I too think having his comments readily visible would detract. While people that have been around long enough know not to respond to his less lucid prose, I've seen people post comments about how off-putting his comments can be. This tends to detract from the overall discussion without adding anything.
That being said, I do make a point of reading his comments. Hmm, perhaps there should be a TerryFilterBot that can repost them, although of course it would have to be tailored to each readers comfort level. There's probably an MVP there :-)
> perhaps there should be a TerryFilterBot that can repost them, although of course it would have to be tailored to each readers comfort level.
I think this is an extremely cute idea and a cool hack.
It doesn't need to be complicated or custom-tailored; to start with, just make it not repost things that include racial slurs, which are easy to detect.
I've never heard of an online community having a user that is automatically filtered like this. So it would be an interesting first. Then again, perhaps HN doesn't need any unwanted attention.
If somebody wanted to do it (maybe a student for a course project?), you could feed the bot a bunch of samples and scores, and it would learn which of his posts are high quality and which are low quality. Then once the bot is in place, it could learn further by looking at how many upvotes he (it) is getting on each post. Though I would recommend starting with something simpler and making it open source.
Honestly, the guy's technical work is a real inspiration.
That being said, I do make a point of reading his comments. Hmm, perhaps there should be a TerryFilterBot that can repost them, although of course it would have to be tailored to each readers comfort level. There's probably an MVP there :-)