1) The easiest thing you can do is have a friendly reminder about what is and what is not acceptable to post right next to the comment textbox. When I was in grad school they used to remind students of the honor code before each and every test, and apparently it reduced problematic behavior.
2) Posters in heated conversations care more about advancing their view than keeping HN civil. You can't rely on the downvote system, because mean comments that advance the "right" view will be upvoted regardless. You can't call them out, because your thread will be one of many, and the damage is already done by the time the comment is read.
They simply need to be deleted, and I don't see much deletion on HN.
3) there is a 99.9% chance a post is spam if it broadly criticizes the behavior of HN as opposed to the person they are replying to. These posts should also be removed.
4) For every topic of political contention, there is a group of people that ONLY post about that topic. These people should be monitored closely. I don't consider these posters to be participating in good faith--this is (or should be) a community of tech people that occasionally talks politics. So if you only post about a particular political issue, and never about any technology-related topics, one wonders if you are there just to advance your political viewpoint. As an aside, these posters mostly come out of the woodwork for gender-related topics, which I think are consistently the worst category on HN in terms of comment quality.
5) we need a clearer idea of what is and what is not acceptable on HN. Honestly I want to flag most of the political stories. I hate them. But I don't, because I am afraid of losing the feature.
6) ignore people who whine about censorship. There are a ton of other forums they can post on.
7) a more radical idea that I am less sure about: remove all political stories, and make politics.ycombinator.com. The twist: make membership invite-only. If someone is uncivil then it reflects poorly on the person who invited them. This is, as far as I can tell, the only effective solution to stopping uncivil discourse. When tensions are high, any amount of incivility can trigger another user. The only way to stop this problem generally is to stop it completely, there is no half way.
EDIT: to be completely clear: this advice really only applies to topics where the posters on each side have what can only be described as religious devotion to their point of view. Civil discussion requires humility, and there is rarely humility in political discussions.
Thank you for taking the time to make this highly thoughtful reply, which at first sight looks excellent. I'm going to need time to re-read it and reflect on it.
Remember how that worked out with deleting pages on programming languages from wikipedia ?
EDIT: My point was to say that the same might happen to dang, we all know his identity, his email address. So, "careful with the axe Eugene". Over enthusiastic deletion, whether be it in good faith or otherwise (frankly, faith is irrelevant as far as content moderation is concerned), is often not a solution. As you probably know from your own experience, it often exacerbates the problem, Streisand effect and all that. I was surprised that you suggested the exact same style of intervention knowing how it turned out for yourself. See, someone downvoted this comment within minutes and its greyed out. This works a lot better. BTW "were terrible.... and likely unvisited" is a personal opinion and not widely shared. So in the end what have we learned from the experience ? same old (Ha! Floyd again)
Appreciate your comment. I was unsure how you would take it and lest it spirals into a long nested and heated thread I responded by editing my post. I just hate long inflamed nested threads.
One thing I would urge you to think about is that one man's conviction of what is right can become another man's "unreasonable demands" and "god given rights". One man's action in good faith may seem like actions of a troll to another. I see that in a previous comment you mentioned "humility", yes that is very important, note that it might be in conflict with "staying strong". As much as I listen to my own voice, I try to listen carefully to others even when their opinions are very different from mine. It is important to temper/question one's convictions, especially so when used to execute potentially inflammatory actions that are not easily reversible. If this comes out as preachy I apologize, its just something that works for me.
also, I think you're trying to harass me.
Well, then I have to write better, that is in my control, perception, on the other hand, is unfortunately not something that I can control.
Comments
I run a large community. Here are my opinions:
1) The easiest thing you can do is have a friendly reminder about what is and what is not acceptable to post right next to the comment textbox. When I was in grad school they used to remind students of the honor code before each and every test, and apparently it reduced problematic behavior.
2) Posters in heated conversations care more about advancing their view than keeping HN civil. You can't rely on the downvote system, because mean comments that advance the "right" view will be upvoted regardless. You can't call them out, because your thread will be one of many, and the damage is already done by the time the comment is read.
They simply need to be deleted, and I don't see much deletion on HN.
3) there is a 99.9% chance a post is spam if it broadly criticizes the behavior of HN as opposed to the person they are replying to. These posts should also be removed.
4) For every topic of political contention, there is a group of people that ONLY post about that topic. These people should be monitored closely. I don't consider these posters to be participating in good faith--this is (or should be) a community of tech people that occasionally talks politics. So if you only post about a particular political issue, and never about any technology-related topics, one wonders if you are there just to advance your political viewpoint. As an aside, these posters mostly come out of the woodwork for gender-related topics, which I think are consistently the worst category on HN in terms of comment quality.
5) we need a clearer idea of what is and what is not acceptable on HN. Honestly I want to flag most of the political stories. I hate them. But I don't, because I am afraid of losing the feature.
6) ignore people who whine about censorship. There are a ton of other forums they can post on.
7) a more radical idea that I am less sure about: remove all political stories, and make politics.ycombinator.com. The twist: make membership invite-only. If someone is uncivil then it reflects poorly on the person who invited them. This is, as far as I can tell, the only effective solution to stopping uncivil discourse. When tensions are high, any amount of incivility can trigger another user. The only way to stop this problem generally is to stop it completely, there is no half way.
EDIT: to be completely clear: this advice really only applies to topics where the posters on each side have what can only be described as religious devotion to their point of view. Civil discussion requires humility, and there is rarely humility in political discussions.
Thank you for taking the time to make this highly thoughtful reply, which at first sight looks excellent. I'm going to need time to re-read it and reflect on it.
Remember how that worked out with deleting pages on programming languages from wikipedia ?
EDIT: My point was to say that the same might happen to dang, we all know his identity, his email address. So, "careful with the axe Eugene". Over enthusiastic deletion, whether be it in good faith or otherwise (frankly, faith is irrelevant as far as content moderation is concerned), is often not a solution. As you probably know from your own experience, it often exacerbates the problem, Streisand effect and all that. I was surprised that you suggested the exact same style of intervention knowing how it turned out for yourself. See, someone downvoted this comment within minutes and its greyed out. This works a lot better. BTW "were terrible.... and likely unvisited" is a personal opinion and not widely shared. So in the end what have we learned from the experience ? same old (Ha! Floyd again)
[deleted]
Appreciate your comment. I was unsure how you would take it and lest it spirals into a long nested and heated thread I responded by editing my post. I just hate long inflamed nested threads.
One thing I would urge you to think about is that one man's conviction of what is right can become another man's "unreasonable demands" and "god given rights". One man's action in good faith may seem like actions of a troll to another. I see that in a previous comment you mentioned "humility", yes that is very important, note that it might be in conflict with "staying strong". As much as I listen to my own voice, I try to listen carefully to others even when their opinions are very different from mine. It is important to temper/question one's convictions, especially so when used to execute potentially inflammatory actions that are not easily reversible. If this comes out as preachy I apologize, its just something that works for me.
Well, then I have to write better, that is in my control, perception, on the other hand, is unfortunately not something that I can control.