downvotes more powerful" meant that more weight would be carried by some (algorithmically identified, probably based on how they voted on some manually analyzed comments) users' downvotes, or possibly by downvotes made in certain (algorithmically identified) circumstances. The following paragraph ("The majority of HN users [...] reliably downvote jerks and trolls") makes me pretty sure it's the first interpretation. Still, your comment makes me think.

For an HN change to do anything to comments identified by the fact that they contain "personal attacks, abusive language, [...]", it would have to rely on either manual tagging or algorithmic analysis of comments, and the latter would inevitably be rife with false positives. However, your comment makes me realize another option: have an algorithm somewhat-clumsily tag comments based on their content, and give the tag no direct effect, but make it cause downvotes to that comment to be more heavily weighted. It's still sort of algorithmic censorship, but it has no effect except insofar as humans manually express their intent. ... Maybe useful.

I am of the opinion that downvotes on previously positive-scored comments should be regarded as suspect.

I too, tend to post comments that immediately get about 3 downvotes then many more upvotes. It seems like I frequently elicit knee-jerk reactions, but then get support from others. (Who I think of as the smarter readers.)

To me it seems like a lot more stuff is getting downvoted than used to, and I'm not sure I see a meaningful pattern in the places I see it happening.

My current sense is that about 1% of the negatively scored comments don't deserve it. In most cases, though, when users passing by see a slightly-faded-out comment, they identify unfairness and upvote it back to par. I do that a lot myself. If enough people do this, it's the ideal solution to the problem—community practice is better than intervention. If it isn't enough, we'll eventually do more.

Lame comments that aren't rude but just mediocre are also a problem, and one which has been growing for years. That's not really what Sam's post was about, though. We can't solve every problem at once; we don't even know yet what will help with that one. One thing that would not have helped, though, is allowing toxic comments to run rampant. HN already lost some good users because it was heading that way, and we weren't about to let that keep happening.

Edit: By the way, since kogir and I made this scoring change, noticeably fewer accounts have been getting banned.

This could start a vicious cycle where voting cabals of power-users form. For example if Idea X becomes popular among some members of HN they will be able to always steer the discussion to talk about Idea X or down-vote a competing valid Idea Y into oblivion. Comment readers could be converted to Idea X, as it is always appearing at the top of relevant comment threads. So now the voting cabal as even more members. Growing the dislike of Idea Y. The cycle then repeats. The discussion is then steered over time by the thoughts of a select few power-users.

Maybe this is just the natural order of things and I'm subconsciously afraid of change. Thoughts?

On that topic, I'd really love to see downvotes with an accompanying comment weighted somehow.

EDIT: just proved my point,why am I being downvoted? it was a simple suggestion yet,someone downvoted me,just because he can and it's free. I was not trolling or anything... I just wanted to participate the debate.

It makes sense for downvotes to be free on questions and expensive on answers because questions are low effort while answers are high effort, and the community wants to encourage more answers.

On HN, everything is low effort, and everything is worth 1 point. Also, our problem with comments isn't that we don't have enough, it's that we have too many low effort/factually incorrect/abusive/spammy comments that we need to discourage. So it makes sense to keep downvotes free.

This would let users indicate "This was a very worthwhile story for HN, but I have no desire to read it again" (upvote) or "I'd like to read this later, but I'm not sure it's HN worthy" (save)... or save and upvote. The placement of the "save" link only once you click through to the comments keeps the home page as it was and only introduces one discreet new option.

I hope that's a tune you can dance to. :)

i now see an "add to pocket" link next to every HN story, so i am able to separate voting and saving for later (albeit on a different app).

That said, I do understand if the mods/community do not feel that witticisms have as great an importance on HN - yes, seriously - so this is not a criticism, just an observation.

Having spent quite a bit of time on both Reddit comment threads and HN threads, sometimes on the same topics, I find the earnestness and thoughfulness of HN extremely refreshing. At reddit, I feel momentarily amused but then I'm left empty from the total flippancy and lack of substance.

I try to gently point this out to people who complain when their attempt at humor has been downvoted by the community. It's not that we don't like humor. We just don't like banal attempts at humor, which becomes noise. Or, put in a less charitable fashion, "You're not as funny as you think you are."

Also, I'm pretty sure you've found the secrets to good Internet moderatorship. So many forums went offcourse from ban-happy moderators that didnt want to actually take the time to moderate the community, instead just banhammering people. Kudos to you guys

I've seen dang do this and I think it's actually quite effective. I'd love to see more of this.

I have to say, I'm a bit confused now. Aren't "trolls" the sorts of comments that are supposed to be flagged[0]? (I understand that spam is meant to be flagged, but HN gets very few true spam comments[1]).

What is the difference between downvoting and flagging for comments specifically - and more importantly, what comments should be downvoted?

I've read conflicting arguments (both sides quoting pg, incidentally) that disagree on whether or not downvotes should be used to signify disagreement, or whether one should downvote comments that are on-topic but have little substance (ie, most one-liners).

[0] I guess this depends on your definition of "troll", but I think a well-executed troll is similar to Poe's law: the reader can't tell whether the commenter is being flippant/rude or sincere. In other words, it's just enough to bait someone into responding, without realizing immediately that it's a worthless comment.

[1] eg, ads for substances one ingests to change the size of a particular masculine organ, or (less blatantly) direct promotions for off-topic products.

As for exactly when to downvote: that's harder to put into words, and premature precision is worth avoiding. But here are some half-baked thoughts.

Downvoting for disagreement is not always bad, but it sometimes is. There should be some nuance here. Don't be indiscriminate. When a comment is blatantly false, downvoting is probably ok, especially when there's something else wrong with the comment. But high-quality, polite posts don't deserve penalizing just because you don't share their position. When you see one of those in negative territory, please be a good citizen and upvote it back to par. Users doing that is one of the community's self-correcting mechanisms, and it's more important now that we've made some downvotes more powerful.

Two things we can say for sure, though. One is that unsubstantive and/or uncivil comments can fairly be downvoted; the other is that complaining about being downvoted is off-topic.

(I assume neither of these are inherently flag-worthy assuming they're made in earnest and not egregious).

http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/03/david-foster-wallace...

It'd be nice if something could be figured out to discourage this behavior through reduction of the value of the downvotes of such, especially if a comment has not had a response to explain the downvote.

Otherwise it seems like a hit and run for many people, from the outside.

My question, is there an issue with comments I'm not seeing? Do the popular topics on the homepage have dozens of spam or troll comments that are pruned out constantly, so I don't notice the problem? Or is the issue those 1 or 2 downvoted comments I mentioned earlier?

HN receives a small number of comments, so fine tuning algorithms isn't a big deal in my opinion. This isn't Reddit, where the number one post right now has 4,000 comments. That presents a lot of complications, since they need to try and cycle new comments so they all receive some visibility, allowing them a chance to rise if they're of high quality. On HN, you have 20 comments, or 50 comments, so regardless of the sorting, nearly everything gets read. As long as HN generally sorts comments, they're fine.

"Deleted" comments are hidden, but much less common. If a comment is deleted it almost always means that the author removed it or (very rarely) asked us to remove it later for a compelling reason.

When we talk about toxic and other low-quality comments, though, we're only concerned about comments that are live on the page. So yes, you are seeing them. I'm glad they haven't been spoiling HN for you! Personally I think the fading out of negatively scored comments is one of the best design choices PG ever made for the site. I once told him that, and he expressed surprise and said he never sees it. (The admin version of the software doesn't do any fading.)

I concur. It makes a big difference to how I read the site and react to comments, especially since comment scores are not visible. I'm kinda surprised that pg (as an admin) didn't experience this.

How have you looked into this, and what have the results been?

What efforts are you going to take to ensure it stays true in the future?

There are other comments asking these questions that have so far not been answered; it would be good to answer them. It's very unsettling when people (primarily from a privileged/majority standpoint) proclaim that things "don't silence minority groups" and handwave the justification.

In general I've found HN to be much more positive towards feminism in particular than similar communities like Reddit or others that I won't name, but the tech industry has large issues in this area and it's surprising to me that this would be the case.

In particular, it seems likely to me that HN will selectively not-silence minority voices that tend to agree with the status quo or pander to majority voices. I'd be surprised if your analysis accounted for that, but I'd be very, very happy to be wrong.

Am I the only one who thinks that posting more meta-discussion directly in comments reduces the overall quality rather than increases it?

Maybe a downvote should come with a chance to add an explanation that can be seen on a user's page or on a "meta" page, but not dilute the discussion itself.

These feedback comments are a special case, though. First, it's an experiment that we've always intended to be temporary. Second, there's reason to believe that what they destroy in local quality they more than make up for in systemic improvement. Third, I've noticed that—except when I've made a mistake—they almost always get no (or very few) replies.

Most people know what a jerk is. Perhaps though you (and others) could define what a troll is for the purpose of interpreting this statement. (Of course I know the online definition [1] but think that there seems to be much latitude in "extraneous, or off-topic messages" or "starting arguments".)

Specifically also from [1]:

"Application of the term troll is subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial."

While as mentioned I know what a jerk is, I can also see very easily someone throwing out "troll" to stifle someone else in more or less a parental way. That is to nominalize something as simply not important or worth even of discussion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_%28Internet%29

It's true that "troll" is particularly ill-defined. Perhaps we can try not to use that word. I like the phrase "toxic comments" because, while imprecise, it conveys what those do to the ecosystem. In practice, I'm not sure this is as big a problem as it seems. As Sam pointed out, the bulk of the community has little trouble recognizing these things.

This, for example, is much more likely to be buried than if I replied a few comments down on the thread from bravura.

I have noticed that usernames might influence the way I vote. What if usernames were not displayed in comments? Now this leads to two problems: 1) it makes it hard to follow who replied to what in threads 2) it makes it more tempting to post bad comments given the lack of accountability. I think the first problem could be solved by assigning users a per-submission temporary username picked at random from a name/word list. The second problem could be solved by linking those random usernames to the actual profile page of who posted (just like HN currently does). It wouldn't stop deliberate attempts at up/down voting specific users, but it would remove the unintentional bias.

Every thread is a rehearsal with same opinions at the top over and over and non-fitting opinions float to the bottom. In which turn, they get less "downvote-power" so they will stay low and can't get their peers above. I am not saying that the current flow of discussion is bad, I am just saying that participation is flawed.

We are simply in a system where you get awarded to fit to the masses and you get more power once you have been accepted into the hive-mind. A circular-reference at some point.

The problem isn't contrarianism; it's banal meanness. Hackpad sells to Dropbox and the top of the thread is, for a time, somebody talking about how the acquisition is a sign that the whole startup house of cards is falling. A markov HN cynic could write that comment; it's boring, it's distracting, and it's mean-spirited: some of the people who worked on Hackpad also read HN.

If you're going to be contrary, don't be boring and don't be mean. You'll be fine.

Signed,

Longtime YC Cynic

I don't know what your last sentence means.

The solution is to stop caring about upvotes and karma. They are internet friendship points, not validations of personality.

There are good places to have that debate, and HN just isn't one of them.

By "not substantive" I do not mean false, but rather that the signal-to-noise ratio of a comment containing many grand, unsupported claims is low.

Since you don't want to provide us with dozens of examples, how about picking, say, three that have the highest signal-noise ratio of the lot, and weren't uncivil? I'd like to see those. I know such comments exist, because I see them, yet the people charging HN with groupthink never seem to cite any clear examples.

Oftentimes a post is doing really well [2], accumulating a dozen up votes within 30 minutes, jumping up the front-page, but then because of two comments, it gets penalized to the third page. I can see it being triggered when there are 40 comments, but there seems to be an awfully low first trigger?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204766

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7578670

curious to learn how this analysis was conducted. e.g. how does HN determine which users belong to a minority groups?

I would love to have more details about that: what do you define as minority, and how do you measure ‘silencing’.

It would be interesting to see how you could actually change the community via comment filtering.

For example, if some individuals are always posting negative comments and were previously not silenced. I wonder if now that they are being silenced if they would leave the community entirely, just keep posting and ignoring the results, or change their comments to fit the community.

Sounds like the new algorithm penalizes disrespectful/spammy comments, rather than the "difference in opinion" comments (which is good). Could a 3rd option be added to differentiate this, though? Have option for upvote, downvote, and mark as spam (I'm thinking a "no" symbol).

Otherwise it looks like anyone just decided to intervene.

It would also be useful to know how often other people upvote (downvote) the comments I upvote (downvote).

These stats should only be privately viewable.

I've thought about doing this in the past but I didn't want to seem too elitist.

What we're talking about here is the community's sense of basic good conduct: for example, that it's bad to be personally aggressive to other users. On this, fortunately, we're not nearly so divided.

I don't think "groupthink" is the right word for that, because there are few views, if any, that cannot be expressed in a substantive and civil way. Minority opinion, reasonably and politely expressed, doesn't do too badly here. Some negatively scored comments do fall into this category—not much more than 1-2%, if that many. That's something we care about and watch for, and may try to do something systematic about, though in practice it's usually enough for a few fair-minded users to upvote those comments back to par.

Far more common is that people post comments which aren't substantive and civil, and then, upon getting downvoted, complain that groupthink is suppressing them.

In general, disagreeing is just fine; one can do so in a polite way. Being a 'jerk' usually entails disagreeing and being vitriolic about it. (An example of this is insulting the person rather than addressing why one disagrees with the arguments in the comment itself.)