This was the first comment on this post, and I had to wonder if it was an intentional or unintentional example of the article's main complaint.

I expressed a similar idea here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1052676

I don't know if it's inherent in the geek mindset, but I often find that ideas are frequently met with overwhelming negativity. One flaw - often not actually fatal - is found, and the entire proposal or idea is rejected as inane. The startup community is generally more encouraging, and perhaps that's why here on HN there's usually a good mix of constructive criticism and cautious encouragement.

I can understand where the author is coming from, and I'm pleased that HN is much less aggressively dismissive.

This is such a succinct and helpful post. I'd upvote you many more times if I could.

I imagine it is something like this: An Issue would be something like a race condition, a detail might be something like a slight inconsistency in naming of attributes.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law_of_Triviality

I think the parent is implying that while discussing with any second party, it is easier to mutually agree on which one is an issue and which one is details --- compared to discussing on the problem itself and finding a resolution.

Fair enough. But my point was that, sooner or later, you'll need to deal with the details and I've found that is, quite often, the most time consuming part (sometimes you just misjudged which ones where the issues, and which ones the details).

You can always delegate the "details", but there's a difference between delegating and deferring (the work for yourself). Knowing what to delegate is very important, of course, which is the main point of edw519's comment, I think.

People like you become good managers.

People opposite of you become good programmers and designers.

Detail is everything and oftentimes that's that one thing that makes you stand out among competition and makes the first impression count.

/end of my opinion

This is why my blog doesn't have a comments section either. I really don't care what non-hackers think of my blog. I value the opinions (and the opinions about the opinions, complete with a useful points system) of people here much more than I would just any casual observer. Also, I don't have to worry about the typical: "[blog post about blah blah blah, continued at...]" spam.

There's more discussion about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006725

I'm sure you're smart enough to make changes that will boost the level of civility, and not reduce it. At the moment, the biggest reason not to zing someone with a cheap shot comment is the fact that you will soon find a negative number attached to the comment (how humiliating!). I suppose you could hide the points and completely hide comments that wind up with negative points (and, to have the discussion flow make sense, you'd have to also hide the responses to that comment). I'm sure you'll iterate, and find out what works best. Good luck, and thanks for caring enough to try to improve things around here.

Could each user get a customized view based on similarity to comments they've previously up-voted? This could be based on a simple Bayesian filter, similar to the "Plan for Spam".

This could also encourage users to vote more as voting would (hopefully) improve the filtering.

I guess my reply to you would be under 'meta' because my questions to you are:

What do you mean by: 'more room for nasty rules lawyering("This is not Hacker News")'?

I like your idea; how would I choose between 'information' and 'related'- or 'opinion' and 'related'? Would 'factual' and 'insightful' be more useful as labels?

I would suggest something similar but for voting, not for posting. Instead of upvoting or downvoting one would pick from a small selection of tags. That would allow for the distinction between "agree" and "informative", for example, or "disagree" and "spam".

When your entire site is a technological solution, that doesn't work. It's not natural to divide conversations and rank them based on merits of "good" and "bad". This is why flat conversations don't succumb to groupthink as quickly or as badly.

I'm definitely going to change the site. The reason I haven't yet is that (a) I haven't decided exactly what to do, and (b) a new batch of startups just arrived at YC a couple weeks ago.

One idea: disconnect the visible down-votedness of a user's comment from a user's visible karma- which seems to upset people. I often see posts regarding 'why are you down voting my comment?'. Not allowing a post to get publicly, visibly, lower than 0 would prevent meta discussions about 'why'- even though the hidden negative score would move the actual comment down the publicly visible thread hierarchy.

Not showing downvoted scores on comments would never cause a user to exclaim 'why aren't you upvoting me?'

Disconnecting a user's visible karma from the hidden negative points a user acquires from negative/poor comments would be important for this idea to work well.

Thanks, yes, I meant "repeat common views" - without necessarily meaning "groupthink" though. For me, groupthink implies uncritical thinking, whereas repeating (and repeatedly reading) common views is only inefficient. So I might down-vote examples of groupthink (if I had down-vote rights that is ;)), but I would just skip over common views without bothering to vote.

edit: although in all likelihood, I wouldn't know groupthink if I saw it, being part of the group... :)

I have a few ideas:

1) No comments on a post until its at least an hour old

2) More time to delete my comments. I made one just a few hours ago I'd like to delete because of its tone.

3) A "stop being a jerk" flag. It would only be shown to the commenter, anonymous, and have no impact on points.

4) Alternative to #3: same flag, still anonymous, but too many flags "mutes" the commenter for 1 day.

Ultimately, of course, its a culture problem. We all need to take personal responsibility for our behavior. Whether or not that can persist in a forum of size remains to be seen (I am optimistic that it can).

I also have to come up with alternative ways for people to find the comments they're most interested in on big threads

I think this is the key. People come to HN because the quality of the discussion is high. With increasing community size comes dilution, but only of the average comment quality.

In fact, as the community becomes larger there are more, perhaps many more extraordinarily good comments, so long as the original contributors are all encouraged to continue participating. These great comments are really the key.

Consider the Netflix Prize. Entries were judged based on RMSE. This is not the right metric, though, because out of all of the thousands of movies in the dataset, only a few dozen would ever be recommended to a given user based on any conceivable algorithm. And the user only really cares whether the particular movie that they use the algorithm to select is good or disappointing.

Similarly, users come here to read the exceptional comments, and a community in which every comment deserved to get 3 karma points would soon find itself without users.

In this way, removing comment scores may be part of an effective solution, but it may not be the crucial component because it only indirectly changes the accessibility of excellent comments.

Instead, actively trying to make it easier for people to read what they consider exceptional is a goal worth pursuing.

Agreed. Also, instead of hiding all comment points, perhaps the score can be hidden when it's 1 and lower, making it ambiguous, while retaining scores for comments with 2+ points.

That won't help, because the people who'd be willing to turn them off probably aren't part of the problem.

Then again, maybe I'm overly troll-paranoid.

Another solution: make down votes "cost."

If a user hits the down-vote then a comment box opens requiring a reason. I don't mind down votes, but I can't stand not knowing why. It's like a (bad) dog owner who comes home and beats the dog for pooping on the rug. Poor dog did that hours ago and thinks hes getting beat just because owner came home. No lesson learned and it fosters a poor relationship between the two and encourages "acting out."

Additionally, if "the reason" received n down-votes HN could automatically cancel the DV to the original comment.

I hope the design changes work.

There is an odd aspect to online culture where pointing out rudeness is voted down or dismissed as being overly sensitive or stuffy. So, some less overt way to signal to someone that they are being uncouth might a) be less threatening to receive and b) encourage more conscientious "watchdogs" to participate in bringing social pressure to bear.

It is often fun to play devil's advocate and argue a particular point, but a conversation (particularly when not face to face) can rapidly progress from differing opinions to a flame fest, and once the first fist has flown there is no going back. Work email exchanges are famous for misinterpretations, oversensitivity, etc., that would never happen in a personal conversation. I look forward to your efforts at increasing civility in a somewhat impersonal forum, I'd definitely be interested in seeing what comes from it.

If you ever get around to testing out having multiple voting axes, one of those axes could be civility or charitability. (I suppose that would more frequently be used in the negative direction, though.)

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.) At karma 56k it's true ;)

For what it's worth, when my blog recently hit both sites, the discussion was still pretty good here, and pretty terrible on Reddit.

You've done a better job holding on to original culture than most forums. Not that I'm a subject matter expert, but I made the /. -> Digg -> Reddit -> HN move like a lot of other people. I'd certainly fall under the 'happily try out changes to increase civility.'

Nasty comments can certainly contain interesting ideas. But I believe all those ideas could be expressed just as well if not better without the nastiness.

This post is great. The contention among people is really frustrating, especially since the great majority of it is just useless babble that doesn't solve or address anything relevant anyway.

You're missing a closing quote in your first paragraph! Your post is therefore irrevocably flawed, and your point completely lost on me.

If only more techies understood and respected the basics of community management. http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/news/?p=76 lists that and other people skills that modern developers need to get ahead.

That's the problem I have with this blog in particular.

It talks about an interesting topic (FP games programming), one that's related to my profession, where there isn't much material out there. The author is describing issues he's faced making functional programming practical, but never provides source or detailed explanations and doesn't seem to reply in the places he's "outsourced" the comments to.

This isn't an attack on the author, it's just that the blog is framed as being informative but is actually more of an opinion piece and I think it would be better as an open discussion, you know, so some of the problems can actually be worked on and potentially solved.

I'm not sure if it's that people have a hard time, or they don't care to. Perhaps it's just semantics; either way I agree with you.

I'm curious what PG says about this - Isn't HN's roots in his distaste for what programming.reddit became?

With the flag button that already exists?

The instant you let somebody's comment be worth less than neutral value, you've built a mechanized system that makes people feel excluded. That means anybody who wants to can make anybody else feel alienated from this community. Not that I speak from experience.

Flickr discussions in three essential sentences:

"Great composition"

"Nice shot!"

"~~o 8 You've been awarded a useless online award by a self-proclaimed expert, join the group now! 8 o ~~"

I agree to the author that faceless communication does not stipulate understanding of finer engineering points. But, sorry, just about any (troll-ridden or not) group in comp.* on my memory was vastly better with quality of comment than that. Flickr is just one big circle-pat-on-the-back.

TLDR...

Actually, I completely agree, but I think online identities such as commenting with your twitter account id, and other similar paradigms help lessen the number of trolls, or people who don't read their own words before they press submit.

The internet was designed to be a two way street, so if comments are broken, instead of not using them, lets take steps to clean them up a little.

Does anyone know what the author does now, for a living, if not write code?

I'm not sure why TomJen2's comment was barred - since he may have been asking what I would like to know: what method of "banning" have you found effective (with such a rowdy, determined group), i.e., how do you know a member's real identity: IP address, etc.?

Having this discussion is great. I'm glad there are plans by PG to implement improvements. I have been a reader of HN for years now, but I rarely comment. Not because I don't want to participate, I do want to participate. And I want to participate civilly and without nastiness.

The reason I rarely comment is simply my own reading habits and the way the site works. I read HN on a mobile device via an RSS reader. I flag the threads in my reader I find interesting to look at further on my next work day when I'm sitting in front of my desktop machine.

However, by the time I return to a thread it's usually old and no longer active. At that point, I rarely see any reason to comment, as it likely won't be seen.

What I, personally, would love is a way to subscribe to a thread's comments in some way, perhaps via rss. That would help me to track the follow-up comments made on the few posts I do comment on. But, if there are others like me, perhaps having a way for people to more easily follow threads would bring more people into the discussion and bring more of the prolific commenters back to the discussion.

When I implemented an email notification system for commenters on my blog which notifies each commenter when a new comment is posted, community engagement skyrocketed. I used to get 4-5 comments a post and it's now regularly up in the 40,50,60 comment range. I also found that eliminating anyone who starts getting "trollish" from getting those email updates tends to make them naturally drop out of the thread because they think no further comments are being made.

Anyway, just my two cents. I may be way off-base on this idea, and if so, PG is obviously free to ignore it and I will continue to love HN all the same.

Look forward to the changes.

"But with smart, technically-oriented people, I'd expect there to be more sharing of real experiences, but that's often not the case."

That was a problem for me too, finally I learned that it's just like expecting them to be good at cooking. Social interaction is a skill unrelated to a technical competence and experience in particular environment affects it more than than ones intelligence.