About this:
> I feel like part of the reason behind the rise of "dumb and/or mean" is that as HN has gotten larger the community has also attenuated. Commenters become a faceless crowd and the quality of our interactions degrades accordingly
... my main question is how we could test that. It might be true, it might not; hard to know.
I suppose there are two parts to my assertion:
1. When you think of yourself as talking to an actual person, you are less likely to be dumb and/or mean.
2. As HN has grown, the degree to which the average commenter considers themselves to be talking to an actual person has decreased.
I was pretty sure I'd be able to find a psychology or sociology study somewhere giving some evidence on (1) or a more general case of (2) for large groups. Wildly, it looks like all of the interest is on how groups reduce your personal identity (deindividuation), not how they reduce the identity of others to you.
So I guess without an appeal to prior research, the best thing would be to develop a measure of "does this comment seem like it's addressed to a real person". You could do that by manually going through and rating them, as (I believe?) you already did with quality metrics.
You could also come up with some heuristics and cross-check them with your own assessment. Here are some I can think of:
* Use of parent's username
* Use of first names
* Use of other usernames
* Use of "you", "your".
* Email addresses, phrases like "contact me", "email me", etc.
* Questions.
* Comment reply chains (ie people replying to a descendent of their own comment)
* "Please", "Thanks" and "Thank you"
I'm not saying that I think comments with this quality are necessarily good, but my prediction is that per (2) the proportion of such comments correlates inversely with the number of active users and per (1) that proportion correlates with a drop in comment quality.
I guess the positive signal still outweighs the negative, but it isn't always a positive signal.
Assuming I can summon dang just by using his name, I feel like part of the reason behind the rise of "dumb and/or mean" is that as HN has gotten larger the community has also attenuated. Commenters become a faceless crowd and the quality of our interactions degrades accordingly.
I wonder if having a way of saying thanks other than a (humanity-less) counter increment or a (discouraged and poorly scaling) public comment would encourage more humane behaviour?
My first instinct is some kind of private comment system, but obviously that would enable less-accountable forms of harassment. Maybe that combined with a karma threshold and an aggressively enforced flag button?
Another less radical idea would be some way to mark an exceptional comment, which would also highlight that person's future comments to you in some way.