In the submitted article from February 2009, Paul Graham wrote,
"Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa.
"Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people, because they feel uncomfortably constrained in a place where they have to behave well. But this way of keeping them out is gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers."
Trying to set barriers to bad user behavior has been an ongoing problem.
In March 2011, pg wrote that Hacker News was still having user behavior problems, under the title "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?"
He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
So the founder of Hacker News thought then that there was a comment voting problem: (a) mean comments were getting too many upvotes, and (b) dumb comments were getting too many upvotes, and (c) too many of the comments that got the most upvotes were either mean or dumb or both. Let's stop and think about what that means. That means that, according to pg posting as of last year, two more years after the article submitted here, comment karma scores were often NOT reliable signals of good comments, comments worth finding rapidly when skimming a thread. So pg changed the Hacker News software a few days later so that comment karma scores were hidden from Hacker News readers (they are STILL visible to each person who makes a comment, on his or her own comments). You can check the scores of each of your own comments. We can all READ comments to see which comments are the good comments. (Better comments also tend in general to thread to the top of discussions, with some other rules also influencing that evaluation as "better.")
Checking the results of the software change involves empirical investigation. How do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list
look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than two years ago? Are there fewer dumb comments than two years ago? Are the comments that are "massively upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out?
In my observation, after 1345 days here, and rather active participation on Hacker News, the comments have improved both in the threads I post in and in the threads I only lurk in. Occasional checks of the best comments page STILL reveal a lot of high-ranked comments that consist of one-liner jokes or whining about something, so the signal provided by upvotes still isn't perfect, but looking at the average comment karma score of some users I've been following for years suggests that comment karma is better allocated now than it was two years ago, which as I said is also my impression when I look at particular threads under submitted stories. There may be some more changes yet to make, but Hacker News has scaled up some more and still managed to emphasize quality of comments, which is not an easy thing to do.
Perhaps subjectively this change did improve the comment quality a bit, I still see plenty of ongoing examples of the problem though. What I'd like to see is the actual removal of karma (at least comment karma) from the user profiles as well.
I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I do realize there is a bit of a feedback system in place (upvotes tell you you're doing the right thing, downvotes suggest you should change your tack). So perhaps you can still see the overall direction of your comment (like the current gray for downvotes).
Obviously voting should still stick around so people can bump the best comments to the top of a thread, but any sort of visible scoring system on comments seems more likely to work against it's own intent than for it.
Comment karma can provide constructive feedback to the comment's author. Often, but not always, a downvoted comment indicates that my point was not made clearly or that there were gratuitous remarks within the comment whose removal would improve the tone of the comment overall. Of course, sometimes comments are just downvoted because someone disagrees or because I intentionally was snarky.
Likewise, upvotes indicate that I have captured a portion of my audience's attention. Often this is because of some minor insight or extension of the conversation, though certainly on occasion I have been rewarded for snark.
In general, gamification is a viable system for influencing user behavior, and if only submissions were rewarded with karma, a great deal of undesirable behavior would be encouraged. The current system helps new HN'ers learn the ropes.
I think that it isn't about incentivizing intelligent thoughtful conversation but rather disincentivizing the dumb or mean comments. People dislike losing karma a lot more than they like to gain karma. What pg observes in his article on Trolls[1], written a year before this one, is that controversial ideas which are modded down tend to be stubbornly left up while the wisecracks which are modded down tend to be deleted because there is less invested in them.
I try to make it a point to downvote any dumb/mean comments I see, even if I completely agree with the sentiment. If it's particularly mean or inflammatory, I'll also flag it.
Unfortunately, sometimes people sabotage that effort by upvoting said dumb/mean comments. I'd like to see a disincentive applied to those upvotes somehow. Like, perhaps, if a comment is flagged to death, deleted by a moderator, or results in a hellbanning, everyone who upvoted it should get a karma ding and a "please don't upvote mean or dumb comments like [quote of comment]" message.
(commenting from my high-karma account, to avoid the green-user stigma)
I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful
conversation, no one actually does it for karma.
I comment to grind karma points. There's a fairly linear relationship between comment length and score, my best comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3705599https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218642) are essentially small blog posts, requiring research, links, several drafts and extensive revision. If it wasn't for karma, I wouldn't go to the effort.
So what do you fell that karma "earns you" that makes it worth the effort? Is it something intrinsic to karma, or something about what you think karma says about you to others? If the latter, then do you think karma is the best way to deliver that value?
I still have the urge to grind karma, though I've passed the limit for downvoting. The reason is that I remember when the downvote karma threshold was raised from 250 to 500 karma, a year or two ago. I'm worried that in a year or three, PG will raise the limit again, and I'll be unable to downvote again. So karma remains an effective motivator - though I kind of resent that I don't know whether my further karma generation will ever pay off. I would feel better if PG had an official formula or schedule for the inflation of downvote thresholds, or if he said that the threshold will stay the same for the foreseeable future.
I'll share my own subjective observation - I feel that the overall "quality" of comments has remained high, at least in terms of writing quality and persuading arguments. That is to say, I don't often see many "dumb" comments ranked highly.
However, I have noticed lately that the highest ranked comments are almost always those which vehemently disagree with the author of the original post. I seem to see fewer comments that begin with "The author makes some great points, but he may not have considered..." or "This was a great project, the author should consider expanding it by trying..." More often, I see comments that are cynical and dismissive of the author's points. While a healthy dose of cynicism is necessary, and I love hearing both sides of the story, some of these comments definitely lean a little closer to the "mean" side of the spectrum.
I suspect that this is a subtle side-effect of not being able to see vote counts, that somehow results in fewer votes being cast by those with neutral or positive opinions, but I'm not quite sure why.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your previous karma and/or average counts more nowadays e.g. a comment on the bestcomment list might not be the top comment on the story page.
Comments
In the submitted article from February 2009, Paul Graham wrote,
"Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa.
"Though of course forbidding bad behavior does tend to keep away bad people, because they feel uncomfortably constrained in a place where they have to behave well. But this way of keeping them out is gentler and probably also more effective than overt barriers."
Trying to set barriers to bad user behavior has been an ongoing problem.
In March 2011, pg wrote that Hacker News was still having user behavior problems, under the title "Ask HN: How to stave off decline of HN?"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696
He wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."
So the founder of Hacker News thought then that there was a comment voting problem: (a) mean comments were getting too many upvotes, and (b) dumb comments were getting too many upvotes, and (c) too many of the comments that got the most upvotes were either mean or dumb or both. Let's stop and think about what that means. That means that, according to pg posting as of last year, two more years after the article submitted here, comment karma scores were often NOT reliable signals of good comments, comments worth finding rapidly when skimming a thread. So pg changed the Hacker News software a few days later so that comment karma scores were hidden from Hacker News readers (they are STILL visible to each person who makes a comment, on his or her own comments). You can check the scores of each of your own comments. We can all READ comments to see which comments are the good comments. (Better comments also tend in general to thread to the top of discussions, with some other rules also influencing that evaluation as "better.")
Checking the results of the software change involves empirical investigation. How do the highest-voted comments visible in the bestcomments list
http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments
look to all of you recently? Are there fewer mean comments than two years ago? Are there fewer dumb comments than two years ago? Are the comments that are "massively upvoted" since the experiment began mostly comments that are reasonably kind and well-informed, helpful comments on the whole? In most of the treads you visit, do helpful, thoughtful comments seem to rise to a position of prominence, while mean or dumb comments gray out?
In my observation, after 1345 days here, and rather active participation on Hacker News, the comments have improved both in the threads I post in and in the threads I only lurk in. Occasional checks of the best comments page STILL reveal a lot of high-ranked comments that consist of one-liner jokes or whining about something, so the signal provided by upvotes still isn't perfect, but looking at the average comment karma score of some users I've been following for years suggests that comment karma is better allocated now than it was two years ago, which as I said is also my impression when I look at particular threads under submitted stories. There may be some more changes yet to make, but Hacker News has scaled up some more and still managed to emphasize quality of comments, which is not an easy thing to do.
Perhaps subjectively this change did improve the comment quality a bit, I still see plenty of ongoing examples of the problem though. What I'd like to see is the actual removal of karma (at least comment karma) from the user profiles as well.
I see no good reason to incentivize intelligent thoughtful conversation, no one actually does it for karma. I do realize there is a bit of a feedback system in place (upvotes tell you you're doing the right thing, downvotes suggest you should change your tack). So perhaps you can still see the overall direction of your comment (like the current gray for downvotes).
Obviously voting should still stick around so people can bump the best comments to the top of a thread, but any sort of visible scoring system on comments seems more likely to work against it's own intent than for it.
Comment karma can provide constructive feedback to the comment's author. Often, but not always, a downvoted comment indicates that my point was not made clearly or that there were gratuitous remarks within the comment whose removal would improve the tone of the comment overall. Of course, sometimes comments are just downvoted because someone disagrees or because I intentionally was snarky.
Likewise, upvotes indicate that I have captured a portion of my audience's attention. Often this is because of some minor insight or extension of the conversation, though certainly on occasion I have been rewarded for snark.
In general, gamification is a viable system for influencing user behavior, and if only submissions were rewarded with karma, a great deal of undesirable behavior would be encouraged. The current system helps new HN'ers learn the ropes.
I think that it isn't about incentivizing intelligent thoughtful conversation but rather disincentivizing the dumb or mean comments. People dislike losing karma a lot more than they like to gain karma. What pg observes in his article on Trolls[1], written a year before this one, is that controversial ideas which are modded down tend to be stubbornly left up while the wisecracks which are modded down tend to be deleted because there is less invested in them.
[1]http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html
I try to make it a point to downvote any dumb/mean comments I see, even if I completely agree with the sentiment. If it's particularly mean or inflammatory, I'll also flag it.
Unfortunately, sometimes people sabotage that effort by upvoting said dumb/mean comments. I'd like to see a disincentive applied to those upvotes somehow. Like, perhaps, if a comment is flagged to death, deleted by a moderator, or results in a hellbanning, everyone who upvoted it should get a karma ding and a "please don't upvote mean or dumb comments like [quote of comment]" message.
(commenting from my high-karma account, to avoid the green-user stigma)
I comment to grind karma points. There's a fairly linear relationship between comment length and score, my best comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3705599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218642) are essentially small blog posts, requiring research, links, several drafts and extensive revision. If it wasn't for karma, I wouldn't go to the effort.So what do you fell that karma "earns you" that makes it worth the effort? Is it something intrinsic to karma, or something about what you think karma says about you to others? If the latter, then do you think karma is the best way to deliver that value?
Brand new accounts can't flag posts (~200 karma) or downvote comments. (~2000 karma) Once I hit those thresholds, the urge to grind goes away.
I still have the urge to grind karma, though I've passed the limit for downvoting. The reason is that I remember when the downvote karma threshold was raised from 250 to 500 karma, a year or two ago. I'm worried that in a year or three, PG will raise the limit again, and I'll be unable to downvote again. So karma remains an effective motivator - though I kind of resent that I don't know whether my further karma generation will ever pay off. I would feel better if PG had an official formula or schedule for the inflation of downvote thresholds, or if he said that the threshold will stay the same for the foreseeable future.
Downvoting seems to be enabled around the 500 mark. At least for me.
Also, I just noticed the flag option for the first time. Thanks for pointing that out.
Yes, downvoting was enabled for me, too, after I passed 500 karma points (reached 501 points) on 2012-06-09, a month and a half ago.
I'll share my own subjective observation - I feel that the overall "quality" of comments has remained high, at least in terms of writing quality and persuading arguments. That is to say, I don't often see many "dumb" comments ranked highly.
However, I have noticed lately that the highest ranked comments are almost always those which vehemently disagree with the author of the original post. I seem to see fewer comments that begin with "The author makes some great points, but he may not have considered..." or "This was a great project, the author should consider expanding it by trying..." More often, I see comments that are cynical and dismissive of the author's points. While a healthy dose of cynicism is necessary, and I love hearing both sides of the story, some of these comments definitely lean a little closer to the "mean" side of the spectrum.
I suspect that this is a subtle side-effect of not being able to see vote counts, that somehow results in fewer votes being cast by those with neutral or positive opinions, but I'm not quite sure why.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your previous karma and/or average counts more nowadays e.g. a comment on the bestcomment list might not be the top comment on the story page.