| Just... your idea will never work!! K, joke over for now :) I agree. There have got to be a few clever / simple ways of discouraging low-quality hate, without discouraging high-quality hate or moving in the direction of censoring or complexity. By "low-quality" I mostly mean the derogatory and/or superficial ones. Just throwing some out there... Ask people to voluntarily check a "this is negative" checkbox when submitting, and if they have too many of them show a "curmudgeon" badge next to their name. Or, let the poster have a limit number of "this is infair" or "disputed" points they can assign, that will mitigate the benefit to someone's karma, or ding/label the person if too many people accuse them of being unfair in proportion to their number of comments. I know, I know, these ideas are stupid, and dumb, and idiotic, and so am I for having had them, and so is anyone within a 10 foot radius of me at the time I posted this, by proxy. Glad we got that out of the way. Re comments with high-quality hate, they are a strength of HN. I suspect many of the more shallow comments tend to keep them away (people might be less likely to add a thoughtful / informed criticism to a thread that already has a bunch of jabs). No doubt the future will bring some innovations for dealing with crappy comments. It would be nice if they happened on HN because it's still a great site. If Dotsies does get anywhere, I may individually contact many of the haters on that thread, just to say "remember this bitter comment of yours that discouraged people from giving it a fair shot?" :) |