To the new users: If you disagree with a comment, please reply to it, stating why. Don't just blindly downmod it.

Just my 2c

I don't see anything wrong with karma mega-boosting. At the end of the day it is just a number on your profile.

-I think the example you gave is a very rare case (I hope.) Unfortunately part of commenting right now is timing, which I do not have a problem with. If you post something informative two days into the conversation it will not have the same exposure, although depending on the conversation it will not appear far below the fold.

-I do see your point and I think it would be great if good comments that come late have more visibility. None or all of the following might help:

1) Delete comments and their replies once they reach a certain negative threshold (-5 for example.) Of course this gives downmodding a whole new meaning but maybe that is a good thing. This would make the comments section more readable and keep the conversation more civil and/or focused.

2) Highlight comments that were posted in the past 8 hours and have reached some karma threshold in yellow. This is a sort of "recent hot shots" feature. This way when an HN reader scans the page they can see what new comments are receiving upvotes more easily.

3) Give recent votes more weight then past votes. This means that a karma point awarded now means more than a karma point awarded an hour ago. Maybe the algorithm HN uses already does this- I am not sure.

I don't think pushing newer comments with fewer points up is a good idea because that changes the power up upvoting too drastically. Perhaps some anchor tags at the top of the comments section leading to the hottest new comments?

p.s. nice blog

http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2009/02/comments-rating-s...

This being said, the "unique post" robot proved to be a success in several implementations.

Perhaps the upper limit shouldn't be 10, but the total number of words in the post. So a two word quip, only gets you two points. ;)

StackOverflow awards medals to bring out distinctions. I don't think we have to go that far, but it's a similar idea.

Similarly as people have pointed out you don't need pile on the down-modding simply because you don't agree with something.

I would almost say that unless something is actually disinformation, spam or trolling you shouldn't down-mod it, even if you disagree. Upvote the comments you agree with or write a persuasive argument instead.

One thing that I like about Stackoverflow.com is the ability to see how much people down/up mod.

(I know this is kind of harsh, but if you think I wouldn't say it in person, you probably haven't met me.)

I'd set the flag/downmod limit to 500.

I have an account on reddit as well, and my tone over there is different than my tone here. On reddit I make a decent amount of off-the-cuff remarks, occasionally troll a bit, participate in pun threads, and also have a decent amount of intelligent debate and discussion. Here I keep my mouth (fingers?) shut (stoppped?) unless I have something to say, because that's the vibe here.

Here, I'm more likely to vote people up who have a differing opinion on an issue, or even if they have an opinion that offends me, if they are able of stating and defending their position logically. On reddit, I'd probably just skim over their post.

Etc.

The tone of this site has gotten a little lighter since the first time I was here, and it seems to have gotten a lot more of a focus on the business side of things, which is fine - but if people aren't careful, the site will devolve into yet another pick-your-favorite-site-here.

So yeah. Please keep HN grown-up. It's nice to see mostly responsible discussion happening on a site like this, and I hope it continues to happen.

By "grown-up", I mean "thinking before posting, and posting in a way that indicates that one has a generally 'mature' mental-model". This isn't something that can be measured objectively, more of an attribute that emerges from the sum of a users postings - and posters on HN have generally passed the "act-like-an-adult" test so far.

The problem is that what you say online about someone is frozen forever, and takes on more significance than either the sender or the receiver actually meant. In person, I call you an asshole, you're impressed that I said it to your face, we both laugh and move on. On the web I call you an asshole, you call me an asshole, it escalates, shows up in google searches for both our names, people who aren't quite up to speed on things (recruiters) take it more seriously than it should be... bad stuff happens.

This is often credited for Facebook having more 'real' content than MySpace and Friendster.

As you've touched on, allowing people to find you on hacker news would also be a benefit.

Next I'll see a reply from cyberguppy.

Not that I always do, but I should :).

What I mean is, a blogger is completely justified in naming a post "Why James Bond would never drink a Coke" (like I did for an environmentalist blog) if that blogger believed their purpose would be best served by alerting Digg users to the perfidies of the Coca-Cola company. But if a Hacker News reader appreciated the post's message -- that Coca-Cola is exploiting water rights laws in third-world countries to produce its products cheaply at the expense of the residents and their clean water supplies -- they would do well to use a different headline that what the desperate blogger, often paid by the pageview, had written with a view to Digg.

That said, bloggers will more and more overhype their posts in the way that media have since their beginning, and those of us on small thinky web sites will have to get used to downvoting and moving on.

Fortunately, people haven't been doing a lot of gaming of the system yet. The biggest problem with upvoting only is that controversial posts garner the most votes (a thousand people love a subject and ten thousand people HATE it, so it gets a thousand upvotes and a TON of comments, even if most people disagree with the premise).

I repeatedly think that I would like downvotes, but I quite quickly remember that I absolutely hate downvotes. I don't completely agree with being able to downmod comments, however I think the side effects are dampened that you have to have good karma before you can downvote, which prevents trolls from abusing the system.

I don't want to see this topic regularly but maybe the guidelines could be made more prominent for new users?

Even for older users it could be good to have a little reminder to not be an arsehole (I could certainly use that sort of reminder on occasion).

If it clutters the interface, it could go away once you get 100 karma or so.

I have often wondered why the posting, submission, and voting guidelines haven't been more prominent. I appreciate Paul's active role in this community--I think it account's for much of the civility to have benevolent moderators--but definitely making the principles easier to access would be helpful, too.

  code indentation

FYI, text surrounded by asterisks (*) will be intended. Begin a new line with two spaces, and you have code indentation.

This could be one approach to dealing with the "broken windows" issue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373356

If you find yourself in that section of code, the little "help" link that shows after the edit box when "edit"ing could also be displayed when you are starting a reply.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219081

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133453

I imagine that this is even more important than usual in this case, since when the message is "please be good" there's really nothing except how well the message is worded.

When you say "take care" to somebody it's not like you think they won't take care of themselves. But if you stop saying it altogether, I bet it will harm the basis of civility.

I vaguely recall an experiment done on a classroom where everybody was required to say hi every morning. Soon after the entire class had a great spirit. I don't recall when, where, or who; if somebody does, please say.

http://ycombinator.com/people.html

that makes the bloodsucking capitalist in me cringe. ;)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/04/2009-products-i-cant-li...

Not only mentioned, but likened to Digg. People may have been expecting that what passes on Digg would pass here.

A few curious trolls probably wandered over and created new accounts. Of course, that's not Antonio's fault. I liked his post. :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455474

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7tbpl/lets_all_...

It takes the ethos of the entire community to keep this all in check. Some trolls might assimilate, but a determined person would be hard to deal with.

Besides, I'm sure Paul Graham wouldn't single out someone that has been trained in classical piano and seems to like Bach...

That said, members who wish to preserve a community's original quality should be proactive. They may have to replace the functions of some other original members who have left. We call this "culture."

Piling on someone like that should be genuinely rare, and only because they are spamming links to goatse or streaming curse words at someone.

Hopefully this little portion of our 'culture' doesn't change, as it seems like a civil way to deal with this sort of thing.

Negative numbers here are like a slap in the face, and when overused they will be even more corrosive to the community than a flood of juvenile comments would be.

More to the point, those scores are not supposed to be used to represent entertainment value, because people are not participating here for pure mindless entertainment.

So far, I've found the users of this site intellectual, technical and insightful in their comments and as a result, its been a joy to participate in this community and I hope the crowd which this site attract remain the same - smart and technical people.

As a personal (though perhaps not universal) example, see here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458256 , a +23 comment decrying the multi-page split of the article. See here, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=398185 , my own comment railing against them wasting my time\effort like that.... modded down to -6.

I don't want to be a whiny nuisance about it, but when that happened it really alienated me from the community and quite frankly I don't think I've contributed much anything of value since. I felt betrayed when I chose to stand against that kind of crap and I was stabbed in the back. Add in the fact that the "rules" are not being applied equally as the culture splits, and it just feels random and unfair.

To conclude my soapbox, I could be doing approx. 50 trillion things on the internet right now, so stop trying to waste my time\effort with 11 three sentence pages, snarky\"witty" comments; and God save the YCNews

That seems pretty harsh to me, but I think people are just hypervigilant against any hint of encroaching diggishness.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

Here is the short essay he provides to anyone who cares to comment, at the top of the comment form:

-----------------------

This board is only about evidence presentations and analytical design. For all business matters (book orders, courses, shipping, prices, delivery dates), please go to the Graphics Press contact information on our home page

On the Ask ET forum, we seek to publish questions and contributions that advance the analytical content of the thread, provide a good example, or raise an interesting question. Contributions should be relevant to the chosen thread. Please no marketing pitches, gratuitous links, or incivilities. There are about 6,000 contributions in the 500 threads now published on this board; they provide good examples of what has been accepted for publication.

Some new contributions go to a non-public queue, which is frequently reviewed by a member of the editorial board in order to decide whether the material should be posted. About 30% of submitted contributions are posted; after publication, about half survive the occasional reviews of published items. The editors are unable to reconsider their decisions or to answer any queries about editorial decisions (some of which may well be mistaken). Publication policies are described in detail at Moderating internet forums [Ed. the link I mention above]

If your contribution is published, your email address will be masked on the board, and your identifying IP number will not be published.

-----------------------

I suggested this to reddit a long time ago when they first started to really get lame, but it never caught on.

There's lots of things I like about HN, like that links can't be down voted and that downvoting comments is an exclusive right to people with good karma.

However, the main thing I like about HN is that I see lots of civil discussion and people giving useful comments and suggestions. When I have seen disagreements (I believe I've been in a few myself) I notice that people tend to do what they do in real life and simply 'walk away'. When I read something that really irks me I usually just close HN and will come back later or whenever when I've forgotten about it.

Any chance that news stories could be throttled or more heavily edited/moderated just after a spike in new users? Just a thought, it could help to filter out those who are interested versus those just looking for another forum to do their usual thing on.

The best way to deal with nasty comments by new users may be just to ask them to stop. Several times lately I've noticed established users doing that, e.g.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=457319

I am very interested to see how things maintained - increasing popularity is inevitable...

As I'm more of a tinkerer and explorer than entrepreneur, the bent is more toward my liking, since the revision. I really like the attitude--or rather lack thereof--and look forward to becoming a part of the community.

It's true, I don't know how I stumbled across this site but one thing I noticed is the 'high quality' comments compared to other social news websites.

I'd say to the regulars be patient with us, the new folks in town, since we may be a bit jaded by some of the other places we visit and, yes, the anonymous nature of the Internet does bring out the worst in people, including me.

One thing I've learned when commenting is "less is more" (although you'd never know by this three paragraph 'comment').

It's a sad thing that it's been years now and we still have to have guidelines that essentially say what everyone was told by their mother when they were a child. I think this will improve some day when either 1. we ban dogs from the net or 2. we start shooting the bad ones :)

As an aside, PG, congrats! I saw recently that you were promoted up a level. It's a wonderful thing, non?

Its message was:

    Prioritize, focus on things that are relevant to 
    your success, not on things that only matter after
    you've succeeded, i.e. see the bigger picture.

But more interesting - With the experience of posting here, I should be able to write a press release for my startup that appeals to hackers.

Plus liberal use of disabling people's accounts without notifying them let alone asking them to change something.

Hacker News logins are a privilege, not a right.

Coming from a background of things like talkers where you needed to be explicitly invited by another user before you could get in, I don't really have a problem with that.

given that he's got other things to do besides just moderate this site, i don't blame him at all for killing the accounts of unruly posters. at that point, the onus is on them to do something to get back in his good graces, or just go somewhere else.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...

hate to carp on it, nobody likes hearing I told you so, but a design flaw is a design flaw.

All successful forums grow big and become worthless. The Y C kids need to learn this.

Never gonna' give you up Never gonna' let you down. Never gonna run around and desert you.

The problem of retaining the character of a site while not just letting it stagnate (as happens when you start doing things like cutting of new memberships or restricting new user posting) is a very hard, and as yet unsolved I believe, problem. But solving hard problems is what it's all about, right? :p