[rweba]

More and more websites are getting rid of user comments on their websites. Just in the last couple of months the National Review and The Atlantic have got rid of comments.

In simple terms they couldn't keep up with comment moderation and were not able or willing to invest in enough moderators.

So I have to give credit to HN to having one of the most civil comment sections on the internet. What I like about HN is that the comments VERY RARELY descend into the inevitable political sniping that seems to happen almost everywhere else on the internet, even when discussing controversial topics like Trump, and even the percentage of snarky and dismissive comments is kept pretty low.

So, keep it up, dang and sctb!

[dkoubsky]

The amount of civility on HN is almost unbelievable. The behavior of the users is one of the HN's biggest strengths.

[bjelkeman-again]

I wonder if the idea that you may be interviewing or be interviewed by any of the people you are conversing with means that one “behaves” better?

I am convinced that the combination of voting up good comments with strict, clear and fair moderation is an important reason. Add to this that reputation among peers may matter to people and maybe that is the formula.

[divanvisagie]

I'm not so sure about the interviewing part. First, I am one of the few who does not use a pseudonym on this site, most do.

I have also seen people say some pretty absurd things using public Facebook comments that have their real name and details attached to them, I don't think people are considering that they may be making some career limiting moves when they get mad in comment sections. I also think that tech people have a lot more job options and freedom of movement between companies than other careers.

Sites like reddit that gather karma also create a "reputation" scenario for users, yet it still contains trolls, so I don't think it's that either, but it may be a contributing factor. That combined with the broken windows theory and the very specific target audience may be what make the comments mostly civil but certainly not immune to parody.

[culot]

I find that I see the civility on here and it makes me want to behave similarly.

[mygo]

I once said something slightly political and my comment was downvoted into oblivion.

So that helps.

[dredmorbius]

I'm fairly contrarian and don't shy from political and economic commentary. Responses vary, though I'd argue it's generally net positive.

Not getting too heavily invested in any one comment helps, as does addressing any responses strongest rather than weakest points.

I'll call out (and occaisionally report) comments thaat eem unjustly downvoted. Sometimes (frequently) the mods agree, occasionally they don't.

There are also numerous shadowbanned accounts. It is possible to vouch their positive contribuions.

HN isn't perfect, but it's better than a tremendous amount of the Web, for discussion.

[c3534l]

My political comments are some of my most popular ones I've made. I think it's more about saying something that's actually constructive or different. I think also the fact that hackernews is not ideologically segmented has to do with it, too. We're here for programming and decent, thought-provoking reading, not having people tell us we're right. You can get away with being political if you're genuinely trying to contribute to the conversation.

[chii]

> actually constructive or different. > not ideologically segmented

i dont think that's really the case. HN is full of middle/upper middle class programmers who works in well-developed countries. This is definitely a segment on the political spectrum. This is why you don't see many trump voters here, or bigots or the very conservative. Anyone who attempts to bring discourse with such an undertone will get downvoted.

I'd say HN has more groupthink than the people here would care to admit.

[dragonwriter]

> HN is full of middle/upper middle class programmers who works in well-developed countries. This is definitely a segment on the political spectrum.

No, it's not. While class and profession have some loose correlation to ideology, the class/profession combination you describe includes people from all over the political spectrum, including all of the ones you say are excluded from HN for this reason (whuch, contrary to your description, seem to be well represented; well, not overt bigots but HN moderation is aimed pretty directly against that, and perhaps merely Trump apologists, who may or may not be Trump voters.)

[bayonetz]

Sounds like an empirical question to me. I'd ante a moderate sum though that @chil's assessment is closer to the truth in terms of homogeneity of political leanings on HN and, if you could somehow measure it, that there is "...more groupthink than the people here would care to admit" on HN.

[spacehome]

I don't think career correlates quite so closely to the liberal-conservative spectrum as you may think. Yes, there are a lot of liberals, but I get the impression that libertarians are over-represented as well. And there may not be as few Trump voters as you think ;)

[mygo]

Well it seems you and I have had different experiences.

I’ve whitnessed threads where users were basically going “no politics pls.”

Maybe the threads that I end up clicking on attract certain kinds and the threads that you’re on attract other kinds.

[dsr_]

I say fairly political things all the time -- roughly 10% of my comments, I think -- and they generally stay positive.

Politics and economics and ethics are inextricably intertwined with technology these days, so it's usually on topic to comment about the political aspects of a situation.

[culot]

I didn't know you could downvote on here. I only see up arrows.

[grzm]

Once you attain 501 karma, you're allowed to downvote.

[dredmorbius]

As others have noted, by way of very active and generally nuanced moderation.

I've discussed this before in a direct comparison to a "kinder, nicer" site which proved to be neither.

Moderation and site dynamics are curiously subtle.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/500ysb/the_imz...

[rweba]

I think there are a few factors:

(1) The culture started by Paul Graham, back when he used to write lots of essays, emphasized a certain "hyperrationality" and attracted a lot of super-logical people in the beginning.

(2) Heavy moderation to keep things from deteriorating and discourage overly polemical debates.

The bottom line is that people quickly get an idea of what is tolerated and what is not tolerated so they work to stay in line which doesn't seem to happen as much on other websites.

[peterwwillis]

You could say the same about Japan, and to a certain extent China.

[ericd]

The mods here do an exceptional job, but it was also like that before there were active moderators (though it was a much smaller site). I think it's largely the culture here that keeps it civil - commenters that aren't civil get trained to do better by swiftly being sent to the bottom of the comments in an unreadable shade of gray.

[dang]

There were active moderators from day 1. The set was mostly {pg}, but few people have any idea how active he was.

[ericd]

Oh, I didn't realize he spent much time moderating. I figured most of his time on HN was spent on improving the systems like voting ring detection.

[Spooky23]

General interest news cannot do commentary. People literally believe that they are fighting some sort of war with people over political nonsense.

I saw a piece yesterday that claimed that a woman was flagged for suspicious activity on Twitter because 98% of the 5,000 accounts she followed were Russian troll-bots. The lady spent hours arguing with these bots.

[tedmiston]

Apparently this is a big part of Twitter's bot problem — actual humans, that don't really get Twitter, acting bot-like unknowingly.

[peoplewindow]

Twitter's bot problem is largely imaginary. If actual humans are acting "bot like", given the fact that nobody has made a bot that passes the Turing test so far, perhaps that means these accounts and tweets are actually human and being mis-classified for political reasons.

[mratzloff]

It's all about clear standards and strong moderation. I visit another forum that has a great community. No karma, no voting, just those two things. I've also run a large community in the past that I believe was successful for those reasons.

[itronitron]

The moderation is strong but not heavy-handed. The clear standards allow commenters to understand why they get downvoted or flagged which is nice. I have seen nitpicky over-active moderators on a different forum site effectively wipe out community engagement over the course of a year and it wasn't fun.

[ThomPete]

In general, downvotes are fair but sometimes, unfortunately, it gets misused to express disagreement of opinion which isn't the purpose on HN.

If I was allowed to make one change on HN it would be that a downvote had to be accompanied by a comment as to why the downvote happens.

[peoplewindow]

I'd probably just abolish downvoting entirely: rely entirely on upvoting. There's already a bias towards upvoting in the system due to the min cap but not the max cap.

You make it sound like voting-as-disagreement is rare but in my experience it's by far the most common way downvotes are used. I have showdead switched on and I keep toying with the idea of finding an extension to un-grey comments, because over and over I find comments in grey that are well written, erudite and merely express an opinion that goes against the current startup-culture HN zeitgeist. They aren't actually bad comments though.

So why not just let good comments rise to the top.

[spiralx]

The user style I've made for HN reduces the level of greying out considerably - dead comments are only 50% black instead of 14% black for instance.

https://userstyles.org/styles/156181/hacker-news-improved-re...

If you had a user style extension you could just change the five styles used to grey out down-voted and dead comments.

[ThomPete]

Perhaps you are right. I have experienced downvotes primarily in semi politicized discussions like automation, economics blockchain, diversity discussions. Most technical posts seems fairly balanced.

Perhaps yeah abolish downvote and only have flag for admins and people with high karma is a good idea.

[tedmiston]

That seems like a decent idea but a bit tedious for the voter. I also like the Stack Overflow model where each downvote costs 1 of your own karma points.

[giarc]

CBC in Canada made commentors use their real name and disabled comment sections on particular stories that would normally incite a lot of uncivil behaviour.

I'm not sure if things got better as I left and never looked back.

[RachelF]

Add The Economist to that list of publications getting rid of comments.

They seem to have disappeared from the site in the last two weeks.

[varren]

Yeah, IMDB was my top 10 site for 10+ years back in the days of the boards and i had 2-3 visits since the removal. The fun part is that i had 0 posts and used it only to find recomendations / plot explanations. It's beyond me how you can remove the killer feature...

[swozey]

We lost so much behind the scenes history/trivia with the removal of IMDB comments. Some frequent users migrated their comments to www.themoviedb.org but it's nowhere near the amount of what was there from what I can tell. Top movie listed has 1 post, Shawshank Redemption has 11.

[rweba]

I lost so many comments on IMDB.

I haven't even bothered to visit since they removed the forums.

I understand why they did it, the racism and trolling was ridiculous there, but there were some good comments, especially on the forums for the less popular movies.

[hw]

The beauty of karma, and community moderation.

[chrisper]

To counter your argument: take a look at reddit.

Community moderation has also the risk of creating an echo chamber.

[funkymike]

I wonder if a big part of the difference is that HN has only one stream of postings. If there were a HN-politics, HN-tech, etc. each may end up as an echo chamber like reddit.

[philipkglass]

I participate on HN but only lurk on reddit due to so many upvoted garbage-comments on the latter. I don't much care if reddit posts/comments in futurology are always "woo! yay technology! future!!" and everyone in babyelephantgifs is just celebrating baby elephants all the time, with no dissent.

I do care about endlessly repeated/upvoted noise in comments. Puns instead of topically relevant comments, political sniping completely unrelated to the story, catchphrases from the poster's favorite movies/TV series/games, and basically everything from reddit site:knowyourmeme.com. Yes, I know, smaller subs and content that never makes it to the front page don't suffer in the same way. I do enjoy reading the rust, programming, and AskHistorians subreddits.

[DoreenMichele]

Select parts of Reddit are fine. The frontpage is a shitshow. I avoid it. But some of the quiet out of the way subforums contain a lot of good stuff.

[PricelessValue]

HN is an echo chamber too. It's no different than reddit. Just much smaller.

[madez]

My experience is that you can speak about nearly everything here if you keep it civil, relevant, and substantial. Being nice and polite helps as well. There are exceptions of which I sadly have made my share of experiences (and my own mistakes!), but I still consider HN to be a remarkable place.

[peoplewindow]

I wonder to what extent you've tried arguing positions that are unpopular with the San Francisco set.

Yes, HN has good comments on average. But my experience of moderation has been that it often seems wildly random and can be very politically biased. There was a story some time ago about the Guardian and when I first looked at the comments section, it was full of comments describing disappointment or mocking what sort of paper the Guardian had become. A few hours later it was a morass of greyed out, flagged and dead comments ... apparently some voters can't take criticism of that paper no matter how civil. One of my own comments on that thread got downvoted to the min and it consisted only of links to stories the Guardian had actually published, so was pure fact!

Perhaps it got a bit better lately, it's hard to tell, but HN's community is not a representative slice of opinion around the world and it's kept that way deliberately. This is especially true of anything that crosses into criticism of modern identity politics or feminism, even if the contents of the comment criticise ideas and not people.

Indeed doing a Damore on HN is a fast way to get lots of min voted or dead comments and a ticking off from the moderators for "engaging in ideological battle", although of course people posting the opposing ideas are never "engaging in ideological battle". The politeness, civility or level of research involved has no impact on this: it's purely about position.

[PhantomGremlin]

although of course people posting the opposing ideas are never "engaging in ideological battle"

To me this bias is quite evident, although the mods certainly don't see it that way.

E.g. I once tried to submit a story from Breitbart. It had to do with soon-to-be-laid-off US workers being replaced by H-1B. But of course the hate here for Breitbart is strong, so my non-political story couldn't even be submitted. Breitbart is shadow-banned in its entirety. Submissions don't appear in "new" except to the submitter (and maybe if showdead is on?).

Fine and good. Their web site, their rules. But at the same time, the mods were cool with allowing submissions linking to rt.com. The hate for conservatives / right-wing is so strong here that mods were more accepting of stories coming from Putin's government-funded international propaganda network.

I haven't seen any submissions from RT lately, so I think it has now also become shadow banned. C'est la vie.

[bjelkeman-again]

It can be on certain subjects, but I would argue it is reasonably open to discussions as long as one argues well and civilly.

[senectus1]

the signal to noise ratio on HN is a hell of a lot better than Reddit.

[rweba]

Wow, so this comment just got me more karma than any other comment I've ever made in almost 7 years on HN!

I honestly didn't think anyone would read it, the article was already several hours old when I wrote it.

It's obviously not because it's a brilliant comment, probably a combination of timing and of saying something that "struck a nerve" with enough people.

[PricelessValue]

> In simple terms they couldn't keep up with comment moderation and were not able or willing to invest in enough moderators.

Has nothing to do with that. It's because their comment section gets no activity to merit investment. Instead they are investing in "managing" social media via twitter, facebook, reddit, etc.

> So I have to give credit to HN to having one of the most civil comment sections on the internet.

It also has the worst and most biased comment section. It's why traffic is down and hardly anyone uses HN.

> So, keep it up, dang and sctb!

Only on "hacker" news would someone support censorship.

The spirit of hacker news died years ago.

[culot]

I find it bizarre to see people equating forum moderation with some sort of freedom-bashing censorship. Does no one remember Usenet? Active moderation is essential for discussion forums, even if only to clean out spam and trolling.

There's just too many people on the internet, and only so many are housebroken.