[dang]

Good question. That's the intention, and also what ended up happening this afternoon. But there's a countervailing factor: when the discussion is so toxic as to be beyond the reach of pinpoint "Please don't be a jerk on Hacker News" nudges by the moderator. [1]

Empirically, the HN community has proven to be incapable of discussing certain subjects without immediately turning noxious. Once that happens, it's more than just a technical question of how best to consolidate the threads. The values of the site—intellectual substance and personal civility—are being grossly violated. If we allow that, how can we claim they're the values of the site? And if they're not the values of the site, who on earth would want to stay here?

That is the harder problem. We don't know yet what the long term solution will be, but we're going to keep experimenting until we find one.

[1] As you may have noticed, I've been making a lot of those this week--but they don't work on threads that have completely lost it.

[codezero]

There are some practical approaches that could be used to do more than nudge when discussions turn toxic. Allowing fresh threads just leads to the inevitable if there isn't a solid solution to the toxic behavior in general.

[dang]

There are some practical approaches

I'm all ears!

[chrismonsanto]

I run a large community. Here are my opinions:

1) The easiest thing you can do is have a friendly reminder about what is and what is not acceptable to post right next to the comment textbox. When I was in grad school they used to remind students of the honor code before each and every test, and apparently it reduced problematic behavior.

2) Posters in heated conversations care more about advancing their view than keeping HN civil. You can't rely on the downvote system, because mean comments that advance the "right" view will be upvoted regardless. You can't call them out, because your thread will be one of many, and the damage is already done by the time the comment is read.

They simply need to be deleted, and I don't see much deletion on HN.

3) there is a 99.9% chance a post is spam if it broadly criticizes the behavior of HN as opposed to the person they are replying to. These posts should also be removed.

4) For every topic of political contention, there is a group of people that ONLY post about that topic. These people should be monitored closely. I don't consider these posters to be participating in good faith--this is (or should be) a community of tech people that occasionally talks politics. So if you only post about a particular political issue, and never about any technology-related topics, one wonders if you are there just to advance your political viewpoint. As an aside, these posters mostly come out of the woodwork for gender-related topics, which I think are consistently the worst category on HN in terms of comment quality.

5) we need a clearer idea of what is and what is not acceptable on HN. Honestly I want to flag most of the political stories. I hate them. But I don't, because I am afraid of losing the feature.

6) ignore people who whine about censorship. There are a ton of other forums they can post on.

7) a more radical idea that I am less sure about: remove all political stories, and make politics.ycombinator.com. The twist: make membership invite-only. If someone is uncivil then it reflects poorly on the person who invited them. This is, as far as I can tell, the only effective solution to stopping uncivil discourse. When tensions are high, any amount of incivility can trigger another user. The only way to stop this problem generally is to stop it completely, there is no half way.

EDIT: to be completely clear: this advice really only applies to topics where the posters on each side have what can only be described as religious devotion to their point of view. Civil discussion requires humility, and there is rarely humility in political discussions.

[dang]

Thank you for taking the time to make this highly thoughtful reply, which at first sight looks excellent. I'm going to need time to re-read it and reflect on it.

[srean]

> They simply need to be deleted

Remember how that worked out with deleting pages on programming languages from wikipedia ?

EDIT: My point was to say that the same might happen to dang, we all know his identity, his email address. So, "careful with the axe Eugene". Over enthusiastic deletion, whether be it in good faith or otherwise (frankly, faith is irrelevant as far as content moderation is concerned), is often not a solution. As you probably know from your own experience, it often exacerbates the problem, Streisand effect and all that. I was surprised that you suggested the exact same style of intervention knowing how it turned out for yourself. See, someone downvoted this comment within minutes and its greyed out. This works a lot better. BTW "were terrible.... and likely unvisited" is a personal opinion and not widely shared. So in the end what have we learned from the experience ? same old (Ha! Floyd again)

[codezero]

I ran moderation at Quora, the interaction was definitely different but comment interactions were a really important thing to deal with. I'll drop you an email with some ideas if you want.

[dang]

Yes please.

[judk]

If you just let people argue in the politics threads, maybe they won't pollute the non-politics threads so much.

Politics posts are non-coercive opt-in hellbans. Everybody wins.

[codezero]

That simply doesn't work in practice.