[dovdovdov]

There is no good solution from a service's side, paid community, closed community, they all bring their side effects.

Even these voting systems will only surface the popular opinion and not necessarily the right opinion.

Best you can do is to ignore content and comments which are irrelevant to you, that way quality always meet your standards.

[Gustomaximus]

> There is no good solution from a service's side

I can't believe that. Nothing will be perfect but there must be some combination of options that can improve things significantly.

Maybe it is volunteer mods. Or HN require new members to pass a 'best use' rules questionnaire before posting (or exiting offenders). Or they run algorithms to find users that vote inline with the spirit of HN and ninja ban people they downvote.

I dont profess to know the answer but there must be improving options available. And further someone solving this is a quite important concept (and potentially a great business too), as while here I want a better conversation, the recent US elections showed us what bot armies and paid shills can do, there are probably options that can be employed in the wider internet encourage genuine conversation in general.

[buro9]

> Best you can do is to ignore content and comments which are irrelevant to you, that way quality always meet your standards

The community of actively participating submitters and commentators is surprisingly small. This is true for nearly all communities.

If HN had a really rich ignore feature, it would take a very short time to create a personal ignore list that pruned the glib or polarising political commentators.

I would say though, that whilst this has proven to be a good thing on the communities I run, I personally prefer not to use ignore features.

[dovdovdov]

I meant a 'client side' ignore feature. :)

Service side content filtering only creates bubbles.

[beaconstudios]

but is there an objectively "right" opinion? Surely that in itself is determined by the group's average opinion.