<story><title>Another Way to View the &quot;Decline&quot; of HN</title><url>http://www.georgesaines.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that there are a huge number of mediocre comments.  The increase in meanness is just one of the more visible aspects of that.  (Meanness is moral mediocrity.)&lt;p&gt;Although maybe I shouldn&apos;t say &quot;unfortunately,&quot; because that problem may be easy to cure.  E.g. it might work simply to add a karma cost of for commenting, an idea I&apos;m seriously considering trying out.</text></item><item><author>javert</author><text>If comments &quot;seem worse,&quot; then in what way are they worse? That may help find an answer.&lt;p&gt;My general hypothesis is that you can improve comment quality by giving users more metrics than just an upvote or downvote.&lt;p&gt;For example, consider the following:&lt;p&gt;Some people are saying there&apos;s a lot more negativity around here. I think that&apos;s true. Also, I&apos;ve found that if someone is negative towards me in a way that seems personal, I get defensive and have to work hard to not respond in kind (and sometimes I respond in a mean way anyways). Sometimes these kinds of arguments get a lot of upvotes, because lots of people take one side or the other, and new people get drawn in.&lt;p&gt;One way to deal with this particular problem would be to treat comments that are &quot;mean&quot; differently from comments that just aren&apos;t interesting or insightful or correct.&lt;p&gt;For example, you could just cut off, or gray out, any comment thread that becomes &quot;mean,&quot; thus diverting attention from it; people already involved would be able to continue if they want, knowing nobody else will probably look at it, and new people won&apos;t get drawn in. How you detect when a thread becomes &quot;mean&quot; is not easy, but maybe you could have a &quot;mean&quot; button/flag. A person clicks the &quot;mean&quot; flag to vote the thread as mean, but their vote&apos;s power is weighted against their karma, and then there is a threshhold that, if reached, actually designates the thread as &quot;mean&quot; and greys it out or whatnot.&lt;p&gt;Now, the point of this comment is not actually the specific &quot;meanness&quot; example, but the hypothesis I laid out at the beginning of the comment.&lt;p&gt;I mean, hell, you could try a bunch of different metrics. Just create a little &quot;metrics bar&quot; that allows users to vote on various things (like &quot;meanness,&quot; etc.) and rotate a few different options through over time just to see which ones help or give interesting data. Keep the normal voting much more prominent, though, and make this metrics bar less prominent, so that it can be ignored and doesn&apos;t impact the UX much for those not interested.</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I wish this were the whole reason.  It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn&apos;t seem much if any change in those.  But comments do actually seem worse.  Though I still have hopes of reversing that trend.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zedshaw</author><text>&amp;#62; Meanness is moral mediocrity.&lt;p&gt;Shiiit Paul, hacker news has been screwed up since the beginning.  Remember this video?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/31/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;That video would show up on the front page about once a year, and is by one of your most popular members and commenters.  The video is &lt;i&gt;full&lt;/i&gt; of slander and straight up factual errors and even gets almost all of cryptography and network protocols wrong.  It&apos;s probably one of &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; worst videos on security out there, yet, what did HN do?&lt;p&gt;Eat. It. Up.  Nobody flagged that video, told tptacek it was bullshit, or bothered saying one damn thing about it other than cheering it on and laughing.  You definitely didn&apos;t boot him off the site, and in fact gave him a top spot in your system.  This is not how you tell people you don&apos;t like &apos;meanness&apos;.&lt;p&gt;Over the years here and before I started commenting people called me a cocksucker, cock, asshole, douchebag, and every mean ass thing you can imagine.  They do it to other people too, and I sure as hell don&apos;t see anyone getting flagged or kicked off.  If you pick someone unpopular to insult you&apos;re totally allowed to be a dick here.&lt;p&gt;Paul, HN is in decline because you don&apos;t actually enforce your own rules.  If you don&apos;t want people to be &quot;mean&quot; or talk like idiots then don&apos;t let mean and idiotic crap on the front page.  Half the time, when one of my many clever ruthless jokes shows up on the front page I giggle.  My jokes demonstrate what you&apos;ve been allowing for years but only seem to care about now that it&apos;s insulting your own ethos of the &quot;uber hacker scientist ruling the world&quot;:&lt;p&gt;You guys love cruelty and insult, I&apos;m proof.</text></comment>
<story><title>Another Way to View the &quot;Decline&quot; of HN</title><url>http://www.georgesaines.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that there are a huge number of mediocre comments.  The increase in meanness is just one of the more visible aspects of that.  (Meanness is moral mediocrity.)&lt;p&gt;Although maybe I shouldn&apos;t say &quot;unfortunately,&quot; because that problem may be easy to cure.  E.g. it might work simply to add a karma cost of for commenting, an idea I&apos;m seriously considering trying out.</text></item><item><author>javert</author><text>If comments &quot;seem worse,&quot; then in what way are they worse? That may help find an answer.&lt;p&gt;My general hypothesis is that you can improve comment quality by giving users more metrics than just an upvote or downvote.&lt;p&gt;For example, consider the following:&lt;p&gt;Some people are saying there&apos;s a lot more negativity around here. I think that&apos;s true. Also, I&apos;ve found that if someone is negative towards me in a way that seems personal, I get defensive and have to work hard to not respond in kind (and sometimes I respond in a mean way anyways). Sometimes these kinds of arguments get a lot of upvotes, because lots of people take one side or the other, and new people get drawn in.&lt;p&gt;One way to deal with this particular problem would be to treat comments that are &quot;mean&quot; differently from comments that just aren&apos;t interesting or insightful or correct.&lt;p&gt;For example, you could just cut off, or gray out, any comment thread that becomes &quot;mean,&quot; thus diverting attention from it; people already involved would be able to continue if they want, knowing nobody else will probably look at it, and new people won&apos;t get drawn in. How you detect when a thread becomes &quot;mean&quot; is not easy, but maybe you could have a &quot;mean&quot; button/flag. A person clicks the &quot;mean&quot; flag to vote the thread as mean, but their vote&apos;s power is weighted against their karma, and then there is a threshhold that, if reached, actually designates the thread as &quot;mean&quot; and greys it out or whatnot.&lt;p&gt;Now, the point of this comment is not actually the specific &quot;meanness&quot; example, but the hypothesis I laid out at the beginning of the comment.&lt;p&gt;I mean, hell, you could try a bunch of different metrics. Just create a little &quot;metrics bar&quot; that allows users to vote on various things (like &quot;meanness,&quot; etc.) and rotate a few different options through over time just to see which ones help or give interesting data. Keep the normal voting much more prominent, though, and make this metrics bar less prominent, so that it can be ignored and doesn&apos;t impact the UX much for those not interested.</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I wish this were the whole reason.  It may be why people are bored with the stories on the frontpage; there doesn&apos;t seem much if any change in those.  But comments do actually seem worse.  Though I still have hopes of reversing that trend.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tansey</author><text>PG, if you really want to get hard data on whether comments have gotten &quot;meaner&quot;, I&apos;d be happy to help with that.&lt;p&gt;It seems the chief complaint is that comments are no longer increasing the happiness and confidence of the community, but rather raising anxiety and hostility. My startup is based on an algorithm for measuring the emotional impact of text and does in fact measure these four emotions.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;d be pleased to help measure how comments&apos; effects on readers have changed over time. I would do it myself, but I know you don&apos;t want me anonymously scraping every comment for the last 3+ years, and it&apos;d be much faster to just get a data dump from the server.&lt;p&gt;Drop me a line if interested. :)</text></comment>