This may be a dumb idea, but how about requiring some minimum length of comment? Are there circumstances when someone legitimately should just use 8-10 words? I don't know what that minimum length would be though.
At least in this case if people want to be strident or acerbic, they have to work for it.
Another possibility would be to implement a waiting period before people have the opportunity to vote. This may help with the issue of newer members upvoting the one line witty comments. However, I am not sure if the short comments are necessarily negative. Should users be required to contribute exceptionally long and verbose posts without the benefit of shorter posts in between? From my own perspective, I tend to only skim over 'wall of text' comments if they do not engage my interests from the beginning so the intermingling of short comments with longer comments to me is not a bad thing. The voting up or down of comments from those that may be deemed inadequate to accurately judge the quality of the post (new members) seems to be more of an issue. These new users may vote based on their opinions (as I mentioned in another post) rather than on the quality of the arguments or information presented so a probation period may be the solution.
(I was going to include this as an edit to my previous post, but it really needs its own comment post.) I created a site with a Karma based system. The Karma was actually transferred from person to person, though. Everyone started with 0 Karma, and only the administrator could feed Karma into the system. The users could transfer to each other, but as they gave Karma they would lose Karma. A potential benefit is that the administrator can feed Karma into the system by rewarding people that contribute based on particular topics as chosen by the administrator. I am not sure if this would be a good idea for this site, but I am simply stating it to get the ideas flowing for other solutions. I really like the way the site operates even if there are potentials for abuse or inaccuracies.
Also, not related to the topic so much, I find it funny that I often see people say "I do not care about points." but are also the most likely people to make suggestions about new ways to implement the points system.
Another option would be to have a hidden karma impact on sorting. Keeping a hidden score based on the log(karma) of the up voters might dilute the impact of people until they have been around for a while and help maintain the current culture without ignoring new opinions.
I'm trying to make this a zingy one liner, because it wouldn't be such a good comeback unless it also fitted within the 8-10 words that the parent post was complaining about.
It is supposed to reference the idea that there isn't any intrinsic merit in verbosity, and that we often prize writing that is pared down and says only what it needs to - prose or code, and as a group prize languages that allow conciseness with joy going to Ruby, reverence to R and J, and fear and loathing to XML.
Particularly PG who has written more than once about Lisp and how it allows dense code to express a lot, so much so indeed that he reduced function creation to 'fn' in the language that backs this very site on which you are suggesting longer comments are the answer.
(See? Not so insightful, sharp and cool now, is it?)
It's not as sharp and cool, but it's equally insightful, and it provides a lot more material with which to actually have a conversation, rather than just shoot back a counter-opinion.
It's just this sort of zingy one-liner that hurts HN. You are playing into the cult of personality, your comment does little to further the discussion, and it's basically just an inside joke. Surprise, surprise... you have thirteen points at the time of this retort.
Instead, you should debate the merits of the idea. I was actually not so much advocating the idea as I was bringing it up for discussion - you can tell by the tone of my comment.
And, while I questioned myself for even bringing up the idea of a length requirement, your response makes me lean a little bit more towards the idea.
I am playing to the karma, which is one reason I advocate my suggestion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936306 where people could agree with my zing yet still bury my comment as a bad contribution.
When voting, I vote up for "interesting point", for "you put a lot of effort into this reply" and for "I agree" and "ha!". I feel conflicted downvoting a comment I like even if it's not contributory, and I don't want to upvote a comment I disagree with even if it's a good contribution. Split the two up so the conflict goes away.
You are playing into the cult of personality
It's what the site's design encourages - usernames are prominent, vote scores are prominent and tallied as the main measure of a person, popular comments get votes. Big thoughtful comments and deep discussion get squashed into nesting and pushed aside by the ever increasing flood of new submissions. "Furthering the discussion" as you put it ... what does this mean to you? Who is supposed to benefit and how, and does the site design encourage that?
I think furthering the discussion in this case means talking about the pros and cons of adding a comment length requirement.
Since the site owner pg is in on this thread, the community may benefit by Paul getting some feedback and ideas on how to improve the site.
The site's design does encourage conversation of course. Comments are threaded to encourage back-and-forth, and voting moderation promotes good comments and helps to keep the discussion civil.
I too like to get some karma, but I'll sometimes write something that I suspect may be down-voted (or even that I may not believe) just because I like to discuss things. Karma doesn't really matter on this site or affect your experience (other than being able to down-vote comments), and I think that fact encourages people not to treat it very seriously.
I think it would just end up with trolls pasting in Lorem Ipsum or something after their trollish comment. Having trash text in low quality comments might make them easier to identify as low quality and the need to post comments of a minimum length may possibly discourage some people from posting "zingers", but I don't feel it would be a net win overall.
I don't think so. I think the vast majority of users will down-vote and/or flag comments intentionally padded with nonsense.
I'd like to see a more sophisticated quality detection system - a learning text classifier of some sort. PG might have enough experience in that field of programming to come up with something useful along those lines.
Comments
This may be a dumb idea, but how about requiring some minimum length of comment? Are there circumstances when someone legitimately should just use 8-10 words? I don't know what that minimum length would be though.
At least in this case if people want to be strident or acerbic, they have to work for it.
I've thought of considering comment length in the sorting algorithm. There's definitely a correlation between length and quality.
Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.
Another possibility would be to implement a waiting period before people have the opportunity to vote. This may help with the issue of newer members upvoting the one line witty comments. However, I am not sure if the short comments are necessarily negative. Should users be required to contribute exceptionally long and verbose posts without the benefit of shorter posts in between? From my own perspective, I tend to only skim over 'wall of text' comments if they do not engage my interests from the beginning so the intermingling of short comments with longer comments to me is not a bad thing. The voting up or down of comments from those that may be deemed inadequate to accurately judge the quality of the post (new members) seems to be more of an issue. These new users may vote based on their opinions (as I mentioned in another post) rather than on the quality of the arguments or information presented so a probation period may be the solution.
Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.
I think you are onto something here.
(I was going to include this as an edit to my previous post, but it really needs its own comment post.) I created a site with a Karma based system. The Karma was actually transferred from person to person, though. Everyone started with 0 Karma, and only the administrator could feed Karma into the system. The users could transfer to each other, but as they gave Karma they would lose Karma. A potential benefit is that the administrator can feed Karma into the system by rewarding people that contribute based on particular topics as chosen by the administrator. I am not sure if this would be a good idea for this site, but I am simply stating it to get the ideas flowing for other solutions. I really like the way the site operates even if there are potentials for abuse or inaccuracies.
Also, not related to the topic so much, I find it funny that I often see people say "I do not care about points." but are also the most likely people to make suggestions about new ways to implement the points system.
Another option would be to have a hidden karma impact on sorting. Keeping a hidden score based on the log(karma) of the up voters might dilute the impact of people until they have been around for a while and help maintain the current culture without ignoring new opinions.
You advocate verbosity to the author of arc?
I'm trying to make this a zingy one liner, because it wouldn't be such a good comeback unless it also fitted within the 8-10 words that the parent post was complaining about.
It is supposed to reference the idea that there isn't any intrinsic merit in verbosity, and that we often prize writing that is pared down and says only what it needs to - prose or code, and as a group prize languages that allow conciseness with joy going to Ruby, reverence to R and J, and fear and loathing to XML.
Particularly PG who has written more than once about Lisp and how it allows dense code to express a lot, so much so indeed that he reduced function creation to 'fn' in the language that backs this very site on which you are suggesting longer comments are the answer.
(See? Not so insightful, sharp and cool now, is it?)
It's not as sharp and cool, but it's equally insightful, and it provides a lot more material with which to actually have a conversation, rather than just shoot back a counter-opinion.
It's just this sort of zingy one-liner that hurts HN. You are playing into the cult of personality, your comment does little to further the discussion, and it's basically just an inside joke. Surprise, surprise... you have thirteen points at the time of this retort.
Instead, you should debate the merits of the idea. I was actually not so much advocating the idea as I was bringing it up for discussion - you can tell by the tone of my comment. And, while I questioned myself for even bringing up the idea of a length requirement, your response makes me lean a little bit more towards the idea.
I am playing to the karma, which is one reason I advocate my suggestion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=936306 where people could agree with my zing yet still bury my comment as a bad contribution.
When voting, I vote up for "interesting point", for "you put a lot of effort into this reply" and for "I agree" and "ha!". I feel conflicted downvoting a comment I like even if it's not contributory, and I don't want to upvote a comment I disagree with even if it's a good contribution. Split the two up so the conflict goes away.
You are playing into the cult of personality
It's what the site's design encourages - usernames are prominent, vote scores are prominent and tallied as the main measure of a person, popular comments get votes. Big thoughtful comments and deep discussion get squashed into nesting and pushed aside by the ever increasing flood of new submissions. "Furthering the discussion" as you put it ... what does this mean to you? Who is supposed to benefit and how, and does the site design encourage that?
I think furthering the discussion in this case means talking about the pros and cons of adding a comment length requirement.
Since the site owner pg is in on this thread, the community may benefit by Paul getting some feedback and ideas on how to improve the site.
The site's design does encourage conversation of course. Comments are threaded to encourage back-and-forth, and voting moderation promotes good comments and helps to keep the discussion civil.
I too like to get some karma, but I'll sometimes write something that I suspect may be down-voted (or even that I may not believe) just because I like to discuss things. Karma doesn't really matter on this site or affect your experience (other than being able to down-vote comments), and I think that fact encourages people not to treat it very seriously.
I think it would just end up with trolls pasting in Lorem Ipsum or something after their trollish comment. Having trash text in low quality comments might make them easier to identify as low quality and the need to post comments of a minimum length may possibly discourage some people from posting "zingers", but I don't feel it would be a net win overall.
I don't think so. I think the vast majority of users will down-vote and/or flag comments intentionally padded with nonsense.
I'd like to see a more sophisticated quality detection system - a learning text classifier of some sort. PG might have enough experience in that field of programming to come up with something useful along those lines.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466373
The arcticle is blogspam. The right one is here.
Okay that took nine.