I don't know how to explain it, but I'd almost rather the flag options be worded as "Sorry, this comment seems: uncivil" or "Sorry, this comment seems: off-topic" to lighten it a bit. If they were a friend in real life, I'd take them aside and say "hey man, that comment was great, but you might want to soften the tone. It kind of came across as rude."

Downvotes end up being seen as judgments of your ideas, and I would love to be able to provide better feedback. This would be great if this could somehow give the user a nudge that they wouldn't feel defensive about.

It may seem like a minor point, but I feel a little guidance would go a long way in helping users get the sort of social cues they already get in a real-life conversation.

Edit: Instead of calling it out as flagging, I'd be okay with a downvote system that simply/optionally let you specify a reason to provide (with 3-4 common nicely-worded options). I don't care about upvote reasons at all.

I don't want to waste valuable time figuring out exactly how sure I am that a particular title is bad, or how polite I should be, or whether or not I should take advantage of this high-bandwidth feedback mechanism to start some kind of conversation.

Learn the design lesson of Twitter: More degrees of freedom doesn't necessarily help.

I think this is a GREAT idea if it uses pre-selected phrases to convey specific / useful info to the author.

Given those two prerequisites, I think it's a great idea.

I'd hate for people to abuse the anonymous nature of it sometimes and be rude-- we haven't had any "private" messaging so far on HN, so this would open a little of that world for moderators to think about.

Yes, it would definitely be a good idea, if private comments attached to flags are implemented, to say explicitly that moderators/curators are allowed to view all of them.

A few other thoughts:

Would it be helpful have 1 word positive and negative flags like: offtopic, uncivil, helpful, insightful, inspiring, trolling, etc...? That way, positive as well as negative behavior could be reinforced.

Would it be helpful to have a delay in how soon the flag shows up. So much online discussion get's aggravated people get angry at getting downvoted, flagged, etc... and then they quickly flame back. If there was a delay in when the flags showed up, would it decrease people's tendency to post "why did I just get downmodded" an hour later.

I have enough spam and distraction in my life.

I've seen many perfectly-civilized comments being downvoted, presumably, because they are controversial, though I have seen others that deserve downvotes because of their nature.

The way I see it, replacing downvotes with a comment flagging system would probably reduce the amount rude comments because they'd probably be killed soon enough. However, it eliminates the penalty of being rude (a drop in karma), and some visible way of penalization must be put in place for it to be effective in deterring users from being rude. A work around might be that for every killed comment (due to numerous flags) a user gets -5 or -10 karma.

Things would behave differently with posts, but these are just my first thoughts (when it comes to commenting).

I bookmarked this HN comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

a while ago, because it expressed the view of pg in an earlier era of HN that "it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

But it's interesting to see pg opening up today's discussion of new, more nuanced, flags, and that would change the core meaning of a downvote. I'm all for learning a new system of flagging and voting if that helps encourage a thoughtful community.

I don't think users should be penalized for siding with one aspect of an discussion just because other users disagree and proceed to downvote based on their own personal opinion. It's not even the best way of determining majority (which I believe is, partly, the purpose of the system), since not every user makes use of the feature.

Some sort of hybrid might be the most comprehensive solution. Probably something along the lines of upvotes raise karma (compensating good input), downvotes don't affect karma (their purpose becomes, then, to provide insight on the general opinion of a subject), and flags affect karma negatively for rude or uncivilized comments.

Perhaps this is no longer true?

Regardless, the fact the downvoting is just as easy as upvoting (and has no undo) strikes me as odd.

I suggest downvoting cost the voter something, not just the votee. 1:1 seems simple enough. It would also give greater pause to newer users than veterans. However, an undo (perhaps timed like comment editing) would be more desirable in this case.

Regardless of the original purpose, I think that fomenting conversation should be one of the most prominent ideas behind the whole karma deal. The comments and the conversations are what make HN different (and, of course, demographics, which consequently means that the comments of this given demographic, self-targeted, is what makes HN great), and I know many concur with that statement.

I also routinely upvote comments I disagree with but find well-reasoned nonetheless. Especially if they are unusually difficult for me to refute.

1) Help with search if it is ever implemented

2) Allow users to quickly disseminate the subject of articles on the front page without ever opening them (especially helpful for ambiguous titles)

3) Maybe in the future allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe to certain tags if the front page starts getting too busy

Agree/disagree would only be tallied inline at the comment for reference -- there's no persistent reward for simply saying things many people agree with, nor penalty for saying unpopular things.

Then, it's OK for downvotes to serve the role this "more flags" idea does. Downvotes then unambiguously mean: uncivil; frivolous; factually wrong; repetitive; unwanted. (And, moderators could focus on highly-downvoted comments as much as 'flags'.)

(Previous comment, with more backlinks, on this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=721853 )

Another related idea: never show a comment at 'maximum negative' score to a person who hasn't yet voted. Show it as '-3' instead (no matter how many net downvotes it's received). Then, there's always a motivation for adding your own independent judgement. (Once they vote, the true-but-truncated-to-range score can be shown.)

The poster could see the 'true' score, so they know if they've really touched a nerve.

I think gojomo is 100% right that people should be rewarded for constructive informative civil contributions, rather than because the moderator happens to agree with you.

An agree/disagree arrow could be left simply as a honeypot, so that people don't use the other descriptive ratings as a substitute for agreement/disagreement.

People want to register their opinion -- and sometimes that opinion is just yes/no. It's good for a site to offer a low-effort, low-visual-pollution way to capture that -- single click votes/favorites/likes work well for that. (It's better than lots of 'me too' or 'I disagree' or 'my thoughts exactly' micro-comments.)

But, if those signals are mixed with a sense of righteousness/transgression -- which is inevitable with leaderboards and display rules whereby 'high-rated' comments move up, and 'low-rated' comments fade from view -- then people may withhold unpopular but important viewpoints, or be tempted to race to be the first to post a banal but crowd-pleasing viewpoint.

My theory could be wrong. Some people might care so much about agreement that they obsess over that score, and knowing exactly how many people agree/disagree would then cause even more synchronization-of-publicly-expressed-views. But I think this crowd is sophisticated enough to draw (and make use of) the distinction between a bad comment and a controversial minority viewpoint.

And I would like to be in a place where someone who advances a controversial minority viewpoint, but does so in an articulate, thought-provoking, civil manner, could be on the leaderboard even if every individual post of theirs has more net disagreement than agreement.

(Which brings up a related point: it would be interesting to report an agree/disagree axis as two totals, not just the net difference. '101 agree, 100 disagree' is more meaningful than a net score of '+1'. A sparkline bar graph or tick-series could work really well for this, though it might not need to appear on every comment, or appear until requested.)

Here are some relevant links:

http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-s...

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

http://blog.linkibol.com/post/How-to-Build-a-Popularity-Algo...

Digg also has a way to rank comments by "controversy", so the comments that are most contested by up and down votes are placed at the top: http://about.digg.com/blog/new-comments-system-released

Over time those few downvotes are almost always balanced by the rest of HN.

Except for 'controversial' subjects, there anything can happen.

If you want to avoid being downvoted completely the easiest way is to avoid such subjects, specifically anything mentioning Ayn Rand, the glory of Capitalism, religion and emacs ;)

People are familiar with the "like" concept, so such a move would be intuitive to a lot of users. It would also ease the difficulty in understanding the voting system.

I tried not displaying points on comments a while ago, in order to solve this problem, but users complained that this made HN harder to read because they couldn't pick out the good comments. I only gave it two days' trial though. Maybe I should have given it more time. Or maybe there is some other solution.

Anyone have any ideas?

The only way to fix this I can see is either some form of meta-moderation where you hold people accountable for their votes (ala slashdot), or the system I'd personally rather see, where rather than a full-democracy the users pick whose votes they see on comments. I'd have my pool of 20-30 users whom I trust and I could see their scores vs the throng's.

Just as you hand-picked some users as moderators who you feel represent what you want HN to be, let us pick who we want to serve as our content filters.

It's a very interesting idea to have users see only the votes of other users they choose. One problem though is that it could easily lead to leaking who voted for what, which would make a lot of users (including me) uncomfortable. E.g. your pool is your 7 coworkers, and user x. One day you know all your coworkers are on a plane, and that you're therefore seeing user x's votes. Another problem is that it could be a lot more expensive to generate pages.

My original thinking was to suggest a combination of enforcing a minimum number of trusted users and then reporting a weighted average of your trusted users + the mass' rating but your solution is conceptually nicer since it adds the same noise to the vote but while extending the idea of valuing a particular user's judgement.

The big technical issue will be computing these "trusted ratings" for every comment. The trust graph could be done asynchronously so that wouldn't be an issue.

Not showing any points above 5 (or 10 or whatever), while still having an internal counter might also help.

A trust system maybe. "I trust this user. So anything he put down as interesting I want marked as interesting."

Another idea I have is to require a reason for the downvote. Reasons could include: disagreement, uncivil, or offtopic. The score could be affected according to the reason. This could make downvoting more thoughtful and scores could be impacted less for disagreement.

Last idea: Instead of hiding all scores. Only hide the score for items with a score less than or equal to 1. These scores have less relevance and I think people will be less critical of comments if they don't see a negative score attached.

People would really need to evaluate each comment accordingly, knowing that each vote could potentially change a parents position on the page. This could entice people to use votes to steer the conversation towards the intellectually gratifying that they want further discussed, as opposed to just things they casually 'agree' with.

There will always be a majority opinion, which gets expressed through votes. As HN gets above a certain threshold of active users, the majority opinion will be indistinguishable from 'mob voting', unless users can be trained to not vote when the vote is already high in 'their' direction.

I don't think a 'honey pot' agree/disagree voting axis will work, unless it is visible to everyone. Otherwise, these users will express their opinion with the current up/down votes.

Another possibility is to make the flag threshold higher but make the flags non anonymous(That might create a hostile environment though, e.g. tit-for-tat retaliation but I would hope this environment is mature enough for a frank discussion.)

Are you thinking of adding more flags to stories too?

dupe terrible-title spam-site not-even-arguably-hacker-related

I'd go so far as including a "meta" checkbox next to the reply button, defaulting to the parent's value, which it would be considered polite to set truthfully, but maybe that's just me.

There are a handful of users that seem to only submit from 1 or 2 sites that (I presume) they are affiliated with. This is just more noise that makes skimming the /new page and promoting good stories less efficient than it could be.

Regarding titles... What about a title/subtitle option? Keep whatever title the actual article has, and a slightly smaller subtitle where the submitter can editorialize.

Flags are a good idea too. The HN feature set is still minimal and polished compared to other similar sites. So the community is really sensitive to any changes. From seeing previous feature experiments I think the only way to really see if it works is to implement it and get feedback. I remember some previous features that seemed like they would be great(!) when they were written up and first implemented. Then after a few hours or days were frustrating. Like the orange vs greys karma change.

Ideally the system will train new users. It has been difficult in the past for me to figure out exactly what downvotes meant.

Over the last few months I'm seeing a rise in ad-hominem attacks. No matter what the subject of the article, technology, startups, history, whatever -- it seems like within minutes somebody has called the author's reputation or the news source into question. Sometimes the information is pertinent, but most always it's just an effort to look superior and/or take easy shots at people. If I remember correctly, we've even had posts about "check out my startup" where the founders were trashed, not to mention the nastiness with Dennis a while back.

I don't think downvoting is sinking in with the people who are doing this. As much as most people don't understand ad-hominem attacks, it'd still be good to have that flag, because it's the same old discussion every time.

EDIT: I meant Dustin, not Dennis. Sorry about that Dustin.

If anyone has any more general suggestions for solving the nastiness problem, besides these new types of flag, I'm all ears.

I had no idea. AFAIC, this is the best site on the internet. It is the home many of us have been seeking for years. I talk about things here that I have no one to talk to in person and I imagine there are many others like me.

I have also noticed that things run in cycles and we seem to be in a bit of a trough lately. My usual response has been either to submit lots of stuff I really like, or just quit and come back the next day. That often works wonders.

Whether we like it or not, it is the nature of this site for people to show others how smart they are. That's just the way we are and this is the perfect place to "show off" (for a lot of us, it may be the only place). Many of us never really fit in, didn't play sports, weren't "cool", and didn't get noticed by the ladies as much as we would have liked. But we had passion for other things, exactly the things discussed here at hn.

So the nerdosterone runs heavy at times. Accompanied unfortunately by occasional meanness.

But I am determined not to let HN go down without a fight.

You won't need a fight. Just a little of what we do best: some good old fashioned problem solving.

A couple of ideas:

- Stop the meanness before it hits the data base with a front end "meanness" filter. When you click "reply", scan the text for cuss words and frequent phrases and give a warning, "Your comment has triggered the meanness filter because of the phrase "xxx". Please take this opportunity to reword it. Say what you want, but please be civil." They could modify it or submit the original anyway, but have to wait a "cooloff" x seconds or minutes. This could easily be gamed, but that's not the point. It would actively establish the expected tone, especially for new people.

- Weigh votes by karma. The top 100 get 3 points per vote. The next 1000 get 2 points per votes. Everyone else gets the usual one point per vote. The idea is that those who have the most invested in the community would be more able to slow down out-of-control group think.

Another thought... What if we could filter out users who's comment we didn't want to read or we felt were offensive or a waste of time? This would reduce the noise for indivudual users without anything so draconian or subjective as flagging plus moderation.

Another less-pleasent thought is more aggressive banning policies. I remember being part of older BB-esque forums that managed to maintain strong communities by enlisting members as moderators and enforcing strict and clearly promulgated discussion policies. It worked because it was transparent and because the enforcers were active members of the community. They had reputations and interest in keeping the quality of discussions high and are bound by the same rules that apply to everyone else. If need be, their rullings could be appealed if they were abusing their authority. I always felt that that system worked.

Even if you can find some effective filters to use, most may eventually be worked around by commenters as you are implying. But they could give you more breathing room to find long-term solutions, and may help in that effort by increasing your awareness of what exactly the problems are.

Hear. Hear. HN is also my favorite general access site. (I am a member of an organization that has members-only email lists that are very, very good, but I still find things here that I share with them.)

The guidelines mention "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" as being on topic here, and I am deeply curious, having been an online moderator in various places since 1992, about how to keep an open online community civil and informative. My friendly advice to pg is to stay in the fight and don't give up. It may take a heavier hand in moderation of both comments and persons, aided by some of the crowdsourcing technical means being discussed in this thread, but HN has participants who cherish what HN is and who will be glad to help.

Along a similar idea, I once started work (and since abandoned it) on a social news site where the idea was to auto-partition all the users into Dunbar's Number-sized buckets based on their commenting style. You could still see everything if you wanted, but you'd be placed into a "swarm" of people whom you'd get to know better than general population. So assholes would end up in asshole swarms, spammers in spam swarms, etc.

I've lost that sense of camaraderie here in the past year. I find myself contributing less to the discussions, and I certainly don't submit near as much as I used to. I still lurk a lot, but I don't recognize a lot of the current users and I have no sense of personal attachement to most people here aside from the friends I've made over the last couple of years here. I imagine it's the same with a lot of other users.

If users could somehow be herded or segmented into smaller groups, that the sense of familiarity, community, and camaraderie might be able to continue in the discussions while a site scales. I don't know if it's necessarily a function of what limits, permissions or abilities that would be placed on individuals within the smaller groups, however. In meat space, an individual's actions and interactions change dramatically depending on group size. I suspect that similar forces work online, too.

The question is, how do you segment the community into smaller groups or swarms? I actually think that this can be acheived using recommendations. I have a hypothesis that I want to test. My hypothesis is that if reddit had succeeded in their recommendation engine, there would not have been a need for Hacker News. Why? Because those of us early reddit readers who were interested in hacking and founding would have remained somewhat clustered together automatically via article recommendations. We wouldn't have gotten irritated at the trolls and left. We would still be reading and commenting together on similar articles. All the while, the site could grow, and the users that were heavily intersted in politics, religion/atheism, zombies, etc... would have been ushered together via common recommendations as well. I'm looking forward to testing this hypothesis with http://newsley.com if and when I can get enough users to start doing recommendations.

I think this is the source of all politeness/nastiness (both here on HN and in real life). It's hard to be gratuitously rude to someone you know personally... it's hard to even be passive aggressive.

Now that HN is bigger, it is by default more anonymous. It is less a group of friends sharing links as it is a public forum. Where insulting someone used to be equivalent to saying it to their face, it's now more akin to heckling from the stands.

I too have been coming here less and less. I came to HN for the discussion... the links were only secondary to me. Often the best discussions came out of mediocre links. But now I feel like all I see is catfights between minor programming stars, people debating whether relational databases are really dead, and the latest scandal involving rackspace/twitter/zygna/facebook. All of that stuff is destructive. It's all just churning the muck of the internet... and more importantly, doesn't make you a better person for having read it.

We used to laugh whenever the front page would fill with Erlang articles. Even when things were 'that bad' ... they weren't really that bad because the discussion was still insightful. I'm really not trying to sound like one of those 'back in the good old days' people, but I'm starting to become skeptical about the value of coming here.

A user could belong to multiple swarms. People who don't feel like they belong in a swarm could leave (or be forcibly voted out by the group) and join another. When swarms get too big (above, say 150-200) they could splinter into smaller ones.

In practice, each swarm would have their own stories and comment threads. e.g. Swarm 'A' hates TechCrunch stories and always votes them down, Swarm 'B' feels that the people in Swarm 'A' are uncivil, Swarm 'C' just loves to make jokes about everything, Swarm 'D' is extremely priggish and has very strict rules about what types of stories should be posted.

A user could choose to experience the raw unfiltered site, or just stick to swarms where he or she mostly knows everyone else. We intended to use voting and tagging statistics to suggest swarms in which an unattached user might feel like they belong.

Dunbar's Number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) was the inspiration.

Treating nasty users is a simple and well-known problem: find out the user's disposition before you release their commenting privilege. Usually you'd put all the user's writings into a moderation queue, and only post them up (and retroactively make those moderated posts appear) if their average moderation score exceeded some threshold. The moderation could be done by users, of course; in fact, it could simply be part of the normal comment-thread interface, with an icon beside the post to represent that voting on it affects whether the user (and their posts) stay or go.

Treating nasty posts by good users might be similar to a problem of catching illicit activity on a bank account—simply asking the user "Did you really mean to post this? It doesn't seem like something you'd say." It might also be similar to a social bookmarking matchmaking service—except that instead of putting people with high pairwise right-handed Whuffie together, you'd be keeping people with low pairwise left-handed Whuffie apart, by somehow making it harder for them to confront one another.

Having a way to offer some means of adjustment would help distinguish between the accidental and willful nastiness.

I actually strongly considered peeking at the html and implementing the necessary JavaScript myself - I wonder if a contribution of this type would be accepted?

Or, since I'm not actually all that active on HN, I'd prefer to be seeing a view that weighted more heavily votes of people who were not voting opposite to those of people whose opinion I respect, such as pg. And probably some others that I'd be aware of, if I were on HN more.

For me to take the next step and suggest that this then becomes the default view that everyone sees seems strangely egotistical. Not for me, I mean, but that you might seem egotistical if you were giving more weight to votes from people who voted similarly to how you voted. I'd probably like the site more if you did that though :)

You'd end up with a graph representation where each user is a node and two nodes are connected if they share a similar voting relationship.

Everything that you can vote on keeps a list of the people who upvoted it vs those who downvoted it. Every day the list of voters are cleared (to reduce load), and those people who all voted the same have their relationships to each other strengthened. The submitter of the item you voted on has their relationship with the voter increased by a larger amount still.

You then take your relationship to the submitter or commenter into account when comments are ordered for you, perhaps via the shades of grey styling HN has at present.

How about something like this.... Create a set of general rules to follow for making an effective/polite post. Things like "calling someone a name brings more attention to the insult than your point." When you have a dozen of these or so, put a random one next to the "reply" button. This way people are constantly reminded of how to create polite posts.

These could be used either to reward or punish depending on how they're designed but people would use them sparingly if they're given after a certain criteria is reached (e.g. age of account, karma points, etc.). The purpose would be to cut down the noise that moderators/you have to deal with. Thus there could even be karma points and a red flag/green flag score.

The red flags might only be visible when you click in to their profile for example so as not to draw attention to their presumably highly offensive postings while the green flags are visible highlighting extraordinary comments.

PS I hope you figure out a solution to this as I'm sure I'm not the only one who was alarmed by your comment "I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here anymore."

I know there are multiple moderators around; maybe it would be worthwhile to say who they are - and then when someone sees a race to the right margin, they can step in and gently remind that the thread is getting out of hand. I think the problems we have here are that people care too much, I don't think that anyone intends to be nasty.

While some comment threads have gotten a little ugly; I still think this place is head and shoulders over just about everywhere for community - personally I'm thankful that you've put this place together, ugly threads and all.

It seems like HN is transitioning from a community to a culture, and that's always going to be painful. It's easy to notice the bad things going on, but there have been a ton of really interesting things going on as well, it's just not as easy to pick those out because while everyone knows when someone is being an asshole, not everyone thinks the same things are interesting.

I think the right consequence for someone who accumulates too many uncivil flags is to have the server start to throttle their IP. This allows it to be a gradual, linear and temporary disincentive to poor behavior, rather than a binary response. Just dropping the connection is also de-escalating relative to alternatives like sending a message only to that user. I could certainly see people absolutely exploding when they see that they've been flagged as uncivil. Add a message on top of it, and things will definitely get out of hand at least some of the time. But if the connection starts to just get dropped, they maybe keep refreshing, maybe go somewhere else.

On the other hand I do think there are a minority of people using this more aggressive tone (or rather are causing it to spread). So that makes it a little easier to deal with - having a jerk flag is a good idea, then you could start to limit the site for those with a high jerk rating (i.e. longer cool off times for them, delays between their comments, when they submit a comment it asks them "are you sure you want to post this hint hint"

So how about a karma-moderated length minimum. New commenters (less than ~300 karma, maybe) have to post several sentences which has some chance of disincentivizing quick, brutal snark.

Longer comments can still be nasty of course, but it's going to require a lot more involvement for the user while making them a bigger target for moderators.

Lots of communities have tried to push moderation into the hands of users via flagging, and it never seems to work. I think the best and quickest solution to the problem is to use trusted but invisible moderators.

There's another more practical reason it's hard to kill mean comments: they often have replies by the time I see them. It would mess up the conversation if they got taken out then.

Once an individual has a given number of penalty boxes, a moderator considers whether to ban them. The danger of doing stuff like this is that subjects that interest this community inevitably also spill over into the political realm and as others have pointed out the use of up votes and downvotes are ambiguous and further, open to abuse.

If you want to publicly shame someone, then once a member is on probation after a certain number of penalties/flags, add a dot or something relatively benign in color to their name.

Edit - I'd add that if it were up to me, I'd try to control personal attacks above all else given the community is pretty good at calling people out on comments that add little to no value.

With a huge crowd, the system needs to train the users by providing cues and publicly "punishing" (through greyed-out text and negative scores) ill behavior. The more people you have, the more important this feedback system becomes.

Then you need to bring onto your team some group of curators/moderators whose number 1 task is to keep the site free of nastiness on a nonpartisan, equal opportunity basis.

The only way to keep human moderation workable is to keep the work of each individual moderator small and scale out tree-style. Perhaps that will be the ultimate shape of the Web: a set of top level news sites, aggregating the best commentary from a larger set of second-tier news sites, aggregating the best commentary from a larger set of tertiary news sites...

Account age has no bearing on the intelligence of the owner... there's a specific group of smart people (6 degrees of PG) that have been here a long time, and the rest have joined as it came up on their radar.

If you do, maybe "fight" partly means actively limiting the growth of the site.

Whatever. Flagged or not, one doubts the EchoChamber of Commerce News crew on what used to be "Hacker News" will do much more than upvote this kind of behavior.

After all, intellectual honesty is hardly as important as the bottom line.

Regarding flags on comments (not stories), I suspect it might have more of an impact to add just one new type rather than several at once. That would send a clear message about what we're all being asked to focus on. Along those lines, I'd say "uncivil" is more important than "frivolous". In my observation, over the last few months, HN users have gotten pretty good at using downvotes to regulate the merely frivolous.

If someone's comment has been flagged as uncivil it might be helpful to inform them of this with a call to action such as "Please be more polite" and a link to a fuller explanation of what they are being asked to do. I'm quite sure that many (though not all) people just don't realize how their comment might come across.

Perhaps comments flagged as uncivil could remain editable for a longer period. It's true that this would distort the history of conversations a bit, but maybe in a good way. If I find out that I made a comment that people found rude, I'd like the option (after my two editable hours have expired) of editing my comment for civility and having it marked as such. After all, if one is found "guilty" by a jury of one's peers, it's good to have a way to make amends in addition to the negative feedback. Besides, if people started noticing comments that had been "edited for civility", social proof might nudge their own behavior in that direction.

Could the community help monitor the general tone of the site? It seems like keeping things civil is a hard task for you and the top users.

Could there be an automatic survey sent out each week or month to a random sample set of users to measure their overall satisfaction with the site and tone? It could even be just one question ("How would you rate the discourse on HN lately? Highly Civil, Civil, or Uncivil").

That way there would be a good objective gauge to see trends in tone and to monitor the impact of any changes like flags.

As the site continues to grow it gets more challenging to preserve the level of discussion. Having some long term measure of that might be helpful and make it easier to know when a new feature needs to be implemented.

Sometimes reading HN feels like reading TC rss feed. If I want to read every single story from TC I would have subscribed to their RSS feed.

If this much crap was posted from any other website, they would have been blocked without any debate whatsoever. There is a reason people subscribe to rss feed, why would I come to HN to see one blog hogging the whole site?

Which is why I suggest either a hard cap on number of subs per domain per day or give users the option to block out certain domain so that they don't see it in their HN.

I don't think it is an unreasonable or very difficult request to implement.

The thing that killed Slashdot for me was the redesign - I'm not usually a design snob, but it's way too visually heavy for me. I think the moderation system is great, though - particularly the ability to set weights for different types of comments (e.g. -1 all Funny posts if memes and one-liners bother you).

The reason I think this is what went wrong for them was that they had flags like "funny", for things that obviously don't add to the discussion, and too many choices for the other positive votes. IMHO, having one meaning for upvote and a handful of negative flags would be ideal if the flags were only visible to the submitter (to educate noobs/reprimand those who should know better) and whatever process is responsible for threshing the chaff.

There's certainly room to improve on this model - I for one would like to see a "-1 Uncivil". Either way, where Reddit and Digg have repeatedly struggled with designing a sustainable commenting system, Slashdot's has stayed relatively constant for years, and the moderation quality has also been similarly consistent. This is not a trivial accomplishment.

IMHO the problem with "raw" upvotes and downvotes is that it is very difficult to circumvent the mob mentality, and that this system absolutely fails to scale with the population of the community. IMHO the Slashdot system works far better for large communities than what the competition seems to have going.

The beginning of the decline was the growth or maybe how they dealt with the growth. Meta-moderation was the nail in the coffin. The tags were never fine grained enough, at least for me. I quickly found out that my taste and what I appreciated in a comment were not the same as the masses. Then I found reddit and HN :) Where I still feel at home and often enjoy the commentary as much as the stories.

To summarize it, after looking back. I think what killed it for me was the decrease in quality of stories and comments while there was an increase in stories overall.

I used to spend 30-35 minutes writing and editing a comment. It doesn't seem worth it any more when the article is going to drop off the front page in 8 - 12 hours. When I thought people might read it for a day or to, it felt like it was worth the investment.

It seems like the current speed of article churn has increased the pace of HN, and has inadvertently encouraged shorter, shoot from the hip type comments rather than encourage slower more thoughtful discussion.

This would add a useful dimension to the feedback.

I find myself using the up/down arrow largely for "contributes to the discussion". There is an element of "I agree", but I frequently click up on a comment that I disagree with because it is well-reasoned or brings up a thoughtful angle that is new.

To avoid the mob clicking of these new buttons, they could be shown only to the author of the comment, or very high karma individuals.

In any case - that is to say regardless of the reason it was flagged - I think it should be killed. Therefore one "flag" link and that's it.

This way if the community sees a mob problem, the community can tweak the settings accordingly. I'm sure you can come up a good algorithm to maintain a moving set of defaults.

Also, maybe allow readers to filter posts based upon their threshold settings.

- Non-threaded comments. I know this has been discussed to death, but I think the downside of threaded comments (fragmentation of the discussion and incentive for witty one-liners) far outweighs the benefit (having separate unrelated conversations). A non-threaded approach gives huge incentive to bring the community together into a single coherent conversation, gives the reader a great sense of a timeline (which gives further incentive to maintain an intelligent discussion), and discourages fragmentation of the discussion to a point where it isn't interesting to anyone anymore. I know this is a big change, but I would strongly encourage at least giving it a serious consideration - it can make a huge difference if done right.

- Active topics - on sites like Hacker News and Reddit it's very easy to lose track of interesting discussions that are going on because top threads are tightly coupled with the top articles. We can have interesting discussions long after the article has left the front page, and an active topics page would go far towards encouraging intelligent interaction. Basically, every time an article is commented on, this article goes to the top of the list. This way I can see all active discussions at glance (including the ones I participated in), and continue interesting discussions, even though they're not on the front page.

- User rating system (not article/comment system) - in real life, if I am usually a very interesting, intelligent person, and one day I suddenly act as a jerk, it can very seriously ruin my reputation. On gamedev people rate users, not comments and articles. So, I can give a user a rating - extremely helpful, helpful, not helpful, jerk. The karma is a combination of ratings for a given user, and the strength of a user's vote is proportional to his karma. So, if someone is a jerk one day, it can affect his karma far more significantly than simply downvoting his comment. In addition, jerks have less affect on the system overall. Rating people's comments never made sense to me - it always ends up signaling agreement or disagreement vs. usefulness. If people rate users instead of comments, this problem goes away always entirely, plus very strongly discourages aggressive behavior.

I think these three things would help immensely to scale the community. These are big changes, but I think they're worth seriously thinking about.