[waffle_ss]

I agree with all the asspats for dang on the day-to-day moderation level. If anything I'd like to see more of a heavy hand from him. I've modded some moderately-sized Reddit subs and it was hell.

However, in strategic terms, I think HN has failed to maintain a good comment signal-to-noise ratio over the past several years. For instance it used to be that "funny" or entertaining type of low-effort comments would be strongly discouraged with downvotes; at some point in the past few years it has become very common and... REminiscent of another social site that I'm not supposed to draw comparisons to due to HN guidelines.* Now it's common to see jokes and puns do quite well.

Fundamentally, to maintain a board's culture you need to encourage people to "lurk more" to get acclimated to the board's culture before participating. In other words you need to throttle/retard new users' participation somewhat.

I do recall at one point a push to increase commenting by removing comment average karma in user profiles. (Some) people used to withhold commenting unless they felt they had a real banger because it would throw off their ratio. It also used to be new user signups were only open occasionally rather than always available.

My hypothesis on where it went wrong is cost-free upvotes. Downvotes have always been gated behind a karma threshold, but any new account can upvote whatever it wants. Floods of new accounts thoughtlessly upvoting the types of comments they upvote on other sites will easily outpace the old timers' downvotes on that same content. Over time, this small change in karma dynamics shifts the board culture.

* Like the guideline wording, dang frequently brushes away this critique out of hand, but as someone who goes long periods between visiting HN regularly, it's very obvious to me. I think you could quantify it if you took random samples of HN comments from various time slices and noted the quantity of low-effort comments.

[clairity]

disheartened, as usual, to see an insightful comment lurking nearer the bottom of the page than the top, while a bunch of throwaway fawnings sit above it[0]. i have a pet theory that there can only ever be about a dozen good comments on a thread, and hn usually does a terrible job surfacing them. the (poor) karma-to-tenure ratio you describe is certainly one of the mechanisms by which this goes wrong. i actually liked slashdot's voting mechanics the best of all the forums i've ever visited. it wasn't perfect, but did a better job at surfacing good comments.

i've actually been thinking about how to solve this problem lately, at least for myself. the hn api doesn't look like much fun to work with however.

[0]: that's not to say that i don't appreciate dang, i do, but it's cloying to say the least.

[dang]

The good intentions are clear in the individual posts but I agree that their sum can be cloying.

There are a lot of 'backfiring sums' like that in internet forums.

[clairity]

no doubt that there's some good intent there, but the public performativeness just undermines the genuineness for me.

i do think a dampening function on repetitive messages/sentiments would be a net-good however, since repetitiveness is not where the interesting/insightful points tend to be.

[dang]

It would be valuable to automatically detect that sort of repetition—repetition is pretty much what we're trying to avoid on HN. Although a certain amount of it can be good for morale I suppose.

Re intent: many people underestimate good intent in these cases. My experience interacting with users is that they're mostly trying to say good and helpful things, even when what they actually say is bad and unhelpful.

[clairity]

also, given the eternal september phenomenon where things that are new to new members are often tired and trite to older members/people, perhaps there's a "maturity" factor that can calibrate what gets surfaced to whom and how much gets collapsed (but still accessible), rather than a single function for everybody. that way new members get to establish some of those same baseline points and arguments without wearing out the "seniors" with retreads.

totally agree that most people have good intentions most of the time, but i'm skeptical of motivations in a public context. intentions and motivations cross purposes all the time, and cheap social points, like junk food, are nearly irresistable to our evolutionarily-culled pro-social chemical pathways.