Another thing that could happen if you speak up is that you get hellbanned on HN. It seems a bit ironic to me to see this on HN, which implements more and more mechanisms to ensure consent.

Anyway, I think this just highlights the importance of anonymity on the internet.

HN […] implements more and more mechanisms to ensure consent.

My impression is, the focus is not on consent, but on civilized looking comment threads. More specifically, back and forth discussion is not encouraged. Consent is just a way to get quiet.

On Reddit, when someone replies to a message of mine, a little icon turns red, and I can click it to review new replies. So, I can reply to a relatively old comment, and be reasonably sure its author will see it. I don't really care there's no audience any more, sometimes a private message is worth it.

HN doesn't permit that. If I reply to an old comment, or in a lively thread, it will be buried under tons of comments, even on the author's threads page. Sub-discussion are not possible, unless you have perfect timing.

Another thing that discourage too much comments is the "average" feature: the more upvotes you get on recent comments of yours, the more visible your comments are, so you are encouraged to make comments that get upvoted. This means stating a popular opinion on a popular thread in a not too aggressive way, before the swarm gets in and drowns it. The system value those comments much, much more than, say, factual correction of a comment in an already developed discussion.

It's important to recognize that HN is advertising for YC. It's not a discussion board aimed at increasing knowledge or bettering the community.

An uncivilized looking comment thread that eventually converges to the right answer is something that is not necessarily good for YC. After all, what if YC gets portrayed as a bunch of geeks debating technicalities? Even more dangerous for YC, what if those geeks debated non-technical matters and converged to a naughty conclusion?

The vast majority of our time is spent trying to make HN more interesting and substantive. The problem with incivility is not that we care how "naughty" you are, it's that it destroys the capacity of the site for the very "increasing knowledge [and] bettering the community" that you claim we're not aiming at. It's a bit of a bummer, when you're working so hard at something, to have someone who ought to know better claiming you're not.

Your faith in the capacity of "uncivilized looking" threads to converge upon truth seems surprisingly naive. From what I see, they don't converge at all.

From what I see, ["uncivilized looking" threads] don't converge at all.

I'll have to agree. But it looks like there's a tension between individual satisfaction, and collective quality. I'm not sure this tension has to be.

Reddit implements different solutions, and so far it frustrate that HN doesn't try some of them:

Markdown support. HN only has star-based emphasis and naked links. Many comments would look cleaner if they could take advantage of at least citations and lists.

Inbox. Presently, I have to scroll down my "threads" panel to see if anyone has replied to me. New messages are not even highlighted, so it's easy to miss them. This, I think, is the biggest long-term conversation killer.

Inline replies. Presently, when you reply to an HN comment, you are kicked to a page where you only see the comment you're replying to. Leaving the current page is a hassle, and may discourage some type of comments —probably not the type you'd want to encourage here, though.

No damn "unknown or expired link". It's frustrating to have that one every time I type a long comment. Instead, I'd rather have some ninja-edit detector.

---

Maybe you want to limit such back-and-forth threads, possibly because of their average low quality, but Reddit have mechanisms to deal with that:

Hidden stuff is collapsed. Here in HN, hidden stuff is written in very light grey. Still, it takes up screen space… In Reddit, hidden stuff is just reduced to a single line, on which you can click to expand the hidden stuff.

Hide entire threads. When a comment is downvoted below some threshold, the whole thread is hidden by default. One has to click to recover it.

Charge Karma for replying in a junk thread. That's a LessWrong exclusive: when you reply in a thread that's supposed to be hidden because of too much downvotes on a particular comment, your karma instantly goes down by 5 points. Just so people really think before they reply to trolls. (Those who replied before the downvotes occured are not affected.)

Hide long-winded threads. When a Reddit thread gets too long, the later replies get cut regardless of their quality. One has to click to see the end, so they don't get very public. I like this feature: you can do back-and-forth, but the other users don't have to suffer this little private flamewar.

Hide lesser-quality threads in stuffed comment pages. Sometimes, a real popular pages gets over 500 comments. For those, Reddit hides even some comments and thread that didn't get any downvote. The idea is to highlight the higher-quality comments.

---

Now there are some features I like in HN that you probably want to keep:

Hiding Karma scores. I'm not sure why, but my average went up the very day this came up. It's probably not neutral. But most importantly, it seems to be a deliberate and tested feature. You probably know more than I do about that.

No downvoting thy replies. It's frustrating in Reddit when your reply is downvoted by just one point: you never know if it's the parent's author being a jerk, or if it comes from someone else, who is presumably more impartial. HN removes that doubt, so I find it easier to stay civilized.

Dead comments. The distinction between massive downvote and death seems to be working here. Not being able to reply to dead comments at all is probably valuable.

---

That's about it. Now you have even more work to do. :-) Now I don't expect all the proposed changes would be a good thing. But I think most of them are worth testing.

We're planning to add collapsible subthreads, which will enable some of the things you're asking for.

Things like richer formatting support scare me a little. HN's nearly-plain-text design seems pretty core to the site.

There should be many fewer "unknown or expired link" errors already, and soon you should nearly never see them. If you still get one, say, a month from now when posting a comment, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.

So I'm scrolling back in my comments. Not all converge. Here is a long one where I learned something: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8228967

Here is a rather deep one that later led to a productive offline conversation. We didn't converge to a conclusion, but we did figure out what data was needed to find one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8219369

I know these threads are ugly, but I don't think they are unproductive. I have certainly learned quite a bit from such threads (about analytical philosophy, computer security, marketing), and have changed my opinion on a number of matters.

As for the suppression of naughty comments, it's posts like this one [1] that suggests suppressing certain discussion if it makes YC look good. I know YC has been targeted in the past, and it appears that Altman wants to head off future attacks.

I have no doubt that all else held equal, you'd like to make HN a better place. But make HN a place with better discussions but also a focal point of criticism for YC?

[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/what-ive-learned-from-female-found... Specifically this comment: "And we're working on something to improve the quality of Hacker News comments."

Neither of those two threads are uncivilized in the least, so it's hard to see what point you're trying to make. For an example of an uncivilized thread, try "Why Doctors Are Sick Of Their Profession" from today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8246760

They are long, but not uncivilized. That's the point - HN goes to significant effort to avoid long threads, and in my view a lot of our best information is contained in long threads.

If lack of civility is what we want to avoid, maybe we should target that directly.

No, HN doesn't avoid long threads. Incivility is what's being targeted.

Another thing that could happen if you speak up is that you get hellbanned on HN.

Is that actually possible ? That's disgusting, this makes the admin look like a piece of shit in my opinion.

I'm not sure what kind of problem this is trying to solve, but I'd rather see the hellbanned posts and the occasional person with an unpopular opinion that stay locked in an echo chamber.

I'm not trying to tell HN how to run it's tomato garden, but please, is there a rationale for hellbanning ?

HN, which implements more and more mechanisms to ensure consent

Huh, I'm one of the people implementing mechanisms here and have no idea what this refers to. Nobody's trying to ensure consent. It isn't hard to dissent on HN.

People who behave inappropriately enough to get banned on HN often choose to believe that it was all because of their noble bravery in standing up to insert-evil-caricature-here. To examine one's behavior and make adjustments takes a bit of work. It's easier to play the hero and make dark insinuations about censorship and groupthink.

But perhaps I'm wrong. Would you care to link to comments that got you banned because you spoke up? Let's take a look.

I'm one of the many HN users who has had to examine his behavior and make adjustments toward civility over the years. I still struggle with this. That's part of being a good citizen here. But it has bupkis to do with consent. It's about being considerate to your fellow users. Disagree as much as you like, just don't do the online equivalent of elbowing someone in the ribs and your odds of getting banned go to near zero.

Even if that's all wrong, Slava's article was about courage to speak up in the face of real costs. What does getting an account banned on an internet forum cost a person? It's not even a mosquito bite, so any courage at issue here is trivial.

Another point: anonymity can be used for ill or good, but as a means to allow one to speak without professional sanction, it's tremondously useful.

As a means to shill or astroturf (look up "Steve Barkto"), not so much.