zlacker

Making it cost karma to comment would be one way to do that. I could also do something like slashdot and reddit do, and not show comments below some threshold.

>>pg+(OP)
You think it's a good idea to penalize people for commenting? How does this help people new to the scene? "Thanks for joining in the conversation, here's a penalty" This only rewards people who have been around in the scene for a while, while penalizing all the new people.

>>pg+(OP)
Or a karmic penalty for upvoting a comment. That way you have to be respected by the community before you can upvote a thread. Maybe it would help curtail negative or snarky comments, if only because people upvoting have been around longer.

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.

>>rexree+m
Penalizing comments is also a more graceful solution than invite-only, because I doubt Jason Fried or Joel Spolsky care too much about their karma score here; the only people this dissuades are people who are commenting to game.

>>pg+(OP)
If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion.

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.

>>pg+(OP)
One feature of Slashdot that I did like when I still used it was the option to sort comments by point value, which usually meant excluding everything below a +4. Great time-saver, for those who are not interested in scrolling through long threads. For those who have more time or interest in reading through the discussions, they still see everything.

>>gleb+Q2
> If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion.

This would probably work well if combined with the private messaging function mentioned elsewhere on the thread.

>>rexree+m
People who have been around longer also know better what the community expects.

>>pg+(OP)
If it costs karma to comment or vote, then you also have to limit the number of submissions people make. Otherwise people will spam HN with controversial topics to accumulate enough karma to vote/comment. That said, if you could only submit one link per day, and it cost karma to up-vote or comment, I think the result would be much-enhanced. Also you'd have to give new members 100 points or something, but maybe they wouldn't be able to use them for the first week.

>>rexree+m
It's not penalizing, it's just acknowledging seniority. Sort of like how on Slashdot you can't vote on other peoples' comments until you accumulate enough karma.

>>pg+(OP)
Maybe something along the lines of N free comments a day, or 1 free comment per thread, just to get the ball rolling.

>>gleb+Q2
> If comments cost karma it would lead to less discussion, which I think would lead to better discussion.

I disagree. I think it would lead to a mix of bland groupthink and fashionable rebellion, with no room inbetween for the merely thoughtful.

>>gleb+Q2
If comments cost karma, some users will just submit more stories to try to earn more karma so they can keep commenting. That could decrease the overall quality of articles. One option would be to stop awarding karma for stories so that they only way to earn karma is through good comments. That would conflict with comments costing karma though because you'd never be able to earn the initial amount.

>>pg+(OP)
I'd be careful of comment thresholds at least to some extent. It's pretty well known across many of these services that if you reply quickly to a new story you're much more likely to get upvotes. Similarly with replying to a top post. If they need to be written quickly they often aren't as high quality or carefully considered, or may even fall back on some of the easy bad posting styles you're trying to eliminate. If you take the existing karma whoring incentives to do this and add to it that you may never even get read if you don't get in early that might cause a lot more people to play that game. And cause a drop off in participation from people who might only be able to respond to a thread when it's hours old.

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.

>>pg+(OP)
But that doesn't solve the problem of bad comments that get tons of upvotes, in fact it will probably aggravate that problem.

>>pg+(OP)
Risk aversion and loss aversion might lead to excessive silence if every comment cost karma. Maybe the cost could kick in above a certain speed/number of comments, or above some other threshold.

>>roadno+p4
> acknowledging seniority

Why is seniority good in and of itself? Privileging seniority seems anti-democratic and anti-newbie.

>>ilamon+83
This doesn't really address the main problem, which is that "poor quality" comments are being upvoted.

>>tptace+y2
It doesn't dissuade anyone who doesn't care about their karma, or who feels strongly enough about what they want to say.

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:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2405266

>>jacque+U8
It also actively disincentivises posting constructive comments on threads few people are likely to read, as commenting has a negative expected value. A constructive suggestion in a page dropping towards the bottom of the Ask/Show HN might get an upvote from the author if they vote, has a negligible chance of garnering upvotes from anyone else, and yet is more potentially useful to at least one member of the community than any number of eloquently-stated opinions on the 'openness' of a particular platform, whether we're in a bubble yet or the idiocy of the USPTO.