I believe that the less anonymous a forum like this is, the more polite it will be. You have said you want people to speak to each other here as they would in the real world: well, I believe the more strongly you tie their real world identity to their account here, the more polite they would be.
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.
I'd like to register my strong disagreement with this notion.
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.
Don't you get it? Anonymous and non-anonymous comments have equal ranking. The point of my system is just to encourage most people to be non-anonymous. This means that the vast majority of comments will stay civil, and when most comments are civil, the tone will tend to stay that way. If you need to make commentary on drug policy or your salary, then simply make an anonymous account and say all you want to say. There is no penalty to that.
I somewhat agree, but you're neglecting the more interesting point: Anonymous posting makes trolling easier, yes, but it also allows for a highly fascinating form of discussion - one that is merit-blind[1].
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.)
That's of course an interesting point, but I don't think it would significantly change the way the discussions are currently held. That's because most people would not go clicking through every account before answering. See for example the cpercival putnam thread.
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.
Ah, to be fair neither one of us took the time to fully explain our understanding of each other's points, and I sort of attacked with the disagreement phrasing when I could have only asked him what he thought of my issues.
I haven't found anonymity to be very well correlated with politeness on tech discussion forums I'm on. Some of the most abrasive ones are filled with people posting under their real names, and folks like rms, Theo De Raadt, Ulrich Drepper, and a bunch of the comp.lang.lisp crowd have no problem flaming you under their real names.
In a way I understand what you're saying, but I feel our environment influences how we interact with each other-- anywhere. For example, rules can be added to give structure to a debate. The whole debate format, while artificial, exists to increase the utility of 'real life' discussion.
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.
Seems unnecessary considering some of the most thoughtful discussions come from throw-away accounts doing Tell\Ask HN. It could also exacerbate other issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
[ ie. comment upvotes co-vary with name of commenter instead of content communicated ]
That's why I believe there should be no real disadvantage to using an anonymous account, and no way of telling in the comments if a comment is anonymous or not. All it does is encourage people to link their real life account in a behind-the-scenes manner, which will raise the general discourse level.
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.
Out of friendly curiosity - what led you to change your official name? What are the steps to do that? (I have an awkward last name and am considering it).
It seems like you even changed your first name. How did it feel, how long did it take until your new name felt natural?
Changing your last name is a reasonably straightforward process in most countries, because women usually do it when they get married. The first name is a bit more difficult, but if you have appropriate and reasonable reasons, it can be changed.
As an anonymous user I actually kind of like your idea, but can you clarify whether you propose that being "verified" would mean your identity is available to everyone or just to other verified users?
("I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code." - Emo Philips)
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.
Yeah, even posting anonymously on the internet your identity could probably still be found, given someone sufficiently motivated to find it.
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.
I think there is a distinction between saying stupid things, contributing to sensitive topics, and outright trolling which you're ignoring here. All three of them are things that I wouldn't want to be part of my permanent record, but:
* 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.
As an aside, is there any particular reason that the comment header (containing the commenter's username and other details) was designed to be grey and of the same text size as the actual comment body?
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 =(.
One thing I personally like about HN is that, in general, I can read the comment and form an opinion about it before I read who posted it. If the username was 'in your face' it would be harder to not let that colour your reading.
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.
The username being unemphasized is quite intentional - Reasoning being who cares who said something? If it's right it's right; if it's wrong, it's wrong.
"to become verified requires a simple step: add a link to your facebook, linkedin or xing profile ... Non-verified users then have a very minor voting hit"
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.
I disagree.I don't use any of the social networking sites. It would be bit crude to assume that the only way for me to be verified is belonging to a social-networking site.
I use my real name to keep myself accountable. It's not my full name, but it's enough for anybody who is interested to narrow it down in a few minutes.
Comments
I believe that the less anonymous a forum like this is, the more polite it will be. You have said you want people to speak to each other here as they would in the real world: well, I believe the more strongly you tie their real world identity to their account here, the more polite they would be.
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.
I'd like to register my strong disagreement with this notion.
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.
Don't you get it? Anonymous and non-anonymous comments have equal ranking. The point of my system is just to encourage most people to be non-anonymous. This means that the vast majority of comments will stay civil, and when most comments are civil, the tone will tend to stay that way. If you need to make commentary on drug policy or your salary, then simply make an anonymous account and say all you want to say. There is no penalty to that.
I somewhat agree, but you're neglecting the more interesting point: Anonymous posting makes trolling easier, yes, but it also allows for a highly fascinating form of discussion - one that is merit-blind[1].
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.)
That's of course an interesting point, but I don't think it would significantly change the way the discussions are currently held. That's because most people would not go clicking through every account before answering. See for example the cpercival putnam thread.
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.
> Don't you get it?
That was a fine example of what people have been complaining about recently.
(And you're not even anonymous! :-)
Ah, to be fair neither one of us took the time to fully explain our understanding of each other's points, and I sort of attacked with the disagreement phrasing when I could have only asked him what he thought of my issues.
I haven't found anonymity to be very well correlated with politeness on tech discussion forums I'm on. Some of the most abrasive ones are filled with people posting under their real names, and folks like rms, Theo De Raadt, Ulrich Drepper, and a bunch of the comp.lang.lisp crowd have no problem flaming you under their real names.
But that's real life. The goal is to make the conversation here equivalent to how people talk in real life, not be more polite than that.
In a way I understand what you're saying, but I feel our environment influences how we interact with each other-- anywhere. For example, rules can be added to give structure to a debate. The whole debate format, while artificial, exists to increase the utility of 'real life' discussion.
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.
Seems unnecessary considering some of the most thoughtful discussions come from throw-away accounts doing Tell\Ask HN. It could also exacerbate other issues: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
[ ie. comment upvotes co-vary with name of commenter instead of content communicated ]
That's why I believe there should be no real disadvantage to using an anonymous account, and no way of telling in the comments if a comment is anonymous or not. All it does is encourage people to link their real life account in a behind-the-scenes manner, which will raise the general discourse level.
> which will raise the general discourse level
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.
That's awfully rich coming from someone posting under a carefully-maintained pseudonym.
I was going to ask for some kind of evidence, but it seems I missed this episode: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1353050
So yeah, on the face of it that's some quite scummy behaviour.
That's quite a negative word about someone else on a thread about negative comments.
It's accurate though. Hopefully more people will take your comments about real world identities in context.
This is the same name as is on my id card, and has been for years now.
Out of friendly curiosity - what led you to change your official name? What are the steps to do that? (I have an awkward last name and am considering it).
It seems like you even changed your first name. How did it feel, how long did it take until your new name felt natural?
Changing your last name is a reasonably straightforward process in most countries, because women usually do it when they get married. The first name is a bit more difficult, but if you have appropriate and reasonable reasons, it can be changed.
As an anonymous user I actually kind of like your idea, but can you clarify whether you propose that being "verified" would mean your identity is available to everyone or just to other verified users?
("I was walking home one night and a guy hammering on a roof called me a paranoid little weirdo. In morse code." - Emo Philips)
It would be available to everyone and google, since the point is that what you say is forever linked to you on the internet.
> and google
> 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.
> I don't mind if you as a respected user of this site knows who I am. Google - forever and ever - not so much.
Unfortunately, you can't get the first without the second, as witness the leak of the "journolist" e-mails.
Agreed. If you don't want your presence to be known on the Internet, there's a very simple way to accomplish that.
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?
Yeah, even posting anonymously on the internet your identity could probably still be found, given someone sufficiently motivated to find it.
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.
I think there is a distinction between saying stupid things, contributing to sensitive topics, and outright trolling which you're ignoring here. All three of them are things that I wouldn't want to be part of my permanent record, but:
* 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.
As an aside, is there any particular reason that the comment header (containing the commenter's username and other details) was designed to be grey and of the same text size as the actual comment body?
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 =(.
One thing I personally like about HN is that, in general, I can read the comment and form an opinion about it before I read who posted it. If the username was 'in your face' it would be harder to not let that colour your reading.
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.
The username being unemphasized is quite intentional - Reasoning being who cares who said something? If it's right it's right; if it's wrong, it's wrong.
"to become verified requires a simple step: add a link to your facebook, linkedin or xing profile ... Non-verified users then have a very minor voting hit"
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.
I disagree.I don't use any of the social networking sites. It would be bit crude to assume that the only way for me to be verified is belonging to a social-networking site.
Please, no social networking verified user.
I use my real name to keep myself accountable. It's not my full name, but it's enough for anybody who is interested to narrow it down in a few minutes.