How does HN's moderation staff feel about users who are dead, completely oblivious to it, but who continue to post, sometimes for years after the fact without any kind of warning that they are wasting their time.
Sometimes I check the comment history of these dead posters; 80% of the time it appears like they are a genuine troll who was correctly moderated out of the community, however, a significant portion of the time, there doesn't appear to be anything particularly inappropriate in the comment history, but the user is still doomed to waste a considerable amount of time attempting to contribute to this board.
In the context of internet discussion boards, it seems a little harsh.
Off the top of my head, I feel like something akin to an automatic probationary resurrection period would be an interesting idea. Perhaps it occurs one year after hellbanishment, giving the community a chance to organically reevaluate the user's quality of contributions, and giving a second chance to those who have matured in a years time (or who was simply hellbanned in error).
I had this happen to me when I critiqued a YC backed company. Had a few thousand in 'meaningless internet karma points'.
You pretty soon realise after a few further comments anyway, so I doubt it's actually effective.
It's pretty mean spirited though - generally a "douchebag" move. It'd be like having a bad employee, but instead of firing him, or discussing his work, just don't bother paying him any more.
After being hellbanned I actually realised that commenting on internet forums is toxic, generally a waste of time, and not productive. So I quit. At the start, you sort of care about "karma". But you end up realising it's a measure of two things. 1. How much time you waste commenting on the internet, and 2. How much you can agree with the groupthink echo-chamber.
But for those that like spending time commenting, I would have thought following a subreddit model would work better here, with the growth. Spread the power out. If I get hellbanned from the "rust is the future!!!" subhackernews, big whoop.
It'd also help with filtering out all the non-interesting (self driving cars) stories.
But then perhaps it'd basically be reddit at that stage which would defeat the point...
We've got an idea about this that we want to try. It's one of the future experiments Sam alluded to at the end of his post.
(I'll add some details in a few minutes. Edit—well, quite a few minutes.)
The problem is that banning an account is an all-or-nothing system where inappropriate commenting is not necessarily an all-or-nothing phenomenon. The solution we want to try, which was suggested by several users, is to give the community the power to bring comments out of [dead] status. Letting fellow users make the call when a comment is (or isn't) ok seems like it might work, especially since the recent experiments with flagging seem to have helped. This is one of the things Sam was referring to when he said we plan to experiment more with community moderation.
I had an account get "hellbanned" a while ago (it was an account with less than 20 karma to begin with) and after some stupid comment on my part I got downvoted significantly. Didn't even realize it had happened until someone reached out to me via Twitter informing me that my account was "hellbanned".
Apparently, this is the comment that got my old account banned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4342935. I'm not sure though, it's just the last one on the profile before they go dead.
> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately.
This seems like one of the cases where HN's moderation is both draconian and completely opaque. I can't flag comments, and I have no idea why. I certainly don't think of myself as an abusive user.
Maybe I accidentally clicked the "flag" link once. If that gets flagging privileges removed, HN should at least consider creating a way to undo an action!
As other users have pointed out, to flag a comment you have to click on 'link' to go to the comment's item page [1]. I don't know why PG designed it this way but have always assumed it was a speed bump to reduce impulsive flagging, since flags are more powerful than downvotes.
We never remove flagging privileges because of just one flag. The concept of a mistake is all too familiar over here.
More than once, I've unintentionally downvoted comments I meant to upvote, upvoted comments I meant to downvote, and/or clicked on a button I didn't mean to click (that includes clicking on 'reply' after writing something that doesn't really add any value and almost instantly regretting it).
So I agree, it would be great to have more/better undo options!
Are you sure you are looking at the right place? To flag a comment you must click on "link", and only then the "flag" option appears. TFA mentions the threshold for flagging is only 30 karma.
This has been the source of much confusion and I'm not 100% sure on the reason why it was implemented.
If I understand the rules correctly, downvoting is used for not agreeing with a comment, and flags are used for inappropriate comments.
But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment?
My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't agree with it; and let flagging remove inappropriate comments.
I would love to see them lower the threshold for down-voting. I've only got 200+ karma, and it's hard for me to get more. I can't be on here all day commenting, and being the first to submit articles.
If I have something important to say, I comment, otherwise, I mostly consume. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to download a comment I don't agree with or find offensive.
"To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately."
When I first joined HN, I aggressively flagged stories and comments that didn't meet the guidelines. I thought that's what I was supposed to do. However, one day my comment flagging privileges disappeared with no explanation. If someone had contacted me and explained how I was misusing flags, I would have happily self-corrected.
It should be noted that during the aforementioned six month periods, both the number of new comments made monthly and the average score for a given comment decreased, although this post claims a 30% increase to Hacker News traffic due to changes in the comment system, which is interesting assertion of causality. (in fairness, the decrease in number of new comments could be caused by the increased moderation of bad comments.)
It would be helpful if this article in this submission clarified how to flag comments, as that action is unintuitive (you have to click the comment permalink first) [EDIT: looks like this was added to the submission]
In my opinion the only real annoyance with HN is when story titles are edited.
Maybe it will take an updated policy to fix the core issue, which is that while linkbait headlines are annoying, some original works are titled very badly and the poster may actually add useful information by customizing the title (often by highlighting what is most interesting/relevant about the linked article).
I think this aspect of HN has improved immensely in the past several months; dang in particular has done much to increase the transparency around title editing. I find myself less likely to knee-jerk reject a title change when the rationale is right there in the comments.
A third experiment didn't go so well: we briefly made the software kill comments that had been sufficiently downvoted. Many users objected, arguing that killing downvoted comments is too harsh a punishment for unpopular opinions, especially since downvoted comments get faded to begin with. We heard that and reversed the change.
Good to hear they decided to roll that back.
PG opened a pandora's box when he said that downvotes were acceptable when you merely disagreed with someone, instead of doing so for civility. There is no end of sadness and bullshit caused by that remark.
It'd be nice to see an official policy statement changing that position, but I don't think it's likely. In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad.
Flagging seems like the solution to toxic comments, and should be more encouraged. At the same time, this means it overlaps with downvoting—but only one use of downvoting. Really, the meaning of downvoting on HN is somewhat confused and muddled: is it a "flag lite"? Is it a way of disagreeing? Is it a way to push worse content to the bottom? Is it just the opposite of an upvote?
Any one of these would be reasonable, but having all at the same time is not great. But that's exactly what we have now, both in the design of the feature and in how it gets used in practice.
Personally, I think downvoting should move away from being an alternate form of flagging (with flagging, perhaps, taking a slightly more prominent role for dealing with actual abuse) and more towards just being the opposite of an upvote. This still makes it a bit of a hybrid (both for moving bad content down and disagreeing), but one that makes a lot more sense because it works just like upvotes do.
For one, this is what the interface already implies. The downvote button looks just like the upvote button upside down. Seeing the two as exact opposites is entirely natural, and that's how it plays out in terms of karma too. But in terms of social conventions and, importantly, greying out comments, this doesn't quite hold.
I also think that some symmetric way to counterbalance upvotes is actually useful in and of itself: downvotes can offset comments that gain a lot of upvotes before getting a strong rebuttal or comments stuck at the top of a discussion because of other quirks in the system. But people now seem pretty hesitant to use them this way. Which makes sense: if downvotes are, in part, mini-flags, they are too strong just to indicate that you think something has been upvoted too much or is not a particularly good comment (without being bad or abusive).
So what would I do? Well, from the site's perspective, the main tweak is greying out comments after more than one downvote. Still have the votes change the order, but only have a really visible effect after a few have accumulated. More importantly, from a social perspective, it would be good to reach consensus on what a downvote actually entails, namely that it's just the opposite of an upvote, neither more nor less.
Disentangling flags and downvotes like this will improve the utility of both features by making them more focused. Downvotes can be a symmetric force in shaping discussion while flags could be pushed a bit more as means of pruning actively harmful comments.
My position is that downvotes should not exist. There are three ways to view posts and comments:
A. you agree with it, and appreciate it, so you upvote it to give it more visibility because that is how this whole system works - popular stuff should rise to the top, and an upvote is a measure of popularity. If you see popular stuff but have something to add, you will usually upvote and comment on it.
B. a comment or post is a violation of site rules, and should be reported. You flag these and leave it up to moderators to deal with it.
C. you disagree with a comment or submission. If you are given a downvote button, people will often just downvote the stuff they do not like and leave it at that. But that is antithesis to discussion, and it is a very real problem on reddit, where users often use downvotes as a substitution to real debate or testing ones beliefs or knowledge. The correct answer is to reply why you dislike a comment, and try to start a discussion on it. If it is not violating site rules (and trolling can be, depending on site, one of those rules) then it is your duty to inform the poster why they are wrong.
Downvoting is a cop out to take the truly controversial topics that make for the better discussions out of consideration, and that is why you get an echo chamber - when you only have upvotes, if there are three opinions, then those three will be ranked by popularity. If you have downvotes, only the most popular opinion will ever show up because not only is it upvoted the most but the other two are downvoted off the site and those with dissenting beliefs just leave. And then you end up with the echo chamber and no real discussion left.
I think that is why HN gets higher quality, in the general case, than most subreddits around technology. They have downvote buttons that naturally turn their communities into hive minds, whereas here you have to actually contribute a bit to get that power. I'd rather see it removed entirely, tbh.
I try to use upvoting and downvoting to massage comments (and comment threads) into a sorting I like better, which seems similar to your philosophy.
I upvote particularly insightful comments, or those that I think will lead to an interesting discussion; I downvote comments that I think are particularly inane, and I sometimes downvote comments and threads that I think are commanding too much attention at the expense of a better discussion further down the page.
Our view makes sense, since the sorting effect is the main one that readers see, but it's somewhat problematic because the effects of upvoting and downvoting on the display order of comments within a thread are mixed up with harsh punitive effects at the user-level (hellbanning) and with sorting effects at the submission-level that don't align with our benign intentions—e.g., a submission whose comment thread has attracted many downvoted gets dropped on the front page, so downvotes are not an otherwise neutral inverse of an upvote.
It makes sense, if this view of upvoting and downvoting as a "sort higher/sort lower" command is widely held, to separate out (or water down) the punitive and submission-level effects of downvoting a comment, possibly transferring those to flags instead.
The question I'd have about a downvote being opposite of an upvote is what is an upvote supposed to be for? I mean that as an honest question. Is it because it's something I like? Is it because I think it adds value to the conversation (usually why I upvote)? I've never seen guidlines for voting either way. The flag guidelines also seem pretty hazy (spam or offtopic [1]).
Of course, that could be totally intentional, and I'm not implying it's a bad way to do things. They might not want to nail down the upvote/downvote idea so much and just let them represent a general will of the readers instead of getting into semantic debates over guidelines. Just a few things I'm curious about.
It seems like early comments on any article generally have a huge advantage in garnering votes.
This appropriately rewards engagement, but also pushes down other worthy comments that come slightly later, often to effective near invisibility when replies to the top comment dominate the discussion.
I wonder if there is any mechanism that could help counter this.
A comment's location is affected both by its points and by its age. New comments tend to appear at or near the top in the first few minutes after they're posted, and then will drop down the page if they don't receive many upvotes.
I expect that there is a strong correlation between how soon a comment is posted and its points. Two thoughts from a relative noob (sorry if these ideas already have been discussed or tried):
* On threads with many comments, few users have time to read all or even most of them. Perhaps find a way to shorten the list, improve signal-to-noise, and surface newer comments by burying older comments that haven't received votes.
> This appropriately rewards engagement
* It rewards engagement by people who have the time to frequently check HN, read linked stories, and comment throughout the day. My guess is that the smarter someone is, the less availability they have for such things. I would create a system that rewards engagement by busy people.
I'd love to see posts on the rationale between different design decisions, particularly with regards to things that change group dynamics. For instance, putting karma next to someone's name may produce leader-following social behavior, meaning your high-karma users would reinforce general behavior by encouraging other users to behave the same. But that would increase the already prevalent concern of high-karma users overly influencing discussion and getting upvoted based on karma alone. It would be interesting to see all these examples stacked up and then a post about why they went one way or another.
Can you mark comments with the score of 1 in some way?
I suspect that I'm not the only one who downvotes the comments he doesn't like or disagrees with, but who'd very rarely want to push a comment into gray. I mean, it's one thing to vote a comment down so that it won't float at the top and another is to punch its author in a face with a negative score.
That's a good idea. Like so many of these, it isn't obvious how to do it in a way that doesn't complicate HN's minimal UI. But it's worth noting that you'd get this for free if we implemented vote undo, which is something we're open to.
Voting is a dangerous thing. In German newspapers, an extreme right wing minority has taken over most comment forums. In some of these, even belonging to reputable newspapers, it has become extremely difficult to voice dissenting opinion (for example defending human rights for foreigners and homosexuals), mostly because "activists" have begun marking such opinions as spam or inappropriate.
Is there any guidance on what stories are appropriate to flag? Is it just spam, or is it looser than that?
I sometimes flag blatant political stories, because I don't think they belong on HN, so I guess if I suddenly can't flag anymore then that was the wrong answer.
I'm wondering if there's any official policy on linking to articles that are behind pay/register walls. I've flagged two such submissions, and only one got flagkilled.
> To prevent abuse, moderators review flagged stories and comments and revoke flagging privileges from users who flag inappropriately.
That seems like a lot of manual work, but maybe it needs to be. Perhaps it could be part automated by revoking flagging privileges when others upvoted the post? If it really are post nobody wants on the site, surely very few people (if anyone) would upvote it. So if it gets both flagged and upvoted, it are probably flags from users that disagree and you can pretty consistently revoke their permissions.
Just an idea, I don't have the data to test this.
Thanks a lot for all the work you are doing and have done so far on the site. I agree that the quality has increased!
"... I’d also like to thank dang and sctb for all the work they’ve done as moderators and with software to increase story and comment quality. ..."
This is a good point and should be acknowledged. I was personally contacted on how to improve HN. I've yet to get back to you @dang, replies are more fully formed.
[+] [-] vectorpush|11 years ago|reply
Sometimes I check the comment history of these dead posters; 80% of the time it appears like they are a genuine troll who was correctly moderated out of the community, however, a significant portion of the time, there doesn't appear to be anything particularly inappropriate in the comment history, but the user is still doomed to waste a considerable amount of time attempting to contribute to this board.
In the context of internet discussion boards, it seems a little harsh.
Off the top of my head, I feel like something akin to an automatic probationary resurrection period would be an interesting idea. Perhaps it occurs one year after hellbanishment, giving the community a chance to organically reevaluate the user's quality of contributions, and giving a second chance to those who have matured in a years time (or who was simply hellbanned in error).
[+] [-] throwit99|11 years ago|reply
It's pretty mean spirited though - generally a "douchebag" move. It'd be like having a bad employee, but instead of firing him, or discussing his work, just don't bother paying him any more.
After being hellbanned I actually realised that commenting on internet forums is toxic, generally a waste of time, and not productive. So I quit. At the start, you sort of care about "karma". But you end up realising it's a measure of two things. 1. How much time you waste commenting on the internet, and 2. How much you can agree with the groupthink echo-chamber.
But for those that like spending time commenting, I would have thought following a subreddit model would work better here, with the growth. Spread the power out. If I get hellbanned from the "rust is the future!!!" subhackernews, big whoop.
It'd also help with filtering out all the non-interesting (self driving cars) stories.
But then perhaps it'd basically be reddit at that stage which would defeat the point...
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
(I'll add some details in a few minutes. Edit—well, quite a few minutes.)
The problem is that banning an account is an all-or-nothing system where inappropriate commenting is not necessarily an all-or-nothing phenomenon. The solution we want to try, which was suggested by several users, is to give the community the power to bring comments out of [dead] status. Letting fellow users make the call when a comment is (or isn't) ok seems like it might work, especially since the recent experiments with flagging seem to have helped. This is one of the things Sam was referring to when he said we plan to experiment more with community moderation.
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wldcordeiro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2012|11 years ago|reply
I did like my old account.
[+] [-] Arjuna|11 years ago|reply
[1] Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761
[2] Pending Comments Update
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7484304
[3] Pending Comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/pending
[+] [-] StevePerkins|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rspeer|11 years ago|reply
This seems like one of the cases where HN's moderation is both draconian and completely opaque. I can't flag comments, and I have no idea why. I certainly don't think of myself as an abusive user.
Maybe I accidentally clicked the "flag" link once. If that gets flagging privileges removed, HN should at least consider creating a way to undo an action!
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
We never remove flagging privileges because of just one flag. The concept of a mistake is all too familiar over here.
1. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=author%3Adang+flag+link#!/comment/...
[+] [-] cs702|11 years ago|reply
So I agree, it would be great to have more/better undo options!
[+] [-] spicyj|11 years ago|reply
Make sure you're clicking "link" through to the comment's page -- the flag links don't appear when comments are shown in a thread.
[+] [-] BoppreH|11 years ago|reply
This has been the source of much confusion and I'm not 100% sure on the reason why it was implemented.
[+] [-] yoha|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] readerrrr|11 years ago|reply
But is fading the comment really the correct behaviour. Isn't the position on the page deciding whether the community agrees with the comment?
My suggestion is: remove the fading; let downvoting only move the comments down, since the comment is appropriate yet the community doesn't agree with it; and let flagging remove inappropriate comments.
[+] [-] chrisblackwell|11 years ago|reply
If I have something important to say, I comment, otherwise, I mostly consume. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to download a comment I don't agree with or find offensive.
[+] [-] sciurus|11 years ago|reply
When I first joined HN, I aggressively flagged stories and comments that didn't meet the guidelines. I thought that's what I was supposed to do. However, one day my comment flagging privileges disappeared with no explanation. If someone had contacted me and explained how I was misusing flags, I would have happily self-corrected.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] minimaxir|11 years ago|reply
It should be noted that during the aforementioned six month periods, both the number of new comments made monthly and the average score for a given comment decreased, although this post claims a 30% increase to Hacker News traffic due to changes in the comment system, which is interesting assertion of causality. (in fairness, the decrease in number of new comments could be caused by the increased moderation of bad comments.)
It would be helpful if this article in this submission clarified how to flag comments, as that action is unintuitive (you have to click the comment permalink first) [EDIT: looks like this was added to the submission]
[+] [-] grandalf|11 years ago|reply
Maybe it will take an updated policy to fix the core issue, which is that while linkbait headlines are annoying, some original works are titled very badly and the poster may actually add useful information by customizing the title (often by highlighting what is most interesting/relevant about the linked article).
[+] [-] xnxn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 03108109108|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 03108109108|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|11 years ago|reply
Good to hear they decided to roll that back.
PG opened a pandora's box when he said that downvotes were acceptable when you merely disagreed with someone, instead of doing so for civility. There is no end of sadness and bullshit caused by that remark.
It'd be nice to see an official policy statement changing that position, but I don't think it's likely. In the meantime, we will simply have to stop assuming that downvoted comments are actually, you know, bad.
[+] [-] btreecat|11 years ago|reply
So I guess I am not able to help.
[+] [-] tikhonj|11 years ago|reply
Any one of these would be reasonable, but having all at the same time is not great. But that's exactly what we have now, both in the design of the feature and in how it gets used in practice.
Personally, I think downvoting should move away from being an alternate form of flagging (with flagging, perhaps, taking a slightly more prominent role for dealing with actual abuse) and more towards just being the opposite of an upvote. This still makes it a bit of a hybrid (both for moving bad content down and disagreeing), but one that makes a lot more sense because it works just like upvotes do.
For one, this is what the interface already implies. The downvote button looks just like the upvote button upside down. Seeing the two as exact opposites is entirely natural, and that's how it plays out in terms of karma too. But in terms of social conventions and, importantly, greying out comments, this doesn't quite hold.
I also think that some symmetric way to counterbalance upvotes is actually useful in and of itself: downvotes can offset comments that gain a lot of upvotes before getting a strong rebuttal or comments stuck at the top of a discussion because of other quirks in the system. But people now seem pretty hesitant to use them this way. Which makes sense: if downvotes are, in part, mini-flags, they are too strong just to indicate that you think something has been upvoted too much or is not a particularly good comment (without being bad or abusive).
So what would I do? Well, from the site's perspective, the main tweak is greying out comments after more than one downvote. Still have the votes change the order, but only have a really visible effect after a few have accumulated. More importantly, from a social perspective, it would be good to reach consensus on what a downvote actually entails, namely that it's just the opposite of an upvote, neither more nor less.
Disentangling flags and downvotes like this will improve the utility of both features by making them more focused. Downvotes can be a symmetric force in shaping discussion while flags could be pushed a bit more as means of pruning actively harmful comments.
[+] [-] zanny|11 years ago|reply
A. you agree with it, and appreciate it, so you upvote it to give it more visibility because that is how this whole system works - popular stuff should rise to the top, and an upvote is a measure of popularity. If you see popular stuff but have something to add, you will usually upvote and comment on it.
B. a comment or post is a violation of site rules, and should be reported. You flag these and leave it up to moderators to deal with it.
C. you disagree with a comment or submission. If you are given a downvote button, people will often just downvote the stuff they do not like and leave it at that. But that is antithesis to discussion, and it is a very real problem on reddit, where users often use downvotes as a substitution to real debate or testing ones beliefs or knowledge. The correct answer is to reply why you dislike a comment, and try to start a discussion on it. If it is not violating site rules (and trolling can be, depending on site, one of those rules) then it is your duty to inform the poster why they are wrong.
Downvoting is a cop out to take the truly controversial topics that make for the better discussions out of consideration, and that is why you get an echo chamber - when you only have upvotes, if there are three opinions, then those three will be ranked by popularity. If you have downvotes, only the most popular opinion will ever show up because not only is it upvoted the most but the other two are downvoted off the site and those with dissenting beliefs just leave. And then you end up with the echo chamber and no real discussion left.
I think that is why HN gets higher quality, in the general case, than most subreddits around technology. They have downvote buttons that naturally turn their communities into hive minds, whereas here you have to actually contribute a bit to get that power. I'd rather see it removed entirely, tbh.
[+] [-] pash|11 years ago|reply
I upvote particularly insightful comments, or those that I think will lead to an interesting discussion; I downvote comments that I think are particularly inane, and I sometimes downvote comments and threads that I think are commanding too much attention at the expense of a better discussion further down the page.
Our view makes sense, since the sorting effect is the main one that readers see, but it's somewhat problematic because the effects of upvoting and downvoting on the display order of comments within a thread are mixed up with harsh punitive effects at the user-level (hellbanning) and with sorting effects at the submission-level that don't align with our benign intentions—e.g., a submission whose comment thread has attracted many downvoted gets dropped on the front page, so downvotes are not an otherwise neutral inverse of an upvote.
It makes sense, if this view of upvoting and downvoting as a "sort higher/sort lower" command is widely held, to separate out (or water down) the punitive and submission-level effects of downvoting a comment, possibly transferring those to flags instead.
[+] [-] doorhammer|11 years ago|reply
Of course, that could be totally intentional, and I'm not implying it's a bad way to do things. They might not want to nail down the upvote/downvote idea so much and just let them represent a general will of the readers instead of getting into semantic debates over guidelines. Just a few things I'm curious about.
[+] [-] rsync|11 years ago|reply
I am sick and tired of seeing the scoring system injected into the comment thread:
"let the downvotes begin" "EDIT: you can downvote all you want, but ..." "EDIT: not sure why I'm being downvoted, but ..."
... and so on. Just comment and respond, don't add all manner of meta-commentary on voting and the score system into the discussion.
Thanks.
[+] [-] natch|11 years ago|reply
This appropriately rewards engagement, but also pushes down other worthy comments that come slightly later, often to effective near invisibility when replies to the top comment dominate the discussion.
I wonder if there is any mechanism that could help counter this.
[+] [-] maaaats|11 years ago|reply
However, I often see new (top level) comments on the top when entering a discussion here on HN, so it seems they at least get some exposure.
[+] [-] lotharbot|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackuser|11 years ago|reply
* On threads with many comments, few users have time to read all or even most of them. Perhaps find a way to shorten the list, improve signal-to-noise, and surface newer comments by burying older comments that haven't received votes.
> This appropriately rewards engagement
* It rewards engagement by people who have the time to frequently check HN, read linked stories, and comment throughout the day. My guess is that the smarter someone is, the less availability they have for such things. I would create a system that rewards engagement by busy people.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huhtenberg|11 years ago|reply
I suspect that I'm not the only one who downvotes the comments he doesn't like or disagrees with, but who'd very rarely want to push a comment into gray. I mean, it's one thing to vote a comment down so that it won't float at the top and another is to punch its author in a face with a negative score.
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|11 years ago|reply
You are only supposed to downvote comments that are useless.
[+] [-] bayesianhorse|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acheron|11 years ago|reply
I sometimes flag blatant political stories, because I don't think they belong on HN, so I guess if I suddenly can't flag anymore then that was the wrong answer.
[+] [-] tptacek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shaggyfrog|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|11 years ago|reply
That seems like a lot of manual work, but maybe it needs to be. Perhaps it could be part automated by revoking flagging privileges when others upvoted the post? If it really are post nobody wants on the site, surely very few people (if anyone) would upvote it. So if it gets both flagged and upvoted, it are probably flags from users that disagree and you can pretty consistently revoke their permissions.
Just an idea, I don't have the data to test this.
Thanks a lot for all the work you are doing and have done so far on the site. I agree that the quality has increased!
[+] [-] bootload|11 years ago|reply
This is a good point and should be acknowledged. I was personally contacted on how to improve HN. I've yet to get back to you @dang, replies are more fully formed.
[+] [-] JoshTriplett|11 years ago|reply
Excellent.
> Second, we've started indicating in the UI which comments/stories have been killed by user flags.
What does this look like in the UI? I haven't seen any examples of it yet, and I'd expect to see at least a few on a regular basis.
[+] [-] hawkice|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptown|11 years ago|reply