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A comment on Commenting, community deterioration, and Hacker News. Parent comment

Re:Commenting, community deterioration, and Hacker News by billpatrianakos on Monday January 16, 2012 @09:56AM (#3470804)
That's s disappointing. I usually spend less time on one liners than anything and thought everyone else did the same. I had no idea that one-liners got so much attention. But for all the people who express sentiments like yours and all the people who read it and all the people priding themselves on being the smartest people in the room, somehow stupidity still slips by under our noses. How? And, just as a hypothetical, you can find a comment much like yours then look back through that person's history and see they're a chronic fluff contributor. How is it that we know not to do something, speak out against it, and then do it anyway?

Also, I don't like your proposed solution. It assumes the worst in people. I tend to believe that if you cater to the lowest common denominator then that's what you get but when you assume the best in people they'll try to live up to that expectation. Of course people will be people and it's inevitable they we disappoint from time to time but... Well, but nothing. That's how it goes I guess.

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Re:Commenting, community deterioration, and Hacker News by willyt on Monday January 16, 2012 @11:31AM (#3471224)
Did you mean you spend less time on reading one liners? Yes me too, but there are lots of one liners now and not so many well written comments.

Regarding your second point. At the scale of HN now, I think we have to consider people not as individuals but as a swarm of actors; perhaps analogous to particles in a CFD analysis. Then ask the question 'what design changes need to be made to change the direction of these actors'. I don't personally assume the worst in people but I don't think people are naturally moral actors. They won't 'do the right thing' without any incentives. People are driven by the positive and negative consequences of their actions which they measure from the reactions of their peers. In the case of HN our peers are the crowd sourced 'off the cuff' opinions of a random sample of a few hundred thousand random people. Some people are horrified by the idea that morals don't exist and it is a bit of a scary concept being surrounded by potential monsters, but really I think it's just nature and lots of natural things are scary but can be mitigated by design.

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