Tell HN: Uptick in mean-spirited comments

Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.

FWIW, I discovered that people take disagreements personally and will stalk you across threads if you're not careful with their egos.<p>For some reason I am incapable of remembering names and can only identify about 10 - 15 people here other than the ones I have met or know from somewhere else. So the whole thing feels to me like detached, anonymous discussion. I was surprised to be 1) remembered, and 2) "punished" in another, unrelated context.<p>There are also times when I withhold contributing to a thread because of its strong fanboy/flamer possibilities. Certain companies have .. enthusiastic supporters/haters.

pg's quoted comment <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833255" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1833255</a><p>I've noticed that if you reply to a mean-spirited comment with a straightforward and dispassionate counter-argument, completely ignoring its rudeness and tone, you get massive upvotes. Transcending meanness also <i>feels</i> really clean; it is neutralized.<p>By framing the meanness, the site's collegiality is not undermined, but demonstrated.

Not trying to be passive aggressive here, at all; I agree with you here. The reason I didn't post anything was that HN has gotten pretty damn meta recently too. I'm not sure posts like this will help anything, much; probably something needs to come from the top, or the community needs to focus on enforcing the behavioral norm by down-voting (even if they normally wouldn't put in the effort) comments that are of an assholish nature.<p>As an aside: <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/ihodes/status/29059931658" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/#!/ihodes/status/29059931658</a>

I've been on HN for a few years, and I'm usually extremely skeptical of people claiming a decline in the quality of HN, but I agree, and furthermore I have noticed an increase in acceptance of clever but empty Reddit-esque one-liners. I don't mind them, but I think it's unfortunately a very slippery slope...

No social news site is going to be perfect. If it's people that are writing comments, some comments will be good and some will be bad. Read them and decide for yourself. If a comment hurts your feelings, get over it. If you like a comment, upvote it, and help other people find the best comments.<p>Really, I kind of get tired of reading stuff like this because there is always some subtext to it. "mean-spirited" usually means, "someone disagreed with me". If people disagree with you, you can either get over it or learn to argue better. Passive aggressive, "oh noes everyone is so mean" is not going to change what people think. Good writing will.

I upvoted this because I agree with the concept, but I don't believe such things are necessary. General rule of life: assholes will be assholes. This isn't going to make anyone more polite. Most of us are already polite, and quite content to simply downvote people who aren't.

This is only for a subset of comments, but one common case that's sometimes sort of accidental: a commenter disagrees with a submitted article strongly, but doesn't realize that the article is written by the submitter or by another HN user. If they had, they probably would've phrased their disagreement differently.<p>Of course it's nice to be polite when disagreeing with any article, but I notice myself making more of an effort to be polite when disagreeing with an HN user's own submission, compared to disagreeing with, say, a <i>New York Times</i> article, because the NYT reporter isn't present or going to read my comment. HN's greater volume of user-written content (compared to, say, reddit) makes this something not everyone expects to encounter; it's like ranting about how Daikatana sucks and then realizing that John Romero was standing right next to you, and then you feel bad.<p>(This doesn't explain mean-spirited comments that are responding to other comments, though.)

Sometimes mean spirited comments can be full of usable ideas, or at least they can fuel a debate between contrasting opinions. Remember that what looks to be a mean spirited comment by you, might be taken a completely different way by someone else.<p>In any case I'd say that more important than mean comments is a the downvote everything I dislike regardless of if it contributes to the discussion in any way. It stalls actual conversation between different opinions.

Correct, the "mean-spirited comments" are part and parcel of every <i>open</i> online community. This is the flip side of the anonymity and what Jaron Lanier calls "the mob switch" (google it). In other words, human tendency to gang-up/gang-down, up-vote/down-vote in batches, regardless a content.<p>I also noticed that often here the polite but critical comments are down-voted if they don't share the "main theme" of a post. Again, this is the part and parcel of every online community.The alternative are the one-liners and up-likes you get on Facebook, the same Facebook that coincidently is responsible for the internet-wide decline of the commenting culture.

I have become a lot more circumspect since I've been on the receiving end of things. I used to slam books I hated having read on Amazon, but after being published, I realized how crushing something like that can be.<p>Just because I think www.linttrapsforsale.com is a dumb idea doesn't mean that there wasn't a team behind it that thought they had a great vision, emitted blood and sweat in pursuit of it, and hung their hopes and dreams on it.<p>Short of replying to things that are actively malicious (bigoted, etc.), I try to rein in my online 'road rage' and let other people take things to task. There are so many of them out there willing to do it, in any event...

Reasons: "The difference between the two societies is that in the society which performs poorly:<p>a) the stupid members of the society are allowed by the other members to become more active and take more actions; b) there is a change in the composition of the non-stupid section with a relative decline of populations of areas I, H1 and B1 and a proportionate increase of populations H2 and B2."<p><a href="http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/basiclawsofhumanstupidity.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/basiclawsofhumanstupidit...</a><p>Solutions: "1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. 2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since." 3.) Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities. 4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale."<p><a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html</a>

Considering the perspective of a logged in user, simply give them the opportunity to deselect others by username and then record their deselections with their account. This wouldn't require unique pages to be served, except for a deselected_users array to be picked up and processed at the client side. The same lightweight approach can be used give shape to a user's own view with stuff like: 'preferred users', 'out-right scum' etc. Same principles apply to personal topic preferences and their viewed ranking.

As someone who was a "bad" user (under another username); posting rather useless, short, unsighted comments and submissions; I think the best way is to "educate people".<p>This is not only a HN culture, it's a civilian culture. Limit the freedom of newbies until they are more mature. When you are committed to the community, you become more responsible and work toward creating a name/friends. When you are new, you pretty much don't care.

I have noticed that a negative comment(against the main point of the post) tends to be sometime initially down-voted by some superficial prejudice that it should be also mean-spirited.<p>It seems that the community naturally upvotes that comment to support diversity of opinions.<p>Of course such support tends to bring some of the provocative comments up in the list- in my view.

<i>Incidentally, if anyone has any suggestions for technical changes/features/tricks that would help fix the problem, I'm all ears. Fending off the decline everyone thinks is inevitable for forums is the main thing I work on. It has been since practically the beginning.</i><p>My observation has been that hackers tend to look for technical solutions for moderating a forum but forum moderation is a people problem, not a technical problem. Deal with people first, tweak technical stuff second.<p>My experience has been that an assumption of ignorance is generally more accurate and more productive than an assumption of guilt. The antidote to ignorance is easy access to information. A prominent (top bar) link explaining how the forum works (both technically and socially) and allowing for "dumb" questions would likely do more to promote polite, thoughtful interaction than a million assumption-of-guilt based tweaks to the voting system.<p>I am not really a hacker, though I do know a little (x)html and css and I am not new to online forums (and have been a moderator in a forum). I found the extremely minimalist design of HN hard to fathom. I did not understand why I sometimes couldn't find the "reply" button and on several occasions I replied anyway, via another means, and then sometimes edited it once the reply button appeared. In spite of the fact that the "logo" being linked to the "home" or "front" page is standard practice, it took me months to figure out that was the link to the 'top stories' everyone talked about so much. I just didn't view the words 'Hacker News' as being part of the menu and I just didn't make the connection.<p>With so many more people from so many different walks of life and even countries now using the forum, there are probably quite a lot of people who, like me, just don't initially have the info they need to effectively participate. Frustrated people who don't know how to make something work often sound gruffer/have poor 'tone'. Enlightening them and assisting them will likely do a lot more for their tone than finding creative, subtle ways to secretly spank them for it (a la "the beatings will continue until morale improves").<p>Good luck with this.<p>Edit: I probably put this in the wrong place. I am not having a good day. I have added pg's remarks (at the top), which is basically what I am replying to. I hope that makes more sense. :-/

How about people with low karma (like myself) not being allowed to comment on articles that appear on the front page. Then only people really interested in following HN, and trying to form some kind of reputation in the community would be able to get much exposure. Trolls in general I would think are much more interested in putting out comments that a number of people will see.

Previous insightful submission and discussion, for background: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057133" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057133</a> (9 months ago)

It's not just Hacker News. It's everywhere on all forums, blogs, etc. I have no idea what's causing it other than economic stress!

I've been seeing a lot of this lately, too. I wonder how much of it is related to the Digg mass exodus?

The price of popularity is interest from assholes, unfortunately.

I would say the phenomenon is merely a sign of the times.<p>An echoing of the cries from the world and its people.<p>People are frustrated with rising food/gas/health insurance, with layoffs after layoffs and local businesses closing, with governments that work with banks to steal from the citizen, with corporations that pollute the environment and food source without consequences.<p>Their mood is sour. Their heart is heavy.<p>They know the good times is over, but they can't see when the bad times will stop, if ever.<p>They weep for their children, yet they intoxicate themselves with alcohol and tv and sports and video games, unable to rise up to fight for themselves.<p>And so they come online and vent their frustration and anger on others, because its just easier. Because nothing of consequence happens anyways, except we all drag each down further and further.

It seems my brief back and forth with PG is the subject of this post. (indirectly?)<p>I'm not sure if my criticism of blind positivity (boosterism) is intended to be what you're concerned about, or if you're just referring to the popularity of banal and frequently unkind commentary.<p>I'd really like to know, because if it was my words that raised your concerns, I want to address it.

If we could dispense with all of the boo-hoo-someone-was-mean-and-downvoted-me meta posts and comments, this could be a great site.<p>Posts like this are the biggest problem with HN.