My suggestion, similar to that experiment in the past, and similar to twitter, add a "verified user" badge in the users profile. However, to become verified requires a simple step: add a link to your facebook, linkedin or xing profile. Any already verified user can then verify you.

Non-verified users then have a very minor voting hit, for example a comment karma cap at 50 or so.

This will encourage people to associate their real life accounts with their hacker news accounts, and will result in conversation that more accurately reflects what one would say in real life.

The fundamental dynamics of the site would not change, since the advantage to being verified are not that major.

While accountability has many benefits, I believe our world doesn't allow any feasible way to discuss many important topics without anonymity— especially in regard to business or our jobs. Think of the trouble that can come from discussing salaries, and don't even bother going into what sort of trouble opinions on drug policy can bring people.

While real name accountability can bring a lot of gravity to a discussion, I feel our current social order will give certain people unwarranted power under their real name while forcing others to censor themselves entirely.

Right now, certain posters carry a lot of weight around here, mainly because we know what they have achieved in their careers. Inevitably, there will be lots of up-voting, lots of agreement, lots of influence regardless of what they actually say. Introducing real names would exacerbate this effect. I enjoy the fact that sometimes, you'll find a renowned Silicon Valley person arguing with an enthusiastic college freshman about a technical/ethical/... topic. I suspect that's only possible if they're called "johnny32" and "jimmy21".

Display their real names, and the college kid will think twice before he/she answers. Anonymity encourages trolling, yes. It also liberates discussion.

[1] Of course, I'm talking about "external merit." The karma system is wonderful, maybe even essential. But I don't think that non-HN-related achievements should directly affect how your comment is received. Postings need to be effective on their own, not in virtue of who wrote them. (Obviously, if you're head of engineering at Facebook and talk about scaling, please say so! This does affect how your comment is and should be received. But as a default? No.)

And when in fact, the credentials of the person are know, it would only raise the bar for the discussion. If, for example, some famous lawyer makes a long comment about the various legal aspects of a particular incident, and most people know it's a famous lawyer, then replies that diagree will be by people who are qualified to disagree, thus raising the bar. If johnny12 makes the same statement, a lot of people with very little knowledge would argue, and it would lead to a poorer and longer discussion.

Discussion can indeed be liberated by making comments anonymous, but this does not scale. You are going to lose either way - either you lose by making the society increasingly more formal, or you lose by making the society less formal. The second comes automatically as it grows. Working towards making it formal will only work against the informality, maintaining an equilibrium, in my opinion.

The problem of big names dominating the discussion is a different problem, but it's a better problem than that of nobodies shouting down everyone else.

That was a fine example of what people have been complaining about recently.

(And you're not even anonymous! :-)

It seems to me anything we can do to boost the interesting aspects of this community are fair game, and they augment real life itself.

[ ie. comment upvotes co-vary with name of commenter instead of content communicated ]

On one hand you want to avoid trolls, but on the other hand you want to avoid a circle-jerk and "my boss can google everything I wrote" timidity and un-hackerish conformism. Tending toward either extreme can disincentivize thoughtful discussion and negatively impact a community. So I would be hesitant to declare that a safe assumption.

So yeah, on the face of it that's some quite scummy behaviour.

It seems like you even changed your first name. How did it feel, how long did it take until your new name felt natural?

("I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code." - Emo Philips)

> forever linked to you on the internet

I'm happy for you as a respected user of this site to know who I am. Google - forever and ever - not so much.

As far as comment quality goes, you might cut out some of the crap, but you may also get more sterile discussions from good citizens such as myself. My hunch is that some people just have an attitude problem, and will be a detriment to HN with or without their identities on display.

Unfortunately, you can't get the first without the second, as witness the leak of the "journolist" e-mails.

Don't post, don't publish, don't comment. Simple as that.

Some time ago another person made a comment about pearls and some sort of livestock. Throwing...things...in places?

Was interesting maybe a year back we had someone post anonymously and then had a thread on people trying to work out who it was, knowing it was someone who had commented a decent amount before. People were applying algorithms to attempt to work it out, no idea if anyone ever did, can't find the thread.

* Saying stupid things (Software X doesn't support Feature Y, which is good if you want to do Activity Z) and then be corrected (because in the meantime, Software X got a Feature Y for the latest version) provides overall value to the discussion because other people are likely to have made the same mistake that I did.

* Contributing to sensitive topics (be it gender equality, the question of "race", or any political question) will always send the goon squads your way whenever you voice a non-majority opinion. Admittedly, HN has a policy that these contentious topics are not great material for posting, but you get one of these once in a while and it's hard to make an informative contribution to such an issue without drawing ill will from anyone (which will result in downvotes to an anymous HN poster, but could be potentially harmful if those trying-to-be-well-informed-but-not-necessarily-popular opinions ended up on your permanent record). As an example, consider the question of founders being able to raise kids at the same time. While there are people who do a good enough job at it to be able to step up and say, I can do it just fine, and people who can claim anything because people will listen to them anyways, anyone in between would run the danger of drawing the ill will from people of one side or the other for claiming that it's possible or not so possible.

* Outright trolling is something you would not want in the comments, but there's a very fine line between a pointed remark that someone made, and trolling. And as with blog posts, successful trolls are still successful when they are not anonymous.

I think one of the problems here is that, when the audience grows large enough, a pointed post will draw a larger number of upvotes than a boring-but-informative one. So it may be useful to partially decouple the comment-ranking function of up-downvotes with the karma calculation to disincentivize karma whoring.

For example, one could reduce the weight of comment up-/downvotes whenever the total number of (comments+upvotes+downvotes) of an article crosses a certain threshold - say 100. In this way, having a +20 voted comment on an article that barely made it to the frontpage would count more than a +60 voted comment on an incendiary topic that draws a total of several hundred up/downvotes.

I think we can say that standard forums are much more 'scannable' compared to HN, and I often find myself looking out for posts from users whom I respect on that particular forums. In this case, Putting the username before the the points of the comment may lead people to view the comment for the commenter first and foremost, as opposed to the number of points the comment has.

I don't know whether or not that is a good thing. For one, it makes negativity very obvious, and it makes recognising a bad commenter pretty easy.

On the other hand, it may give a free-first pass to 'respected' commenters who might make mean comments every once in a while.

On the whole though, I think it may make it easier for your average user to recognise and avoid mean comments when they do see them.

Another possibility may be to shift the position and/or size of the upvote/downvote buttons to make upvoting a more conscious decision. I've got no suggestions about how to do this yet though =(.

For example, there are several prominent members here who post very reasonable and thoughtful comments that I often agree with, but sometimes disagree with. I think it would be harder to judge their comment on its merits alone if it was very visible that it was <prominent user> who posted it.

Why use some third-party proprietary system? It's almost as easy to make a fake Facebook account as an HN account. As far as "verifying" users goes, just look at their About page and previous comments.

Please, no social networking verified user.

Downvotes change how you think about reading comments. Instead of "was this helpful?" you're thinking "do i love this or hate this?". It's polarizing, and as the number of users increases, it's easy for a comment to hit -4 in a couple minutes.

People feel bad when they get downvoted (often because they feel the downvotes are unjust), and some of them turn to trolling or flaming as a defense mechanism. This spreads across threads and infects the whole community. Emotions are contagious.

Also, add the ability to undo your upvote.

I'll think about the real solution more after I'm done reading applications, but I'll increase the downvote threshold to 500 now.

I'm a little disappointed that HN isn't like this. Most of the time I have a "stupid question", but I don't comment due to the HN's disapproval of stupid comments. I self-censor to the extreme with HN, and I don't think I'm the only one.

Maybe I'm in a minority here, but I'd like to see mean comments flagged/deaded. And stupid comments filtered to the bottom (but not otherwise punished).

I self-censor because of this and think we shouldn't mind. I end up writing comments I don't submit, but I consider the exercise worthwhile because forcing myself to write my thoughts out and then judging whether they're truly helpful/insightful teaches me what knowledge gaps I need to fill eventually and where I'm just falling back on preconceived notions/biases to form my opinions.

So if you think you'll be down-voted ask yourself why. If you don't know why, then re-formulate your post as question to understand others' reasoning.

Some of it is really a very good thing -- namely, "am I asking a question that would be trivial for me to answer for myself?"

There are plenty of "stupid" questions that are important to ask of yourself (and are part of the learning process for all of us) but need not clutter up a good discussion.

If everyone self-censors by asking "will this increase the value of this discussion for other readers?", I think that's a good thing.

I think you're talking about self-censoring based on "will this comment reveal my ignorance and harm my karma?", which isn't the same thing. A question or two along the lines of "I don't know much about this, but it's interesting and seemingly not well-covered online -- does anyone want to give a quick high-level explanation?" are normally welcomed.

Be polite, be on topic, don't ask something that's trivial to answer for yourself, and consider the value of the question to other readers... and you don't have to be already a wizard on the given topic to discuss it.

Is Hacker News about teaching people things? Or does it have some other goal?

I wonder if there a parallel with the whole punishment vs rehabilitation aspect of the justice systems. In essence, a justice system is a social tool to cause people to act a certain way. Some techniques are better than others.

1) People down vote to express disagreement. 2) People down vote to eliminate value-less comments.

There needs to be a separate function for each of these. Perhaps the current down arrow for disagreement and some sort of irrelevance flag which wouldn't impact karma, but would still make the comment fade or eventually disappear.

I typically approach down or upvotes to my comments as (dis)agreement.

What is important to me is furthering the discussion if someone downvotes me for disagreement.

Requiring a dissenting opinion with a disagreement downvote would not only satisfy my wanting to hear the objections to my comments, but it would also require the downvoter to have a good dissenting opinion (lest his post be flagged as valueless/irrelevant).

Requiring a dissenting reply with a downvote is for my own personal reasons, but I do think there needs to be a distinction between disagreement downvotes and irrelevance/valueless downvotes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652566

We've gained a few trolls but I don't think we've suffered from evaporative cooling yet so it's not too late. I support removing down voting and switching to flagging specific offenses e.g. spam|offensive|troll to start.

Alternatively [just a crazy thought] how about we open up and show what each user has down voted. Perhaps as a courtesy we could only show down-votes starting Halloween 2010.

If we assume that a user's total score is a good indicator of their value to the community, then the HN leaderboard would agree with you.

I'm not so sure, though. IIRC, pg has mentioned in the past that he spends less time here now, and I rarely see anything from Reddit's founding user group. Another HN user that I've been following for a while -- DaniFong -- who's doing some pretty interesting stuff and has a tendency to post fairly intelligent comments, has had a really obvious decline in activity here.

Although I've been a part of this problem as often as not, I've also found that the discourse here isn't worth participating in any more.

But, maybe there are alternative explanations for all of that.

A user can see the "yay!" and "boo!" scores of any recent post or comment.

"Yay!" and "boo!" scores do not effect karma or otherwise effect HN privileges.

(The idea is to allow the exchange of "push a button" feedback that, in some sense, doesn't count. Up/down votes can still work as always.)

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvisational_theatre

What I'm curious about is what sort of data is available on these negative comments. If we were to identify (and agree) on a large enough sample population (n>30, probably) can we start seeing any trends in terms of downvotes, account age, posting frequency, etc? Do any of those correlate with a sample population of comments we identify as positive?

Other half-formed ideas I have that may be interesting: - mandatory cooling off period (one to two weeks) before account activation - analyzing downvotes by user and, once a threshold has been reached, putting them in a "time out." - being able to block certain users from appearing in stories once you've logged in

If someone has good ideas but is used to discussions on wilder forums, we want to educate them in a respectful way. If someone really doesn't belong here, we don't want to get their attention; we want to make HN as boring as possible to them, so they go away instead of posting a self-righteous rebuttal or seek vengeance in some way.

On the subject of respectful education... it might be helpful to have some built-in explanatory text shown next to downvoted posts shown only to the author, with the standard reasons for HN downvoting, and suitable responses for downvotes that seem unjustified.

Philosophically, downvoting should impact the karma of the downvoter.

For instance, you can't downvote replies to your comment, but you can go into their user history and downvote their other comments. This is worse, because their other comments quite literally have nothing to do with what would have been downvoted had that measure not been in place.

If someone views downvotes as punishment, then this engenders retaliation, and retaliation doesn't engender civil discussion.

I feel like 60-70% of the heavily downvoted comments I see are already trolling or flaming (or in some cases something dumb, like a 3-word reference to an internet meme). With the grayed out text, I think this is a fantastic visual cue about how not to act on HN.

(I could have just written this comment as "/disagree", and then watched it get appropriately downvoted, and learned my lesson)

Edit: I should also add that as a barely-contributing user, I don't have the ability to downvote. But I'd still like other people to be able to do it, to enforce the community's standards.

We should not remove down votes outright. I've seen a comment get downvoted to -4 because people didn't like the commentary, but then shoot back up to +10 when it was shown that they were correct after all.

The concept of "down" is conflated in people's minds in a way "up" isn't. It is used by people to mean either "I disagree" or "totally inappropriate". The first is not supposed to affect karma but the second is. If you simply replace "down" with "flag" it changes how people think about it.

As for accidental up-voting, moving the links so that there is separation would fix that.

I generally agree with that, but it reminds me of another problem. The Karma number is now an ever-growing and meaningless figure. I think it should be harder to improve your karma as you get higher, and it should be easier to lose it. That it actually has a meaning.

Inflation may be a problem some day, but for now I think it's under control. The leader board is still at a human understandable scale: http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

What I mean by "rah rah" things includes political articles that make people think "right on!" Paul B's article on Proposition 19 falls into that category for me: I strongly agree with him.

But when I step back and look, I think that I don't want to read everyone's "rah rah" articles because they tend towards flame wars, and, if opposing views are trampled to the point where those people go elsewhere, group think. I also think that, since they are topics that anyone can have an opinion on, that they are much more likely to draw people only marginally interested in the core topics of "hacker news". Those people in turn will submit more articles about politics. At a certain point a few days ago, between Prop 19, John Carmack's libertarianish views, and something else I don't recall, the top three spots on HN were occupied about articles that were essentially political in nature.

I would much prefer that articles like that one, much as I agree with it, and think Paul B is an awesome guy and a great contributor here, were ruthless pruned from this site.

The former is, of course, the Twinkie of human growth. HN is becoming Twinkie-ville. Reddit is Twinkie-ville already, but it's Twinkie-ville with a sparkling sense of humor, which HN lacks (cultural difference).

Granted, we're all emotional creatures first and foremost -- false impressions of reason aside -- but… there's something that's dramatically changed in the last two months. Don't you think?

Even the non-emotional-alignment stuff is more boring. Boring things stay on the front page longer. Articles that would normally have captured the HN spirit languish.

What's going on?

I almost miss the "What makes an entrepreneur?" pr0n.

On HN, I can chat with some of the most influential people in technology, and it's great. But the moment anyone cracks a joke? Downvoted, sometimes in to oblivion.

I find it hard to believe such a sharp group of people would be so averse to humor, but the votes seem to indicate that.

It's not just jokes. I've experimented: I can make the most insightful and practical comment in the whole thread, but if I use "cuz" or "gonna," or "man," or more than a single (maybe two) exclamation points in the whole thing, no upvotes for me! But the more pseudo-intellectual trappings I pile on -- for example, eschewing contractions -- the more votes I get.

Mentioning a logical fallacy, even if it is itself fallacious, always works a treat.

It's pretty silly.

Even Einstein wasn't afraid to stick his tongue out for the camera.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458155

For example. I've seen others upvoted too, but it's mostly only for genuinely funny stuff that's not some tired, bedraggled "meme". The other thing is that it's nice not to have too much of it - people "clowning around" just for the sake of attracting votes.

As for other stuff, the stories you see on HN still end up there. Try to submit one and it'll point you to the story if it's been submitted. And if it hasn't been, anyone can submit stories.

An average is a better indicator to the user of how well they are engaging with the site. It only goes up if the user consistently posts worthwhile comments, which rewards being selective about when you post and thoughtful about what you post. Fewer and better is encouraged. Consistently good is encouraged. Lousy comments (like one-on-one arguments and "Me too!") are discouraged even if nobody votes them down.

This bridges the gap between two existing forms of feedback: total karma (which nobody really cares about, even though it's on every page) and the voting on individual comments (which is the closest thing we have to an indicator of comment quality), and gives the user continuous feedback on how much value they are adding to the site. It makes it much easier to know if your commenting is getting better or getting worse. That is, it is much easier to tell that my average is up or down from the last time I looked than it is to detect the fluctuation in the rate at which my karma accumulates.

Even if lousy comments get voted up--as happens when, for instance, someone first-posts an opinionated quip on a controversial submission and people swarm to vote in agreement--the impact on the user's average karma (which better reflects their value to the community) is much lower than the immediate spike in their total karma (the feedback they currently see). You don't have to stop people from writing such comments--just give them a smaller cookie when they do.

Obviously you can't make anybody alter their behavior over a number, but I think most here would if given a number that they could trust as representative of the shared goal of keeping this place from sucking.

tl;dr average karma is better feedback than total karma

Comments which few people will notice are also discouraged. Most of my 1-point comments are the only comment on their respective articles, and many of those are 'Ask HN' posts. I don't want to find myself thinking "I could contribute here, but doing so will drag my average down".

That said, upvotes per page-load-including-the-comment is probably still better than the raw number of upvotes.

The number of votes an article has and the number of comments are both going to be strongly correlated with the number of views per comment. So would the mean and range of the comment scores. You could also take the time since the comment was posted into account.

You could have the visible "raw score" for each comment and an invisible "quality adjusted score" that is used to give each user a quality rating.

I think this is a feature, generally, but I get what you're saying. With any criteria you present for deciding what is worth posting you run the risk of it being the only criteria. Ideally, we'd all only care about our karma insofar as it helps us avoid making lousy posts, and ignore it entirely otherwise, but idealism doesn't scale.

"How will this influence my average?" is definitely an oversimplified heuristic for deciding what is worth contributing, but it's reasonably accurate and I think it's the best one we've got. (Better than total karma at the very least.)

As I said in the above comment, the voting on comments is the closest thing we have to an indication of their quality. It obviously doesn't always reflect reality, but what that points to is that some comments--the ones that we want around here but that would bring your average down--are undervalued. Those comments should result in positive feedback (via average karma or otherwise), but they don't.

That is to say: The site has a reward mechanism (karma). There is desirable behavior that is not being rewarded or is under-rewarded (e.g. replying to less popular Ask HN posts). Is there some way to reward that desirable behavior?

I found that it didn't improve my interaction with the site, it just changed the way that I "played the game". Not literally playing a game, but there was a clear difference in motivations for commenting.

For example: thread is more than 6 hours old? Don't comment, nobody will ever see it or upvote, so my average will get dragged down. Don't reply to any comment at the bottom of a long thread. Use short, witty comments, because those take the least amount of effort for others to upvote (I'm not good at making comments like that, though). Etc.

How about the ability to shut off karma for certain posts? One exception if it's down-voted by more than ~10pts. Then the user gets that subtracted from their score, preventing abuse when posting mean/hateful comments.

I disagree. I like it when people make a post because they have something to say to someone else. I like it when I reply to someone and they reply back and it starts a conversation. Maybe it leads to an interesting train of thought that I might not have otherwise come up with, maybe it does the same for the other person. I wouldn't like to see HN losing that.

And possibly like this post. I don't know how many other people will find it interesting or will agree with me. But, if I cared about average, I might be hesitant to make this post.

Lets keep the up/down voting arrows, and let the karma operate in the background in the usual way (percolating good comments/submissions to the top, and letting bad comments fall through). But lets just not show karma. Anywhere. Thus keep the quality of submissions/comments the same, and keep the eyeballs focused on what really matters: good articles and good comments.

If we assume that any displayed score is going to trigger some amount of gaming motivation in most people, then displaying scores of any kind contributes to a rise in game behavior versus social behavior.

For the sake of example, imagine an evenly-distributed bell curve. The high end averages 10 karma's per post, and the bottom end 0 karama's per post. If your average is a 6, you'll be in the 60th percentile. A little "60%" could be displayed next to your username.

This allows you to quickly compare your level of contributions to those of others.

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

This is probably due to the fact that some people spend a lot of time commenting on threads that don't get much viewership. I doubt there's much harm in showing the average as a reminder to try to keep the quality high, but I think there are probably better ways to encourage it.

The individual users pages (except my own) still seem to display total karma.

The leaderboard is still ranked by total karma. If we are adopting (temporarily perhaps) average karma as a metric , it would be great to see who is ranked highest on it or even just how much average karma a user has, just as we can check total karma of a user today

I also suspect that the frequency of average karma calculation may need to be increased.

Come to think of it - a "new responses" link on the profile page could be very helpful.

Is there a reason flag isn't shown on comments until the reply page?

I've got .77, which seems a lot lower than I would expect. I rarely end up in negatives on my comments. But when I do, the negative is a high one.

The problem I have with this is that absolute number of upvotes is not equal to quality of a comment.

A good comment posted under less popular news item will get eyeballs, less upvotes, and lower poster's average.

Similarly participation in long thread (even if that's constructive thread, not a flamewar) or response far down the page is unlikely to get many upvotes, regardless of quality.

I would suggest having a "tone" button that downvotes for tone. The level of fading applied to a comment will be bases on whichever of the two scores is the lowest, tone or voting - so a post with 10 upvotes but -4 tone will be invisible. To avoid abuse of the "tone" feature, it should be possible to recover the user names of those that flag a post for tone.

When people reply to a -4 comment it makes it harder to ignore that comment. It effectively pushes it up on the page. So disable replying to -4 comments. It's probably also necessary to hide any existing replies.

Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1852305

  Does this comment add value/insight/healthy debate to this topic?

1. Make it a checkbox people have to check. Just to force people to take one minor action, and read it.

2. Rotate the text with a variety of different statements, just to mix it up:

"Are you being nice?" "Does this contribute to the conversation?" "Following the golden rule here?"

and most importantly:

"Will this get upvoted?"

:P

It's a low tech solution which focuses on fostering community values.

The mechanism is, counter-intuitively, to allow people to rate their own comments. However, this rating is not to be directly used to affect how the comment is displayed, since that would obviously be easy to game. Instead, it would be used to identify people who can't restrain themselves from engaging in a low quality discussion; ie, replying to a troll or similar.

Obviously we can't expect trolls to rate their own post as trollish, but we can expect at least some people to have the self-knowledge required to admit when they are posting while annoyed or similar.

So, the system assumes that a comment is only as good quality as its parent, or at least, not much better. Obviously, one can make a good contribution in reply to a bad one, but it's not necessarily a problem to discourage this - since the reader of such a contribution has to read the bad contribution to get to the good one.

Internally, each user has their own scale, which their replies - and the replies to their comments - relate to the scales of other users, using the above assumption. A user would then be shown only comments to which they are likely to reply; this means trolls see all the trolls, but quality users see only other quality comments.

There are a couple of potential problems. One is that it would bias people against replying to deeply nested comments; and ultimately, towards making submissions instead of replies. One rather drastic way to deal with this would be to remove the submission mechanism, and only have one conversation tree; the frontpage items would then be the roots of current discussions inferred from the structure of the tree.

The second problem is that while this mechanism would help current users filter out trolls, it would do nothing to help new users find the best discussions. There is a conflict between preventing the system being gamed, and allowing new users to find the best discussions; because the former would prefer the ratings to be secret, but the latter would allow information about them to be public. It is not obvious that there is a workable trade-off.

The goal could be something like Google's Beer Goggles, but for comments: "it looks like you're writing a flame, are you sure you want to do that?"

Another thought: there's a big difference between a comment at -1 with 10 upvotes and 12 downvotes vs. one that has occasioned 2 downvotes. Might be interesting to see the effect of showing both the number of up & down votes rather than just the sum. The idea is that genuinely trollish comments at -1 will be differentiated from minority points of view.

OTOH, some particularly clever trolls are of course intended to provoke division of an intellectually unproductive sort. Not sure if machine learning could identify that...though features computed from the commenter's past history could be informative.

Then you can enable or disable aspects of the site for each user-category. e.g. disable comments from trolls, disable downvoting for people who downvote when disagree as this stimulates groupthink, etc...

A set of users can serve as a training set for each category. It is possible to let the 'genuine'-category classify comments from users from the other categories in order to enhance the classifiers.

Actually this is an interesting machine learning problem, I still need to pick a project for my course in machine learning so I can research this if I can get my hands on the datasets.

Cliques: Likewise if the same few people are consistently the first to upvote stories or comments of a particular user.

Multies/Sockpuppets: I think votes for a user buy another user from "too close" an ip address should be automatically discounted. I'm not sure how to define "too close" (and I suspect HN already does this)

Anonymous posting: I like the way MetaFilter handles anonymous posting instead of people making throwaway accounts. The downside of this is that 1) Posters have to really trust the site admins; 2) This becomes more work for the admins

Disallow noob posting articles: What % of the [DEAD] articles were posted by users with a very low karma? What % hit the front page?

(Yes, those last two are not directly related to the OP's comment but I feel they're ideas worth throwing out there)

Disallowing noob posting articles would be a good thing, a very low karma cap on posting articles would help (5 or 10 or so).

That would be just enough to increase the cost of spam to the point where it would no longer be worth it.

Put troll threads/comments at the bottom of the page, or hide them. Or use spam ratings to amplify users' votes who up vote non spam comments.

Short of that, add the ability to minimize entire threads.

Users should be encouraged to comment LESS, only if they have something useful to say.

That's what I'm doing anyway, because I really don't care about karma and speak only when I have something worth to say, would be cool if anyone was acting like this since we have no shortage of users.

Limit the number of times one person can post in the same thread to once (or maybe twice), either from the top node or a sub-node. Example:

PersonA says, "blah blah blah..."

PersonB says, "You're an idiot because blah blah blah..."

PersonA is locked out from replying to PersonB.

This will do 7 things:

1. It will eliminate argument strings between 2 people.

2. It will remove the incentive to flame because your flame can't turn into an argument.

3. It will encourage people to think through what they have to say, anticipate counter-arguments, and address them in their original comment (or with an update in the 2 hour edit window).

4. It will foster a greater sense of community by encouraging people to stick up for each other. (PersonA made a good comment, PersonB trolled, PersonA can't reply, so I will.) PersonB will get the message much better when confronted by the community instead of PersonA. (Of course, if no one sticks up for PersonA, then maybe they really were wrong.)

5. It will encourage 2 people to take their legitimate discussion (of little interest to others) off-line.

6. It will reduce the length and indentation of threads making them easier to read.

7. It will encourage everyone to slow down and think a little. Those who don't will stick out (not in a good way). Trolls will get more satisfaction somewhere else.

(This is already working by accident. I have gotten so busy that I only visit hn in short bursts. Often, when someone challenges me, I don't reply because I have left and returned much later. But others have replied for me. The resulting thread is invariably better than if I had replied myself.)

You would really lose the 'discussion' aspect of things by turning it into a 'say once' system.

People in complex situations almost never behave exactly as you'd expect them to. An artificial limit to discussion might have terrible unintended consequences. What about the problem of someone asking a question in their comment.

"Hey, wait a second, what did you mean by X?" [I'm sorry you're prevented from replying in this thread]

I know the time delay thing was a good start. I just think it needs to be extended. It seems that threads lose value as they get deeper.

Oh, and I just thought of #8: It encourages you to get back to work since you won't be replying. That's something everyone needs to consider.

2. Trolls do not care who replies. This can avoid the argument between the OP and the troll, but does not prevent the latter to post the snarky comment in the first place. Some people just want to express their frustration attacking someone, they do not care about replies. Moreover, the lack of chance for the OP to reply could even incentivize the bad behaviour, giving the flamer a sort of "revenge" weapon. People often find gratification in silencing others.

3. Some discussions give value to the community because they happen in a short lapse of time. If someone needs 2 hours to reply, then there is a chance fewer people will see it.

4. As I said, trolls just want replies, from anyone. Flaming the full community could even be more satisfactory to him.

5. Unfortunately often there is no way of doing this because some users do not have their address in their profile.

Also, if you can edit your comments, you're opening the door for twisted threads where replies are in one block per person with "@person timestamp," although that's easily fixed by only allowing editing for a short while.

Don't bother trying to do fancy stuff like connecting votes between communities; if something is really good people from each community will submit it separately. Also, it might be nice to be able to move between communities... but that sounds like something for version 2.

You could have these smaller communities run in parallel with the main site if this seems like too big of a shift.

Possible solution 2: Not sure if this really addresses the issue squarely -- but what if, when ranking stories and/or comments, you factor in the number of votes in the intersection between the current user and the submitter/commenter. Something like:

define votes(username): return ids of last n upvoted items for username

item_score *= (length(intersection(votes(user_x), votes(user_y))) / (n / 2))

Just use the original algorithm if the user hasn't yet cast n votes.

One man's garbage is another man's gold, as they say.

You could do something similar by checking downvotes as well. If two people are polar opposites (one person upvotes stuff the other downvotes), then comments by one could be greyed out or hidden for the other.

If there were simply a box I could check to make my votes public, then maybe somebody could write a Chrome or Firefox extension to pull this data and handle the re-ranking.

Neither of these two ideas would be perfect, but I think they would improve the user experience significantly. If nothing else they would be interesting experiments.

And communities could still be visible to everyone, even if only members of that community can participate. Then if there's a really good comment in one community, someone from another could just copy and paste it over.

With the right data structure you could do this with a single matrix-vector multiplication per page view.

I actually built this, but never put it up on a server.

Metafilter has done this very successfully for the last 6 years.

It occurs to me that the main failure of karma-type systems in general is valuing quantity over quality. This is perfectly rational for a commercial site that seeks to maximise engagement and page views, but it seems to actively harm both comment quality and the community dynamic.

It seems that the prime concern we have for HN is maintaining a high S/N ratio; Why should the karma system not make that desire more explicit? I may be completely wrong here, but I think most of us would like to see a community where people think carefully before they post. If we want to discourage flaming and poor-quality comments, I think we need to think harder about behavioural prods to discourage them.

I propose removing the display of a users' total karma on their user page and replacing it with their average karma. I would like to see voting privileges made contingent on average karma and would be interested to hear possibilities for punishing users with a high proportion of low- or negative-karma comments.

It is of course dangerous to use heavy-handed technical changes because of the myriad possible unintended consequences, but we all know that internet communities almost inevitably fail. As a community, we should be considering our options now while things are generally OK, perhaps even designing a 'nuclear option' for the possibility that HN experiences some sort of Eternal September scenario.

Maybe a nuclear option would be good. We certainly had success with Operation Erlang I & II. Maybe a nuclear option would consist of locking out access for 24 hrs to all but the old guard and then requiring that for the next week or so that new accts must be active for more than 24 hrs before they can post.

if a user is downvoted>n times, delete the comment with added penalty factor. this would keep the content clean forever.

Despite the downvoted comment being hidden, it almost stands out the elitist comment(and nowadays the chain of explanations growing usually offtopic)

Could we restrict users to one user per ip? I sometimes suspect people using multiple ids to upvote their comments/posts. There are some posts way out of HN league that get upvotes within minutes from the new page (even the spammer ones).

Would it be hard to have new users moderated? One way is for new users to write few lines about themselves. Moderator would look for human(no-spam) and genuinity.

Show a warning or part of content from http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html upon submission of a post or comment - until they attain their downvote karma rights.

One liners like 'i like it too' should be deleted. Perhaps there should be a minimum amount of words for a reply or a warning telling the user to verify if he really wants to post.

Link searchyc.com on top of the page beside 'submit' - new users don't know of this awesome search site. While there is a search link at the bottom of the page, I wouldn't be using it more than once that I know it's googlified. SearchYC works! with lots of criteria. imho, this would reduce many of'django vs rails' kind of questions, that have been discussed in the past.

1) a metric based on account age, submission karma, and comment karma. less weight on submission karma, since that is easier to manipulate. make this metric the barrier of entry for features instead of basing it purely on karma. it makes manipulation harder, and it encourages actual community participation/development.

2) add another meta-moderation tool similar to the "flag" option. i mostly use flagging for spam or offensive posts. i'd like to see something else (unlocked by #1) that allows you to mark something that is off topic, non-contributing, or otherwise adding to "the decline". accounts accumulate these like points, and the more points an account has, the more features get revoked from it as punishment (which leads up to a temp ban). points decay with time, and have a hard cap on how many can be obtained in a single day or by a single comment, but a long history of points leads to more points being obtained per flag.

edit: just to add some thoughts -- the only way to prevent people from being anonymous internet idiots and adding noise to the signal is either with a carrot or a stick. there's not much we can offer as a carrot that other sites can't, or that they can't get by non-participation (just reading the site). that is, unless you want to implement a private karma-barrier section of the site (unless you already have an i'm not in it... :( but then i wouldn't know about that carrot and wouldn't change my actions to reflect wanting to obtain that reward).

the only real alternative is the stick, hence the revoking of features.

Ex [of what to prevent]. someone submits the latest tech-crunch article first and gets upvotes from everyone else trying to submit it. They can then downvote in comments without first being subjected to a socialization period of earning upvotes from thoughtful comments.

EDIT: Another thought: Only allow submissions from people above a given karma. That way you would always have to earn your stripes through commenting. Downsides: Wouldn't allow sensitive anonymous 'ask HN' posts from throwaway accounts, and we would lose all the good submissions from new accounts.

Then, put a heavy fine on it: for example, if a user has a comment eliminated due to flagging, he loses a big amount of karma (20%?) and he cannot comment/submit for one day.

Also, 20% of karma isn't very useful for troll / griefers on throwaway accounts. A fixed value (-100?) might be better.

To a newbie, karma voting patterns have huge instructional value (at least they did for me)

HN without karma wouldn't be HN.

If anything what I see again and again is that some comment takes a quick lead in upvotes in a topic and dominates the conversation afterwards, despite being often followed by more interesting comments.

Totally agree with that. Comments should be judged on their merits, not the number of points they have gained or lost. Disagreement should be expressed using actual words rather than "thumbs up" or "thumbs down". Removing comment karma would slow people down as they scan comments: rather than just looking for the highest-rated ones, they would have to look at the meaning of all of them. Bitch-slapping commenters with a down-vote doesn't add anything to community or discussion. Clicking the "me too!" upvote button doesn't help that much either.

Keep a flag for "spam", "inappropriate" or "offensive" and leave it at that. People who habitually misuse those buttons should lose the ability to use them at all. People who are constantly (and justifiably) reported using them should have their account limited in some way, maybe limiting the frequency or number of comments they can make.

(I mean comment karma, specifically, not submission karma.)

    (defn v-rat
        [uv dv] 
        (/ (expt uv 3/2) 
           (+ uv dv))))

    (define nest-weight
        [comment]
        (/ 1 (+ (nest-level comment) 
                (/ 3 (nest-level comment)))))

    weight::
    (+ (/ ak 2)
       (v-rat uv dv)  
       (reduce + (map (fn [c] (* (nest-weight c) 
                                 (v-rat (upvotes c) (downvotes c))))
                       (remove (fn [c] (= user (user c)))
                               comments))

=====

Abstractly, I'm trying to consider the comment based on both its individual value as well as how much good discussion it generated. I also take into account, plainly, the average past worth of their comments.

This could certainly use some tweaking, but I like the values I've plugged in so far, and it promotes discussion as well as thoughtful contribution, and gives a nod towards users who have high quality comments in the past.

I'd be interested in tweaking it some more if this seems at all a step in the right direction. I think I could use a better heuristic for replies, as well as a more sophisticated v-rat. I also wonder if it would be possible to see which users downvote and upvote, and give those votes more power (technically possible, that is), and also take into account the users who are replying, and to what effect. This would require a lot more testing, and maybe more CPU cycles than PG would like.

I'm not sure taking time into account is a great idea past the first ~10 minutes of submission. For those first ~10 minutes, perhaps weigh the comment solely using the avg karma of the user + some constant. After those first x minutes, rank by the algorithm.

You can try to raise awareness and ask people to not be evil on your site, but that's almost as effective as asking the tide not to come in. There are many bitter people in the world and they outnumber the well adjusted people who would rather spend their time building up a project instead of tearing down someone else's. These trolls crave attention - the negative attention they get by aggravating people on-line - so it's really not affective to point out the problem and ask them to stop or to ask the community to gang up on them; that's what they want.

We need a solution that frustrates these people. I've seen some sites where the comments a troll posts look like they are live on the site to the troll but they are hidden from everyone else. I think this is a very effective technique because it denies the troll the attention he is seeking and it saves the rest of the site from his attacks.

But, perhaps the best response is to remember Margaret Thatcher's advice about people trying to make you angry (i.e. no one can make you angry without your permission). If you see something that's not in the spirit of hacker news, just ignore it. Don't respond; don't show it to other people; just let it die a bitter and lonely death.

It could then be conceivable to give the downvotes more weight, perhaps putting users in a karma hole, with their posts starting out at 0 points, appearing at the bottom of the comments page, if they have accrued too many downvotes. They would then have to dig themselves out by posting more valuable comments.

This would allow two things. First, users can downvote for specific reasons - mean spirited/dumb/insulting/off-topic. If a comment is technically correct, but unnecessarily mean, then I can its disposition.

Secondly, it would provide feedback to the commenter. If my 'me too!' comments are being downvoted, it'd be great to have some reason why.

Of course, the commenter should see it immediately and should be able to correct it (or even delete it) in the meantime. But everyone else should see it only after 10 minutes.

This will slow down A-B-A-B-... types of conversation which are usually only productive when being written thoughtfully and thus slowly anyway.

One way to invest in handles would be to add more social features like points you can give to awesome comments (you can only give 1 point a day or something), etc. Then again, all these social mechanics are complex and easily gamed.

Another way would be simply to promote handles more: make an easily searched HN users list etc.

Additionally, I've been thinking for a while that it would be cool if threads were ranked a little differently, and not just on the points/time of the parent. Sometimes there are really, really great comments that are replies to low-ranked ones, and the resulting thread gets kicked to the bottom of the page. Something like Avg points/time or just accounting for the average points of next-level comments when determining rank of a reply at each level.

EDIT The previous experiment and discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467181 (4 Feb 2009)

This will balance out the uneven distribution of karma that is talked about above, as new comments will be seen and given a chance to voted on even well into a conversation.

Having done this, comments that stop being relevant to the conversation should drop to the bottom and naturally attract less attention. Ideally, this will leave trolling posts ignored. (This can be helped further by having user selected timeout apply. If comment / responses are mapped as a tree, hide all branches that have no new activity for the past x hours, allowing users to change x as they choose. Give visual feedback to a comments age by fading old comments)

This solves the 'income' end of the system, as karma should now be distributed a little more evenly over time.

Then perhaps a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 500 neutral would rank lower than a comment with 20 up, 5 down, and 0 neutral. The idea being that, all things being equal for two comments, the one with more indifferent voters is considered less valuable, and is thus ranked lower. Maybe a neutral vote simply works by increasing n when judging the size-weighted score that HN uses to calculate rankings now.

I'm sure there are flaws in this line of reasoning..perhaps someone would be so kind as to point them out?

That would be a really cool feature. I would often use it for comments at 0 - something that's factually wrong and needs to be voted down, but without nasty pile-on downvoting that sometimes happens, that to me looks a bit mean-spirited. If the comment in question went below zero, my 'stay' vote would count as an upvote. If it went higher, as a downvote.

Maybe this is naive, but there's something about a binary voting system that just strikes me as something that doesn't fit into a conversation. I often find myself agreeing with certain parts of a comment and not other parts of it. Maybe if the user could vote up the parts of a comment he likes and vote down the parts that he doesn't. Technically, that would be difficult (especially since on HN a comment is simply a text field).

With respect to counting comment views, it's already implicit in the page views.

I suggest a "flame" flag for every comment, which can roll up into a user's rating as a "flamer." The flag would only be available to HNers with a low flame rating themselves and a significant history of comments.

By default, no one would see comments that have high flame ratings. Users that accumulated flame points would get a time out from commenting, leading to a permanent ban if the behavior doesn't stop.

The site is wonderfully minimal at the moment, but using a UI graphic such as a fireball or flame could draw attention to the importance of civility.

"Are you sure you want to downvote this comment? Doing so will push its karma into negative figures. At HN we don't encourage this type of downvoting except in response to abusive content. "

In my experience some people just don't have a clue how to behave online and it's not even expected of them in most places. HN is different.

It cuts down trolls who snipe in lots of different threads at once.

It cuts down on me too commenters, or the know it all contigent who seemly does nothing else but post on HN, again hitting lots of threads at once.

It encourages people to think abiut what they're writing, instead sending out one sentence snark, or writing a long missive they feel they can "clarify" later in a pointless semantic debate.

This isnt a complete solution... I have no idea how to correct for mean spiritedness, for example. But some kind of limit that tells people that they should stop venting/pontificating and take a walk might help.

I guess the success of that strategy would depend heavily on whether a user's karma is a good indicator of the likelihood that they will make a mean-spirited comment in the future. It would also depend on whether the low-karma disincentive is actually undesirable to a potentially mean-spirited poster.

edit: Jon Stewart is generally quite mean spirited, in that he goes out of his way to get people fired and treats people he disagrees with like little kids, but if he were an HN contributor would he really make the community worse?

Edit: I also think that the effect of the first downvote on a new comment is (or was) to powerful. Especially when the leading comments have many replies.

  The following comment has been judged to be unhelpful
  and as a result you are now on time-out:
  <comment quoted here>
  You may return to Hacker News in Y minutes.

Not of the form "You must do this". But rather of the form "The mission of HN is to supply stimulating, insightful, {insert mission here}... Therefore always be polite, thoughtful, engaging and supporting".

That'll be enough I think. It's currently not immediately clear what the mission is unless you explore and delve deeper.

I've occasionally found a comment that I felt was both mean-spirited and largely content-free. I've down-voted that.

Then I wondered if that person had a history of such comments, so I've brought up their profile, looked through their comments, and attempted to assess each one on its merits. In cases of doubt I've left them alone, but if I've felt that the comment in question was again mean-spirited and content-free, I've down-voted that as well.

I've realised that such actions, while intended well, might be viewed as "punishing" the "contributor" in question. Further, I suspect that PG already detects and inhibits this behavior.

So here we have a case where I believe I'm doing the right thing to help reduce the mean-spiritedness of comments, and I get prevented from doing so.

If you can identify troll-feeders, you might be able to stop them from feeding the trolls (just a text reminder above a comment field might be enough), hence create less incentive for trolls.

Not an easy problem to solve though, I've tried myself and didn't succeed. May try again.

Mean-spirited comments can quite possibly be the response to the rampant favoritism that exists on HN and that can be as dangerous to maintaining discussions balanced and interesting.

Seeing the points doesn't add value and it distorts the opinions and upvotes (people tend to like more what other people recommend).

Alternately, what are voting ratios looking like? Are there some people downvoting more than up? If so, a notice above the comment field letting them know could help.

1. every user can config a "whitelist" of users, to personalize HN to only show comments from those users (and access other users via parent links). This is the "filter", of who they "follow".

2. you can set your whitelist to be the whitelist of any other users. This is "subscribing".

Some few users would end up working to maintain detailed whitelists (like, who they "follow"), and most others would just "subscribe" to them. New users would be left out in the cold til one of these services picked them up (like new bands getting signed to music labels?)

No way would pg go for this, but it's interesting to me. It's sort of a variation of subreddits; and a bit like the various newswire services (like reuters etc) being picked up by local newspapers...

Otherwise... aggressively ban people that don't contribute well enough. It is literally the only non-fragmentary way to fix the problem, because it's not a technical issue. People are just terrible. (I'm of the opinion that fragmenting is simply a less aggressive version of banning: leave the trolls to their shit-heaps, forge new ground.)

I'd say you should be banning at a rate over half of the new users you see. And if you look at my posting history, you'll probably see that I'm not exactly grade A material, so I'd expect to get chopped off eventually, probably sooner than later.

Those users who are noted as being excessively mean spirited should have to learn to play in a sandbox nicely with others before they're let back into more active areas of the site.

The net effect is perhaps less of a knee jerk negative reaction so that users can eventually learn to contribute again in a positive manner and it keeps the more frequented areas clean again.

Points from comments should have way more weight than karma points from submissions. It's easy to get massive karma points if you submit something interesting. On the other hand, you could spend a lot of time writing a comment and you wouldn't get than many points from it.