[mcav]

In a small community where people collectively want to foster good discussion, comments can succeed for a while. I think it's impossible to sustain that if the community grows or if they lose their focus.

No community I've ever seen, apart from MetaFilter, has kept the noise level low enough that participating in the community is enjoyable. Hacker News was great a few years back, but it's painful to watch now. Same for every other site I've known: As the community grows, discussions degrade, and people get hostile.

People don't have a lot of insight. So when sites open up to comments, the typical comment — which may be perfectly average for humanity — is trash. People have agendas and biases. Most people don't see it, or don't care, so they don't correct for them.

Commenting systems and algorithms can hold back the tide for a while. They can force out people with a net negative impact on the community. But in the end, attempting to sustain good discussion is a losing battle. It's so easy for good discussions to turn bad, for intelligent arguments to become baseless, for disagreements to become personal attacks. Humanity as a whole isn't capable of rational, reasoned discussion at scale.

[estenh]

I'm just wondering what can be done to sort of capture that feeling of contributing to a community in places that already have large numbers of commenters. You're entirely right that it doesn't work at scale, but there's part of me saying it doesn't _have_ to work at scale. Maybe you can create dozens of tiny communities as part of one large one. I have no idea what that would look like, but it sounds intriguing, at least at this point.

On my blog, someone said they were considering assigning some heavily-moderated "contributor" slots to each post, where each would sort of be treated as an addendum to the post itself. That definitely strikes me as an interesting way to focus discussion to small groups, but also very difficult to handle in any kind of automated way. There's also the concept of focusing discussions into communities with similar topics, but I don't think you'd get the breadth of commentary that you would with other systems through that.

You're right though; the average comment is trash. The question I want to ask people is how they can motivate commenters to realize that what they're posting is trash and either just not post it or refine it.

[pagekalisedown]

Do you think HN should charge like MetaFilter?

[mcav]

Yes. Or require someone to verify a github account with original work or something.