[jessriedel]

Agreed, but I wish HN would experiment more with new technical tools to improve civility. For all its flaws, HN is still home to some of the very best discussion, and there's no reason to throw up one's hands. For instance, removing public vote counts seems to have been a net positive (although I mistakenly opposed it at the time). Even a small nudge to get people to vote based on constructiveness rather than agree/disagree could have a large impact.

[krapp]

I'm not certain there is a technical solution to incivility, or at least, I suspect that technical solutions can only go so far.

Incivility is a social problem, and that requires community involvement and reinforcement of accepted norms, not attempts at operant conditioning through the UI.

[jessriedel]

Lots of incivility problems have been ameliorated by technical solutions in the past (up/down votes, flags, bans, etc.). I don't know why one would downplay attacking the remaining issue this way, especially since technical solutions are vastly more replicable and scalable. Indeed, internet incivility is a problem caused by technical difference from real-life interactions.

[krapp]

Lots of incivility problems have been ameliorated by technical solutions in the past (up/down votes, flags, bans, etc.).

But the fact that flags and bans are necessary means the incivility still exists, so those problems haven't really been solved. And votes create as many problems as they solve, because with them you get people posting for votes, complaints about vote fairness, etc.

> I don't know why one would downplay attacking the remaining issue this way, especially since technical solutions are vastly more replicable and scalable.

I don't believe the effect of these solutions scale with them. If they were, Twitter would be a bastion of civil discourse, because there's little that HN does in that regard that Reddit doesn't also do at a much greater scale.

[jessriedel]

Huh? If you just define the problem as only "really solved" when you aren't fixing the symptoms with technical tools, then, yes, technical tools can't work by definition.

[krapp]

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the problem hasn't been solved because the incivility still exists. I don't believe these tools do fix the symptoms, only hide them.