Tell HN: Can we stop commenting on troll comments?

[tptacek]

We're definitely seeing more overt troll comments lately. I'm not talking about baiting the Apple fanboys or spouting political talking points; I'm talking about comments with Slashdot "first-post" type nonsense.

That's not a big deal. The problem is, people here seem to feel compelled to point out to the troll that this is the "wrong site" to post to. They don't care. Who does care? The rest of us, who have to page through comment threads of people slapping each other on the back for telling off a troll.

We have moderation for a reason. Just let the troll comments drop to the bottom of the page. Can that be the new plan? And can we politely (and preferably out-of-band) ask people who do respond to troll comments to delete their comments to keep the threads clean?

[pg]

Sadly true. HN now gets 40k uniques a day, and I am starting to worry about the character of the comments.

The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up.

The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site. A zippy one-liner that a year ago would have languished midway down the thread now becomes the top comment.

So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and more dangerous decline I've been seeing.

I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix.

[m0th87]

In the wake of my disillusionment with the way reddit has devolved, I've been thinking about this problem for a while.

I think the best way to handle this is to apply a sort of social equivalent to the PageRank algorithm to users. Thus, when a user votes up/down an article, its points change as a function of that user's karma level. Consequently, users with greater karma have greater direct input into the community.

Eigenvalue centrality is a fascinating algorithm that provides such a use case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Eigenvector_centrali...

Another benefit of such a system is you would no longer need to enforce karma thresholds for downvoting, as this sort of meritocracy arises naturally from the algorithm.

[jacoblyles]

Restrict suffrage.

edit for additional explanation: Democracy is another name for the tyranny of the mean. You can try to educate the mean all you want, but at some point it's a losing strategy due to the sheer weight of the numbers.

Further thought: stackoverflow is an example of a community that has implemented an incremental rights model successfully. Universal rights are cleaner and more elegant, but ultimately give a community over to the mean.

[wglb]

How about this small thing--change the wording of the button add comment to add thoughtful comment.

[tptacek]

You should do what you've been doing all along. Provide occasional reinforcement: post items urging people to look at the guidelines, urging people not to upvote naked snark, and perhaps urging them to downvote snark that seems to be catching on.

One or two comments to the effect of, "I agree with this, but the way it was phrased is toxic to the site, so I downvoted it" can't hurt either.

I don't think yours is a problem that requires a technical solution. You've already got a critical mass of people who give you extraordinary deference. Just use them to to fix it.

[heed]

I spent a good amount of time lurking before signing up to get a feel for the culture. I'm actually kind of intimidated by the folks around here, and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb.

With that said, I'm sure it has been mentioned before, but maybe restricting new users from commenting at all until they have held the account for a significant period of time would help.

[axod]

What about a pagerank type algorithm for ranking comments that weights the votes depending on the voters own karma?

eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score.

Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies.

(That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course).

I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments.

Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments".

Just an idea...

[davidw]

You will be very surprised to hear my suggestion: kill the off-topic articles mercilessly. No politics/economics and no fluff.

[Diederich]

After a certain threshold is met, the average quality of voting seems to be inversely proportional to the traffic on the site. This trend, with different overall parameters, appears to describe a large class of aggregation sites. I'm thinking specifically of HN, reddit and slashdot.

I think code and culture can shape this curve in useful and beneficial ways, but fundamentally, once an aggregation site gets popular, its quality declines. And the site gets popular because it has high quality.

So we are thinking about trying to shape the curve with code and culture; that's good. I bet there's a more 'meta' solution though.

I'm not really proposing this, just throwing the idea out there. For a given site, once popularity starts pushing down voting and submission quality, make a new site. Obviously something as trivial as http://news2.ycombinator.com/ won't work. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it's interesting to think about.

[imp]

To limit the effect of one-liners, you can try making the maximum karma a comment can have be a function of the number of words in the comment. A simple linear relationship would mean that a one-word comment ("No") could never have a karma greater than one. It may be that a more complex function would be better, but something like that may help.

[alexgartrell]

So the problem is that, at a certain growth point, growing the community and preserving the feel of the community become more or less mutually exclusive. New people will invariably bring their feel for things here, even if it displeases existing users.

Anything involving kharma or other metrics is also likely to fail, and will probably lead to lots of benign but likely popular posts so that people can get more "power".

Basically I think your options are to freeze the community (or make it invite only) or to be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them. I don't particularly advocate either of these, but generally believe less extreme measures are superior.

There's a fine line between trolling and radical new ideas and sometimes radical new ideas are a good thing.

[pasbesoin]

How about making upvoting power (e.g. votes per day (or hour, or whatever) accrue with tenure and/or karma? New users start with a low number of upvotes per period. At the start of each period, their count is reset to this maximum. (Unused votes do not roll over.)

The user's upvote count scales up per some formula, and beyond a certain point, it becomes uncapped.

I wouldn't grandfather anyone, either. KISS, and so that it also addresses the problem with the current population.

Potentional problems with this:

+ In line with the general policy of transparency that is practiced here, you may want to show users how many upvotes they have. But you may not want the load of additional profile page hits that might occur as people check their counts. Perhaps it would be a lower load to show that count in a fashion similar to how karma is shown in the banner next to the user name. However, I don't have a suggestion for a design that wouldn't make the banner look too busy.

+ A scarcity of upvotes might promote more low-value commenting. Perhaps a user's minimum time between comments needs to be defined and similarly throttled. (Simply cutting off comments when the count hits zero will merely result in people turning to comments before their count hits zero.

To take the glass half full view, perhaps such throttling would not eliminate participation, but would help people observe and become accustomed to the community's values before handing them the keys to the kingdom. And if they don't respect those values, it's going to hinder them from progressing to greater influence.

Including karma in the formula allows for high value contributors to progress more quickly. Tenure keeps a one hit wonder or clique of friends from gaining undue influence.

[riffer]

Since it sounds like the problem is comments rather than posts, and posts are commonly flagged and killed, why not encourage users to flag comments that are inconsistent with the character of the site?

I only realized a couple of days ago that one can flag comments by following the comment's permalink -- why not make this more obvious and promote its wider use as an experiment?

[yason]

A site like HN is basically a group of insiders, namely folks who have decided what is smart and what is not. So the system ought to favor insiderism and reject power from newcomers.

So, why let newer users vote at all? They can't downvote either, so there ought to be a karma threshold for voting as well, too. Then you would have to own some credibility (=karma) before you can begin to affect the site's future.

You get karma by posting good links and writing good comments. Who decides what's "good"? Those who have karma, of course! Back to the circle of insiders! So, you ought to gain karma normally if a high-karma user votes up your submission or comment. If lots of low-karma users do that you might get a tiny bit of karma but no more. If only few low-karma users do that you get nothing.

That should at least give most of the control to users with high karma. Note: I'm not entirely sure how HN works for beginners these days, so some of the above might already be in effect.

[joshfinnie]

I think this is by far the best idea that I have heard on this thread. We know that the ability to remove features based on karma is there (due to the inability for new people to downvote or most people to start polls), so why not remove the ability to upvote for people under a certain threshold of karma.

I think this would also alleviate the issue of having people upvote stores on the front page as a sort of bookmarking feature. I have strong opinions that many of the upvotes on the front page come from new people who are using it as a bookmarking feature and not a bestowment of karma to a good post.

[shaddi]

I really like this idea. However, I'm not sure if it is solving the trolling problem. Most troll comments I've seen come from "throwaway" accounts -- one post, and then not used again. These trolls presumably don't care about being able to vote or not.

I like what Twitter is doing for their (IMO, similar) spam account problem. Users flag for review and block updates from suspected spammer. We already have flagging, but we don't have blocking. It would be nice to be able to selectively hide specific comments or users (perhaps behind a "[blocked]" tag, like deleted comments are done now), so existing users at least could more easily ignore these trolls.

Account banning could be done by voting. Once an account is flagged, it gets added to a list of suspect accounts. Users (potentially above a karma threshold) can vote on these accounts based on their usage history; if enough people flag and confirm these accounts as spam they will be deleted, with their posted comments masked under a "[spam]" tag.

[conflux0]

I honestly think this is the best way to do it. I've been a lurker on hacker news for a while now for the occasional article that doesn't involve business tips (most of them are bogus). In addition to what you said I think that maybe that users could be sorted into groups by upvote/downvote correlation, and that users with a higher correlation to you would have a greater weight on the tiering of your articles.

[gord]

second that - current members have moral right to preserve the intent of the site.

Id make upvote power logarithmic in Karma, vis -

    upvote = K log( karma )
    dnvote = K/4 log( karma )

which would imply a certain Karma before you could upvote at all, and a larger karma before you could downvote at all.

Not sure how to solve karma hunting, but that's orthogonal, and a smaller issue.

Id weaken downvote power because it is more damaging when used, and also because it seems to act in a way to reduce freedom of speech : people may be scared to speak the truth due to fear of losing karma, which devalues the site. Id almost prefer not to have downvotes, but there are comments I might want downvoted [racism, personal abuse, religious bigotry etc]

[tomjen2]

That might work, but why give them the ability to post stories initially? That way, to get karma they would have to be able to impress the insiders with what they have to bring to the table personally and can't just find some good stuff made by others.

You could even combine them, so that the threshold is different - you can post stories with karma of, say, 30 but you can't vote before you have hit a karma of 500.

I have lived in my country all my life, but I was 18 before they let me vote.

[ionfish]

It's also worth noting that besides downmodding, one can flag an individual comment by going to that comment's permanent link and clicking 'flag'.

[mustpax]

The flag button should be added to the regular thread view for comments as well. For the kind of trolling tptacek is talking about, downmodding really isn’t sufficient.

[sganesh]

And the comment gets automatically deleted if it reaches a flag threshold.

[blhack]

A few days ago, somebody had a made some silly comment like this:

"OMG She is t3h winrar of t3h intarnets!". Their point was that somebody had done something very noteworthy. It added nothing to the conversation and was exactly the type of thing I think we're talking about here.

I did what I think this thread is asking me not to and responded with something like this:

"Just so you know, you're being downmodded for using the word 'internets', people around here don't like that" (or something to that effect).

My question is if this was the "wrong" thing to do? I was wrong, and the user I was responding to had been here for a long time, but I felt like it might have been helpful to inform new people that the sorts of things that are welcomed and encouraged on reddit, are not here.

Is this thread encouraging us NOT to do stuff like that?

[tptacek]

Yes. That's what this thread is encouraging you not to do.

That goes triple for comments in the middle of bona fide comment threads, because the [troll, rebuke] comment pair is going to be stuck right in the middle of the comments page, not at the bottom.

[josefresco]

I replied to your reply clarifying why the one-liner comment was downmodded. In further hopes that my comment would dissuade others considering a one-liner. Does that make my action 2x worse? confused

[dschobel]

To represent a contrary viewpoint: I haven't seen more than a handful of the patently useless accounts whereas I've noticed more and more "big names" showing up on HN.

Just the other day in the Python language moratorium story I was asking about a particular PEP making the cut-off and the author of the PEP responded. I was blown-away.

The HN experience balance is still massively in favor of those latter moments rather than the former.

The level of the technical discourse is still higher than any other general technology site, even if there are a few ankle-biters around now.

[DenisM]

Don't know if you realize this, but regular snark in your comments reinforces bad behavior from newcomers. There is no gray area here: either we tolerate snark & sarcasm and slide into a pit of goo, or we don't tolerate it and keep this place civilized. Every single post counts.

[cd34]

I believed that until a post about a hamster in a tutu falling in the LHC outranked a post on an async i/o python engine.

This is just slashdot with a different frontend/theme and less sci-fi.

[tptacek]

I wasn't looking for a whole "soul of Hacker News" thread here. I'd just like people to stop cluttering the comment threads with things that reinforce the behaviors of the "shitcocks" of the site.

The rest of my response I'll take offline to you directly. Why clutter the thread further?

[icey]

I wonder what would happen if there was an indefinite moratorium on the creation of new user accounts. I'm starting to see a lot of throwaway accounts being created solely for the purpose of trolling.

Beyond that, it seems like the overall quality of the newer users has been fairly low. I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I can't think of any that have been created in the past, say, 200 days or so.

[Edit: See tptacek and mquander's responses below to see why this is a bad idea]

[tptacek]

Absolutely not worth it. People like Joel Spolsky, DHH, or the UX guy from Zappos, can be counted on not to put effort into figuring out how to post. Cutting expert casual commenters out of HN is a huge concession to the trolls.

I'm asking for us not to freak out about them, and just let the site do its job. Don't comment. Just mod down and, as was pointed out upthread, flag. Make it not worth it for them.

[chris100]

With all due respect, you sound very condescending. To use an analogy, think of a first generation immigrant who says that now the country is too crowded, we shouldn't let immigrants in anymore.

Why are you convinced that you are better than newer users, to the point that all new users should be forbidden? It sounds a little harsh. You could impose some new thresholds so that people's votes and comments only start mattering once they have some amount of reputation. That should help get rid of the obvious trolls.

But please, not extreme measures.

[japherwocky]

invitation based systems work too

[nkurz]

I'm mostly with you, although I think frequently the 'trolls' are just ignorant of the local customs, and will adjust their behavior if the norms are politely pointed out to them.

Perhaps it would be possible to fold (hide) the responses to negatively scored comments, so they aren't an interruption to the flow?

And is there a reason you suggest to 'just let the troll comments drop' rather than actively voting them down to the bottom of the page?

[SlyShy]

I find the "go back to reddit" or "go back to digg" posts particularly ironic. If you are going to criticize those sites, then perhaps you shouldn't contribute to the degradation of this site in the same post.

That said, I was recently guilty of the commenting on a troll comment But I think it was justified in that instance, because the original poster was being attacked in a particularly vicious way, and I didn't want him to feel nobody was backing him up.

[nzmsv]

Erecting walls is never the answer. Any community, from a website to an entire country, suffers if it decides to close itself off from the world. There are too many examples to list.

So, making registration hard or invite-only, or making new users feel inferior is not the answer. I like the fact that I can vote on articles right after joining. Having to "earn my privileges" by having my opinions validated by someone first would have likely made me leave. And though I'm a newbie, I solemnly promise I won't be posting any lolcats :)

This doesn't mean a lack of policing, but with this many users it has to be improved. One problem that pops out right away is: there is no feedback associated with votes.

Are private messages a possibility? Or even a limited implementation, just for votes? A downvote would require a reason (to be sent to the poster by PM). This way the user can learn to write better comments. The downvote should be anonymous for the receiving user, so the discussion doesn't devolve into vengeful bickering. Upvotes could also have a reason (perhaps optional). I think this would balance out the impression of being shot down all the time.

[makecheck]

This is a lot like graffiti in a city, and should probably be dealt with in the same way. Cities have been known to paint murals, react quickly to cover up graffiti, and patrol so that they can catch offenders in the act.

The HN equivalent of a mural is to submit something really interesting, that will be voted to the top quickly.

The HN equivalent of covering up graffiti is to flag a post or a comment, or to post better stories and comments that push the garbage out. Though a way to mark duplicates would be nice.

What we really lack is a way to catch offenders. I have seen several "karma: 1, created 15 minutes ago" accounts, that are always attached to useless contributions. Sure, I can flag a comment, but it's very obvious that the entire account should just be banned (and perhaps the IP it came from), and there's no flag that applies to an entire user. Perhaps there should be, at least for accounts that have only existed for a short time.

[Mz]

"The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site. A zippy one-liner that a year ago would have languished midway down the thread now becomes the top comment.

So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and more dangerous decline I've been seeing."

Perhaps a lot of the new users are relatively unsavvy about some things and some instruction is in order. This might be done in the form of a "best practices" listing. I have found when dealing with Internet Newbies, it helps to list out a few things like "Don't say anything online that you wouldn't want on the front page of your local newspaper." A lot of times, inexperienced people just don't realize the potential consequences of doing certain things online. It may seem "obvious" to most people here what the best thing to do is, but perhaps the newer users just have no idea. If that is the case, some of them might be very cooperative in going along with some "best practices" posted somewhere.

This may be especially true if you are finally attracting more women. I'm female and I've spent a lot of time in online communities where the majority of members are female. The culture is very different from male dominated online cultures. It's been a bit disorienting for me to try to figure out how to effectively participate here. I consider it a growth experience and I expected to have to adapt. But not everyone will show up with that expectation.

[xtho]

I don't see this a problem because most only few posts on the front page have that many comments. I find troll comments mostly in the discussion thread of posts with 100+ comments, which are rather rare. What I find more annoying are low quality blog posts that are actually spam in disguise.

[nailer]

HackerNews succumbed to mob rule some time ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935085 - a response consisting of 'I disagree' with no additional content - is currently sitting at 6.

[rms]

I disagree with the premise of this post. A lot of people making stupid comments do care and just don't understand the nature of this site.

The comments can still be killed, but it's a mistake to not give people a chance to change their behavior.

[gouki]

I'm a new user to this website, but I've notice the level of integrity and consistency on the comments. It's actually the reason that made me select this "community" and not others like Digg/Slashdot/whatever.

The users are the strong point of HN, and losing that would not be good at all.

I say +1 for invitation based system. Also, users could have a more active role on moderation. Just not sure how, exactly.

[prawn]

On invitations, who would have invited me to read and participate? I live and work overseas and don't know anyone else that uses HN. I would feel too intimidated, and as though I were begging, to approach an existing user to ask for some sort of endorsement or invitation.

How might it work?

I think HN could do worse than add an intro guide for newcomers that carefully explains the difference between this and other sites the newcomer may have experienced before. e.g., a big difference IMO is the lack of playing for +1 Funny as is done on Slashdot. "Like Slashdot, but with just Insightful and Interesting." ;)

[jacquesm]

hey there T., good seeing you here :)

An invitation based system could work, but there would have to be some kind of 'fast track', some people are only here because their stuff was once discussed on HN and then signed up to be able to provide a different point of view.

If they would have to wait for an invite that would take some really good stuff out of the mix.

[NathanKP]

You aren't kidding about new user, only ten days old. I guess now that you are on board you don't care if we switched to an invitation based system, but what about all the others out there who might, like you, crave the "integrity and consistency" of HN?

[dan_the_welder]

You have to teach the culture you want to see.

My pet peeve is repeat submissions. I'd like to see a primary source focus.With news that's difficult as many outlets break the same story more or less simultaneously.

I get annoyed when I see something for the second or third time from different source, sometimes weeks later after it's made the rounds of the blog-o-sphere.

[chasingsparks]

I've actually stopped casually referencing or recommending HN in a silly attempt to guard it. (Note, I don't mean this in the "this band was great until they sold out and got popular" way.) I'd actually be happier if the number of users regressed.

[ErrantX]

I have to confess I haven't noticed a huge increase in replies to trolls and so called back slapping

Not that there aren't problems; I just haven't seen this specific one as being the biggest myself

[lleger]

Agreed. I've always been a fan of the intellectual and enlightening conversations here. It's really the main reason I keep coming back.