Quality of HN Comments Over Time
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    S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D
                 '08                     '09

I know that when winter approaches for me, I tend to get a little disheartened with whatever I'm doing, want to quit and do something inspiring and new... Then when spring rolls around, things are so much better and I have a new lease on life.

I'd suggest comments reflect people's internal barometer, and there probably have been studies on this...

The reason why brasil's huge online population doesn't really count in these kind of things is because they largely keep to their own communities, often portugese-speaking.

So it being seasonal in appearance isn't really much of a surprise.

I'd also argue that geek-types (which most of us are) seem to be more prone to SAD.

But then maybe there aren't that many students here ???

Which I guess makes sense :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925034

and also that such a huge number of people piled on to vote it up.

In fact, that makes me wonder: could it be the voting that makes the tone of the site seem more negative? There are often nasty comments lurking at the bottom of a thread with 1 point or less, but they're not very noticeable. Whereas this one + 49 points (currently) = an angry mob.

The other way is to vote towards how many points you think is should have. So if something has 15 points, if I agree with it but think it's not that good to have 15 points, I sometimes downvote it. Likewise, I'll upvote some heavily downvoted comments because they weren't that bad. I figure no comment should be below -1 unless it's overtly belligerent or trollish.

My idea to solve the problem you're talking about is to have 3 ways to vote. The usual up/down (which in this case can be agree/disagree) and a third for good comments that the user doesn't particularly agree with. It's a rough idea, but I think it could help solve the problem.

Something else I've been toying with that's along similar lines involves removing any up/down/other voting and instead uses a small area of say, 50x50 pixels. The X axis would be the quality of the comment, the the Y would be personal agreement with the comment. And the user could just click anywhere within that area to express their opinion. It's not as easily quantifiable as regular voting, but allows for more expression.

Just some thoughts. :)

A "I think this is a good comment" or "I think this is a poor comment" is certainly different from "I agree with this" or "I disagree with this". The later seems to be how the voting system ends up degenerating into sadly.

Writing anything here requires a lot of time and thought. You can't just dash something off. Careless comments are frowned on, and rightly so. In particular, if I choose to disagree with something, I have to really pick my battles. More often than not, I just don't have the time or energy to get that involved. So if there's another comment that is at least in the same ballpark as what I would have written, I'll just vote that one up instead. Then I don't have to personally join the fray.

I am of the opinion that, while Dustin Curtis' heart might be in the right place, the way he's going about expressing himself in the AA situation is not very good. And if he can dish it out, he should be willing to take it. So while the comment in question is perhaps more vitriolic than I would have written myself, this is a topic I didn't feel strongly enough about myself to get personally involved. So I just voted up somebody else who did.

So, "angry mob?" Man, I really don't think I'd characterize the comment that way. But I'm open to hearing from other people who think so.

I like well-crafted comments that I completely disagree with; it challenges me to rethink my own position. I'd hate to see people get fed up and not write comments simply because it goes against the grain; it would change the nature of the site, and to me, part of its value.

Anyway, I am sidetracking, let me get back to the point. One of the things that makes me jump from a site and not look back is down modding because of disagreement with the idea of the post and not with the nature of the post. I feal that just because you do not agree with a subject of a post if it is well articulated, covers that persons rational and is not abusive or deriding then if you don't agree with it just move along.

In saying that, I have had allot of post here that I thought where great debates (which I love) get blasted down to -1. None of which I thought where particular offensive or abusive. I am passionate and opinionated but to down mod for that, reflects of a desire to constrict ones freedom of expression.

Let me be clear I do not blame HN for this, it is a personal issue among each of us as individuals, but one should really be introspective before they click that button either way (up or down) and ask themselves, is this a good argument, not just I agree with this or I don't like what this guy is saying. If a person does not then they should really reflect on their ability to critically analyze information as they are doing themselves a disservice by limiting their horizons to there own intellectual prejudices.

It used to be that the highest-scoring comment on a thread squatted at the top of the page forever (occasionally displaced by some slow-moving boulder of a competitor). These posts acted as quieting blankets of calm over the whole page.

Now, new comments get debuted at the top of the page, and if they can draw a few lightning strikes of upvotes ("yeah! that's right! screw that!"), they get a chance to stay there, or at least contribute some positive reward to the poster.

One thing I have noticed is a consistent desire for the community to "meta discuss" how the board is doing -- much to the annoyance of others. (yes, this is a comment about meta comments, which makes it a meta meta) I'm not sure any of these conversations have kept the board from getting worse quicker or not -- it's impossible to measure something that didn't happen.

There seems to be common "games" you can play on boards like this, whether you're into game-playing or not. Edw519 has a tendency to come up with pithy quips that the majority of readers would like, thereby gaining his comments a lot upvotes. People who comment early get the "pile on" effect.

I know PG has tweaked the algorithm some to combat this, but all it's really done for me is to put rather worthless comments up above more interesting ones, so for me it makes the board less valuable.

At the end of the day, I think 3 things: 1)karma matters, whether you like it or not, 2) people play games with karma, and 3) you can only play so many quality-enhancing games: as the crowd grows outlying players are left with "cheap and dirty" games which work every so often.

I notice that people care about it and experience consternation about downvotes, I don't yet understand why. In my experience with the site, every comment speaks for itself, and getting downvoted just means a lot of people disagree with you. When it happens in real life it doesn't bother me, I don't see why it would on here.

The thing I'm really looking out for when I browse are the topical mega-comments that appear sometime, usually when someone understands the topic at hand better than the original author. There are only so many of those to go around, so the rest is chatter, it has to be. Everyone wants to talk, only a few people have relavant insight... still true to life :S.

That sounds all fine and dandy, but study after study has shown that if you put numbers/points/stars next to desired user behavior it is going to incentivize it. So yes, in theory it shouldn't matter at all, but due to the freaky way people's minds work, it actually matters a great deal.

It's not a logic thing.

I wish there were a way to send someone a private message, cause I'd give you more specific details. Anyway, the site I built, which gets about 10k uniques a day and has around 200 active users, uses the ratings of posts to sort the homepage and the tag pages. It uses a few different signals like the number of distinct commentors, click throughs, and the reputation of the poster (this is mainly to break ties). It has a decay so that new posts come up, and it also has some safeguards for abuse. For example, users with no or very low reputation don't count in the distinct commentors number so that it can't be spammed, and there are similar safe guards for the click throughs.

Building community sites has been a hobby of mine for years, and I have a bajillion ideas on the subject. Right now I'm working on some bayesian filters for collapsing insulting comments, porn, etc. Fun stuff :)

Not here it doesn't, or at least it shouldn't. Getting downvoted here means that people don't think you are contributing constructively to the discussion, I'll usually upvote a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, especially one that's a reply to one of my comments.

I don't think upvotes are quite as meaningful, though.

Hacker News' voting system is very Reddit-like, so it will also become Reddit. Expect Hacker News to become more immature as it grows in popularity.

Here are two changes that can be made to Hacker News to keep it from becoming Reddit:

* Discourage controversial or dramatic posts. For example, the latest brouhaha about American Airlines and Dustin Curtis was very dramatic, but its educational value was lower than some other less-dramatic posts on Hacker News. I think it's okay to have content like that on Hacker News, but there should be some damping effects to keep the controversial stories lower on the list. Otherwise, Hacker News will be taken over by knee-jerk, reactionary thinking instead of deeper, more nuanced, intelligent discussion. Technical gossip will supplant technical news.

* Provide two ways to vote: vote up if you agree, and vote up if you think the content is valuable. It's important not to conflate the two into one vote up button.

It is because of this thread that I probably won't participate in discussions here anymore. The extreme negativity and personal attacks make me feel as though I'm not a welcome voice here.

I miss the hacker news from two years ago, when I doubt wmeredith would have been supported so highly for a nasty personal attack.

On the other hand, I understand Michael Arrington a lot better now.

Would you claim to be perfect in skill and intent? Are your writings brilliant and your designs unilaterally breathtaking? No? Then you should not only accept intensive criticism or embrace it. The simple fact is that if you were flawless, wmeredith wouldn't have felt the need to call you an ass; that he chose to, and that others agreed with his sentiment, implies a fault of your own, and one that you can fix and mature in the process. Pressure makes diamonds and suchlike.

I learned when I was thirteen that the Internet existed to call me out for my bullshit. I have it to thank that I've become as shitless as I am, and I welcome the future negativity that I'm sure will shape me in the future. You can either sulk that people think you're an asshole, or you can figure out why and become better in the future.

The contrast between this controversy with you and the Fake Steve controversy last month is striking. You get called out for bullshit and reply by being smug. You don't even drop the smug in private email conversation, as I found out last night. Then, when people get irritated and slap you, your reaction isn't to lose the insincerity but to get mad at the people who'll call you out for shit. Meanwhile, last month Dan Lyons decided he was pissed off at John Gruber, and Gruber utterly ignored him except when he had a crushing rebuttal. That's maturity. You'd do well to learn it before you try grandstanding the way you did with your American Airlines series.

EDIT: Can whoever's started downvoting Dustin please not? He made an earnest argument, and he's contributing to the conversation.

At least ten of your comments in that thread contained petty negative personal attacks as well. You do not know me, yet you have created a very negative image of me in your head after reading an angry rant I posted to my personal website. Come on.

Further, the way that you present yourself, both here and there, suggest to me that the things you write are neither sincere nor passionate, even when you design them to look like you care about them. I come from a writing background, and your writings strike me as dishonest. But that's the only dislike I have for you, and all the comments I posted were to that effect.

As I wrote in reply to somebody else in that thread: I was glad people were calling you out, not because I dislike you, but because in most threads talking about your stuff I felt that were I to interject by saying "Dustin's writings seem insincere", I'd come across as either needlessly negative or outright douchey, and it's something I'd have felt awkward emailing you about. So I like that I can say what's been on my mind for a while. But it's not like I hold a grudge: If you ever start writing earnestly, I'm sure I'll love to see what you have to say. Until then, I'll keep judging you by the insincerity you put out for me to read.

I have to think about how to better phrase it—that's just my top-of-the-head reaction—but I had the same feeling last night when we talked, like you cared more about the image I had of you than you did about what I had to say. We didn't have a conversation last night so much as we had a PR session, and that rubs me the wrong way.

people call me arrogant, young, naive, and stupid

There is no clearer signal that you're doing something right. Keep it up.

I suppose you can blame us for any recent decline in quality, although some of us do try not to pull the place down.

* Vote a comment up or down based on its quality, not on whether or not you like/agree with it.

* No politics.

* Downvote reddit-style conspiracy theory/rage against the machine comments...I have started seeing these sorts of comments on HN and it is making me very sad.

After all, we wouldn't confuse a random topic on the internet with a scientific survey, would we? (rhetorical question)

It may not be on the web at all. Could be mailing lists.

OK, ok I kid, I kid... but you are inferring that there is a lisp of forums, and most fall in the blub category. Whilst this is entirely possible, there is a lot more scope for orthogonal directions in discussion.

It might be interesting to contrast some alternative discussion forums / mailing lists and discuss the relative strengths of each, rather than worry about becoming reddit or digg od 4chan or /.

I don't know if you'd call us "elite", but we're still really small over here (full disclosure: this is my website) http://www.gibsonandlily.com (this is mostly just my friends and I along with a few people that jumped ship from reddit)

Most of the articles are science and technology related, with a few funny, economic, and political things peppered in.

Not only that, but you get twenty blog articles submitted pretty much all talking about the same thing every time, and it can just get draining. I think people get aggravated when they start reading the same thing over and over. "Release early/iterate often" has been the subject of no fewer than one top-page article nearly every day, and though it's good advice, I think by this point we get the message. Once the main point of an article is understood, people start to pick apart and criticize the smaller points I guess.

</sarcasm>

I still find HN to be a friendly, positive environment. Let's keep it that way!

Edit: Wow. Either starting your comment with a joke is somehow no longer OK, or nobody else agrees with me that HN is still friendly and positive. I've been reading HN everyday for a very long time. I think these negative trends are mostly just an illusion due to the novelty wearing off for newer users. "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)" (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Reddit's not the worst thing in the world, but make no mistake, we're headed there.

I'm not happy about this :/

Metafilter did a smart thing by forcing users to pay to join. It's also got the most anal modding of any civil site I've ever seen. Cortex will remove entire discussions if he doesn't like them.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the Reddit community - I've expressed this here on HN in the past.

Recently there have been some pretty clear racist undertones running throughout the site (anti-Muslim, in particular). Reddit prides itself in being a community of self-ascribed liberals and progressives - but I don't see it at all in the behaviour of its userbase.

Nowadays I mostly only go to the photography subreddits, that are still generally populated by reasonable people willing to discuss as opposed to fight. Niche subreddits may be the only places left on the site that doesn't make me mentally throw up every time I try to read it.

Of course, I don't spend much time reading the threads themselves. But ... I just don't see how horrible Reddit is.

I haven't seen serious discussion like this there, either. But that's hardly enough to condemn the site entirely. (Of course, maybe I'm one of the negative influences here; I do have a tendency to enjoy off-topic posting.)

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not looking for more venues to argue politics, but that I wouldn't find it a good idea to argue politics here, either. (Although I just got 70 karma for doing just that, this week. So plainly I have no idea what I'm doing.)

>Recently there have been some pretty clear racist undertones running throughout the site (anti-Muslim, in particular)

This is a good example. You'll probably find as many anti-Israel comments as anti-Muslim.

I'm not saying that's a good thing. But it is a scale that balances in the end. One thing that keeps it interesting is that the reddit community doesn't seem to have run for the middle as part of its groupthink, instead it runs for stark polarity.

I wouldn't mind subscribing to your whitelist.

Sorry, I don't measure a person's worth, or the quality of their statements by karma score.

Sweet. Only 8 more days and then I'll be able to voice my opinion without the "noob" stigma.

Such things get downvoted as part of the noise.

I feel that policy should be extended to sarcasm. Sarcasm doesn't work very well on the net, and is often rude and dismissive.

What I used to like about Slashdot was that you could give the +funny modding a -1 weight. This improved Slashdot discussions quite a bit.

Its been my experience that either type of humor isn't tolerated here very well.

A community of self-made people tends to self-select for a certain personality type.

I keep coming back to HN because of the caliber of minds that offer up advice, criticism or personal thoughts on a daily basis for little in return. I envy the amount of collective intellect that HN users have, and yet therein lies the problem - I envy it, so I want to be part of it.

I'm considered the most intelligent person in my family and in my previous job I was the "goto" guy for the tougher questions, the hard assignments or just general advice on your random everyday things. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this sense of worth. You're admired, needed even, and feel like you have something to offer.

On HN, however, I often feel like I have something to SAY, not necessarily something to contribute. This realization has made me very cautious about posting unless I really feel like I can add value to the conversation. Commenting, as I understand it, should really be about just that - adding value.

Having said that however, I also think there is room to embrace newer users who don't really understand this mechanic. Down voting a comment to oblivion doesn't help with educating those who really don't understand why they're being down voted, whether or not it's a troll or just a misguided newbie. Repeat offenders are a different matter and I can't really offer up suggestions on how to handle them, but for the newer members of HN who just happen to confuse something to add with something to say - hopefully giving them a casual nudge in the right direction will really with keeping HN on track.

I was really disappointed by that, since it seems like it was the unofficial way for the community to signal large scale concern over the quality of the site.

It would be nice to have another channel to replace it.

At a minimum I would suggest a mix of Erlang, Lisp, Scala and Clojure articles. Besides being more even handed it probably will be more useful.

Prediction, the comments in this post will converge on the semantics of the word "negative".

Personally I have a few names I like to read commentary from and so keep an eye out for - then skim the rest.

I'm thoroughly disappointed though... from crystalis' later post, it appears you guys all have areas of expertise, but I'm just some kind of generalist or something... cries

I'm sorry to have left you out of the direct accolades- I figured you'd be happy in the company of pg, of so much merit that it need not be mentioned. Your posts are consistently thoughtful, reasoned, and insightful, with an incredible signal/noise ratio. You're just smart, and you write/do/make awesome things.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how his asserted graph deserves the points it has now.

When I see a post about education, I expect tokenadult to have a well sourced and reasonable comment on the topic. When I see a post about security, I expect some intelligent and experienced discourse from you, cperciva, or dfranke. patio11 is consistently arguing from experience about things he knows, like uISV, Rails, and A/B testing, with real-world examples to back it up. These are really valuable posts.

Something like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=924045 isn't entirely valuable, but it's not a bad thing.

However, something like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876726 misses the point entirely and becomes harmful in its Ludditism. To go straw: Do we really need a "product" like plumbing to replace our evolved mutually beneficial practice of shitting wherever we happen to be? Do we really need any of this so-called "medicine" to "hack" nature without consequences?

It's a shy step from vaccine frenzy and represents a titanic reputational blow that- in the absence of proven, public results or credentials- limits the ability to take people seriously. When the quack-science spouting is utterly indistinguishable from what might actually be an experienced person talking from an educated viewpoint, the whole signal is poisoned. No one ever wants to ask the random oracle more than one question.

Without those useful 900 words, the post is just "Yeah, I think there are some roughly seasonal peaks and troughs and it peaked in summer '08. btw it's winter '09, rough times lol."

Have you seriously never heard the phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words"? It's a very common saying. The point is that an image can convey a lot, not that you need a certain number of significant figures in your image:word ratio. Lighten up.

Come christmas break some of the college kids will drop some ineresting academic stuff and things will look up.

As for upvotes being on post quality, that may have been once the intention but it seems that has long gone out the window. Imo that degrades the quality of HN quite a bit but since you can't really check why someone got modded down I guess it does not matter much.

People that mod down because of disagreeing with you would have done so anyway even if that would not have been policy.

And those that mod up/down based on post quality would probably do so too.

Any change you perceive is probably more related to how the numbers of those groups develop.

..I wonder if any systems act similarly? ;)

The barrier is having to pay at all. When you contribute to something online you are already paying, with something far more valuable than that $1, with your time.

It also limits the speech to the voices of those that happen to be able to use the method of payment and adds significant overhead to the running of the site.

Most of my other sparse comments were questioning a premise, offering my .00002 cents worth, and typically neutral to positive in tone. I think. (Or at least that was my intention).

I don't really want to bring this into the discussion though; just saying I thought the way it was shot down was rather rude compared to what I was used to from HN, and I've seen similar posts in other people's threads.

The more blog drama (AA killed my dog!) which gets through, the more people who like blog drama are drawn to the site and up-vote it.

If I were PG, I would look at the data and try to categorize the type of submissions which draw the most negative comments (and I think we still do a good job of -4'ing useless comments) and set a high threshold for a story of that type to get through to the front page.

As another example, if submissions about 37s tend to be really vitriolic, make it harder for those submissions to get through and make it harder for people with a history of incendiary -4 comments to post in them.

The bottom line is that there is a lot of data collected here which can be used to optimize the content towards quality, since we all seem to be talking about the same thing when we talk about quality.

I figure it is because the "original" members were of a certain level of contributor. "hand picked" in a sense (classic early adopters). A these move on to pastures new and a large numbers of new people come in you start to get a range of commentary style rather than just top class stuff.

(not that all newcomers are bad - or indeed not that many of us are - just that you get a range of attitude).

And of course almost outright trolling is less obvious once the general range of commentary style is expanded; so it passes off as serious discussion.

Suspect YC comments will be more optimistic with perceived wealth increasing and folks spending more of their hard earned $$

I'm optimistic, but I have food in my belly at this moment, and a warm place to sleep tonight. That combination falls under the "rich" category at the moment.

Multiple failures might put people in a bad mood.

But, it was a good discussion I thought, sometimes conflict can flesh out ideas and make them stronger or make bad ideas more eligible to be discarded. I certainly took a lot away from it.

I actually appreciated the debate, it's something I encourage in my company and helps us get to the good ideas faster.

It's still one of the rare sites where, years later, I go back and see the same quality of posts (which honestly isn't that bad), and the caliber is kept high enough that my brain doesn't bleed internally.

I'd like to see HN get past this sort of bullying and trend more towards helpful/intelligent.

And up-arrow means "This is insightful and I'm glad you took the time to talk to me, you've made me a better person and I would like to continue having this conversation with you" while down-arrow could mean "I wish to stop talking right now, you're boring and I wouldn't have a beer with you".

I mean, when everyone has the chance to judge what everybody says, you're favoring group-thinking. It's a meritocracy. Which isn't something bad, but if it's not your objective, then drop it. It's a pipe dream to still deny comments are up/down votted based on quality instead of agreement or agenda. It's written on the rules, yet it's simply not followed. I wish people could simply accept that this has been tried, many many times, on a lot of websites, and the reality is that it doesn't work. There are the rules and there is how people actually act.

It's like how project management with Scrum is done. Or rather, what it is up against. Like the person who gave me the course on Scrum said: You can make the client write his requirements with the blood of his first born male, he'll still want to change. It's just how things work. Instead of trying to swim against the tide, fighting its force, we should accept and work with it.

I think designing a system where "helpful" is the ultimate goal might be worthy pursuing. Or maybe Yahoo Answers or Stack Overflow -like systems are the best we can do.

So, we just have to start changing what people get upvoted for.

I think we should create a small group of supermoderators who have 10x voting power.