Really bad comments are not the root of the problem. Simply having large number of mediocre comments crowds out and discourages thoughtful discussion from starting at all.
I'd say:
* create some real cost to making comments
* make bad comments disappear/not display at all with time
* make things less democratic -- to encourage good behavior identify users who have this behavior and make this behavior more prominent programmaticly
I've got no citation at all, but I'd bet that people who have N comments left in the next week will be more miserly about using them. You could also make exceptions for replying to replies and that kind of thing, so as not to artificially limit back and forth (which is sometimes a good thing; for example, tcptacek and zedshaw always have good conversations, if a bit argumentative).
It'd cut back on people who shotgun "funny" comments and have them land occasionally without disrupting people who try to only comment when they have something valuable to say.
A set of super voters would also be good, but, again, not super democratic.
Also, on the 'less democratic' idea, up-votes from users with more karma could be weighted heavier. Quality comments would rise up faster.
Stackexchange kind of does this. You need a certain (low) amount of karma before you can post certain types of submissions.
I think it's important to let new users have a visible voice, but giving older users greater powers for moderation might help preserve the older attitude of the site.
For example, bloggers who write insightful stuff on a regular basis should get some sort of bonus when content from their domains is upvoted early on. Maybe each upvote would internally count as 1.5 upvotes for the first 100. Similarly, bloggers who have a reputation for writing linkbait should get some sort of penalty.
Right now you can easily spend ten hours writing an amazing blog post and have it not even make the front page. This provides an amazingly strong disincentive for intelligent people to contribute, especially when the front page is dominated by vapid current events gossip. The heart of the problem is that the current system is set up to reward people for submitting garbage from TechCrunch and to punish people who try to make thoughtful contributions of their own.
Similarly, content that takes longer to read should stick around on the new page for longer. Otherwise the front page gets dominated by fluff. Again, there are lots of people who would be willing to spend 10+ hours writing a 3,500 word essay designed to benefit the HN community, but they don't because they know that there is essentially zero chance of it hitting the front page. Right now by the time the first few people finish reading, it's no longer on the new page so any upvotes basically count for nothing. This problem gets vastly worse as the amount of content submitted increases, so if nothing changes then we're probably only a couple more iterations away from having the front page be dominated by pictures of cats.
On the other hand, I've been ridiculously productive the last few months now that HN is basically unreadable, so maybe the decline in quality isn't such a bad thing after all.
Popular comments will make more karma than they cost, so users will still be encouraged to leave comments that will become popular.
It seems that a system like this will be even more sensitive to what community considers popular. For this to work well you'll need to make sure that comment being popular correlates with it being good. To improve on that you'd may need to further reduce inefficiencies (e.g. time-of-day vs popularity) and maybe implement un-democratic measures if "voice of the community" still doesn't correlate with good.
I'd split test this system (and any other change like this). Have some posts that have these new rules in place (this should be publicly visible) and some that don't. See how this affects the results.
This would probably work well if combined with the private messaging function mentioned elsewhere on the thread.
I can't see it working here, for a number of reasons, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
The idea is to reward people who are writing good stuff but who aren't making the front page, not to reward people who already have all their stuff upvoted.
I disagree. I think it would lead to a mix of bland groupthink and fashionable rebellion, with no room inbetween for the merely thoughtful.
I think in general you already have most of a filter in that bad comments get pushed down and the lower sections of comments seem to be read much less often.
Why is seniority good in and of itself? Privileging seniority seems anti-democratic and anti-newbie.
A karma penalty is a very soft slap on the wrist, at best.
It won't stop trolls, or assholes, or anyone with an agenda.
Subtracting a fixed amount of karma also gets less effective the more karma one has accumulated. So people with a lot of karma will be able to get away with more than people with less karma.
This has an upside, in that it allows more valued members of the community to express themselves more freely. The downside is that they can act like assholes without much repercussion. If the community winds up rewarding them for acting like assholes (by, say, upvoting their assholish comment) then that's even worse.
Of course, any community that not only tolerates but encourages assholes is not a community I want to be part of, and I've left a number of communities over that sort of behavior.
But there are other solutions short of "love it or leave it". I describe one such alternative in another comment in this thread:
That might work when there are a small number of participants and everyone has met everyone else face to face or when there's at least someone to vouch for the identity of every participant, but it doesn't scale very well to a community the size of HN.
I used to participate in the comments because the conversations were stimulating and the community was small. The community's too large for everyone to talk now, but HN has been the best tool for the intellectually curious to date and that doesn't have to change. The bar for commenting just needs to be higher.
When I read the top comments nowadays I'm expecting them to be written by:
- the author of the submitted article - the subject(s) of the article - employees or close relations to the subject(s) of the article - experts in the subject matter
At the bottom I expect to find comments such as product feedback or links to the print version of the article and minor but useful stuff like that. Smart people with interesting things to say shouldn't leave comments here--the community's too big for that now.
I'm not sure how you programmatically enforce that. It might be as simple as changing the commenting policies and have the users adjust their self policing.