For example, I can post a comment decrying Blub with a snide remark (e.g., "You wrote a 1,000 line Blub program? Was it 500 getters and 500 setters?" in a thread discussing software projects) that is both information free and mean (perhaps Blub wasn't the author's preferred choice, but chosen for him or required in order to build an application for the iBlubber). People on this site generally dislike Blub, so the comment will get upvotes without adding any value to the discussion (an example of adding value would be saying you were able to do this in 100 lines of Flub using its cool new hygienic macros with a link to a paper on hygienic macros in Flub).
That's not to say all comment score data should be gone. Comment scores can still be kept and comments could be displayed on stories in the other in which they're displayed now (a mix of comment score and how recently it was posted). Generally, what I've found is that comments showing up _first_ tend to be of higher quality i.e., overall algorithm works more often than not.
[NB: I work at LinkedIn and we do this for connection counts-- we want users to network with each other, but we don't want to make it a "who has the most connections" game, that's why when you have over 500 connections (which is perfectly legitimate and allowed), only "500+" is displayed as the count on your profile]
Edit: I like my later thoughts on this better (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404267)
Users should live or die by their votes on that comment. If you vote up the blub comment, you should personally get the downvotes for it too. Upvotes should expose you to the karmic downside of superficial comments.
Especially because the really good comments, the ones most deserving of upvotes, don't seem to get a lot of downvotes; watch the scores on a 'patio11 comment closely sometime to see an example.
Minimum comment length of ~50 words.
This would A) get rid of casual snideyness, as those sorts of people wouldn't put in the effort to formulate a longer post; B) discourage crowd-pleasing one liners, which while enjoyable have a long term negative effect; C) still allow jokes, they'd just have to be asides to actual substance; D) encourage longer, better thought-out posts in general, and backing up of claims.
The problem is only partially too many bad comments, it's also too few good comments. Your proposal is targeted at lowering the amount of bad comments, but it might do so at the expense of the good ones.
Most of the users that have a high karma count have so because they always have something insightful to say (mechanical_fish (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mechanical_fish) is a good example), and their incentive for posting interesting stuff is marginalized by this. Almost all people, whethere they'll admit it or not, are incentivized by other peoples approval, eg. karma, and downplaying their contributions will make them more prone to not submitting great comments.
I can spend all day writing a post that has no substance, garners upvotes (in today's HN climate) and is as long as the day, but that doesn't make it good, or worthwhile.
Many of my short remarks are actually more to the point, or are asking a relevant question, or are politely correcting errors. It takes considerably fewer words to do this sort of thing than it does to be mean, while trying not to look like it.
To add to that, lionhearted posted a comment about inevitable site decline because of open membership and equally weighted voting. What if only accounts over 1 year could vote (or diminish their vote weight)?
Wouldn't instituting a min. length requirement and taking away new user voting improve the problem significantly?
However, I suppose you could argue that valuable content would be blocked to some extent, it a knowledgeable contributor was put off because s/he didn't have time for a longer comment. Still, 50 words isn't much, or 30, 25... anything above the average sentence length I suppose would start to have the desired effect.
On your other point, I'm thinking that short unwanted quips can rear their ugly head anywhere along threads.
The problem with time wasters is that it's no big deal for them, they're already wasting their time. It's always going to be up to users who care like you, me and others to try to mitigate the exposure of those time wasting comments while not penalizing legitimate contributions by users who care, and that's why I don't think a hard comment length should be implemented.
I just think that it's far too easy to game.
Another big issue with comment quality, of course, is in the general vagueness of it all. Jokes, for example, are almost always discouraged. Almost. On some occasions, it's quite appropriate.
(Or at least, that's what I assume it's like -- I don't know, I've never been invited into any elite prestigious clubs...)
Even if you say "Oh, it's just a time requirement", what are you gonna do if Big Name Smart Person shows up wanting to comment? Surely you're going to let them in. So now you have an elite line and an unwashed line and you're arguing about who should be in the elite line.
That way, you're rewarded when you contribute meaningful, valuable comments, plus from a reader's point of view, your comment will still have 10+ votes.
However, at a second glance, your idea could work. If people see diverse and insightful comments being voted up, perhaps the hive could learn to encourage creative and interesting comments.
Then again, this would incentivize upvoting comments with an existing positive score, and vice versa.
Perhaps the solution is to not display comment scores at all until you vote on a comment. (But order comments the same way they are ordered now.)
Very interesting point about not discouraging high value contributions: you don't want to create a situation where users have no desire (or are afraid to) comment.
> Most of the users that have a high karma count have so because they always have something insightful to say (mechanical_fish (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mechanical_fish) is a good example), and their incentive for posting interesting stuff is marginalized by this. Almost all people, whethere they'll admit it or not, are incentivized by other peoples approval, eg. karma, and downplaying their contributions will make them more prone to not submitting great comments.
I think we can all agree that users with high karma generally have it for a reason. However, you can't always deduce that if user A has higher karma than user B, than user A has higher karma because his contributions are always more insightful than user B's. It's not a total order.
The marginal incentive ("get more karma by writing a comment that gather N+1 up votes") is not aligned with the over all goal of the sight (produce consistently insightful content).
This would backfire because many useful comments aren't that long, and therefore people will be forced to pad them, this decreasing the s/n ratio.
For example, my paragraph above has 24 words.
It's actually based on a real comment I saw: the discussion was about migrating a 10 MLOC (iirc) enterprise Java system to git. One comment said that this system must have been "5MM getters, 5MM setters". That struck me as particularly mean and below the belt strike against the programmers who worked on this system: it's very likely there is a good reason why it had to be in Java in the first place (and other JVM languages may not have been available when it was created) and even so, it didn't mean the programmers working on it would have chosen Java as the language themselves (but they were not there when the architectural decision was made). Further more, it added nothing to discussion.
This is not unlike poking fun of somebody for wearing the wrong kind of clothes on the school yard: cheap way to score social points with the plurality of others present, mean and ignorant (may be they can't afford the right kind of clothes, may be they are going hiking right after class).
An insightful comment would have been something like "That's great that you were able to get this into Git, changing a VCS is a painful task. Have you considered using Scala in some of the modules? Functional objects, case classes and implicits could help you model your business domain better, write thread safe code, and get rid of much of the boiler plate."
Others are better at commenting, and maybe there are even different classifications of commenting or different badges.
You would be able to incentivize behavior (commenting) and then narrow it down to a particular type of commenting.
One interesting badge might be the efficiency badge, and that would be generating the most points or badges per minute on the site.
I already like what HN does with the colour of posts. What if HN switched to colour only? Displaying points
* encourages "karma whoring" by posters or just makes people care about how well their comment was received
* biases the decision to upvote/not by subsequent readers. Subconscious, conscious, contrarian, consensus-seeking, whatever -- shouldn't people make up their own minds as to whether a comment was good or not, on its merits rather than on what the rest of the community thought?
The information filtering function would still be accomplished by colour and order only.
Isn't this is a logical inconsistency? There seems to be no problem dividing the community into haves and have-nots when it comes to post quality.
It's not quite badges, and it is a bit twitteresque but i really feel like it ads value to the site for me.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mkdhfabjcebcgnpgnh...
This is similar to an idea I was toying with a while back but never got around to nailing down. Upvoting or downvoting an item should result in a change on the personal account, but rather than it changing the account's "score" up or down, the system records the vote based on the "type" of item. If a series of items are categorized as "Gossip" and I vote them down, the system learns that I don't like "Gossip" items. An item could be in multiple categories ("Gossip" and "IT") and my past voting would determine whether or not I would see the item on the page (super-roughly "the item was categorized 50/50 Gossip/IT, dpk's Gossip score is -11 and IT score is 10, result is -1, don't show"). In effect, users would themselves be group-able by their votes, so if someone in your "group" posted an item, it would get an automatic bonus. If someone in your "anti-group" (someone nearly diametrically opposed to you) posted something it would get a negative bonus.
Categorization would need to be put to the community, and would be done while the item is on what is currently termed the "new" page. Once the item is categorized the various display scores (as loosely described above) will be computed and the result could be shown to the users.
One side-effect of this is that it allows users to "shun" spammers in to their own "group". They could spam all they want but nobody would see it unless they were really excited about seeing spam.
The idea has (at least) one major serious problem: It encourages group-isolation. This could be partially resolved by always showing a "best of group" block of links somewhere on the home page, which could encourage users to branch out a bit.
As I said, this idea is not fully fleshed out, hence the overuse of quotes and its nebulous, hand-wavy nature. It's a less punitive, more categorical system. It may not scale at all.