zlacker

This article was more interesting than I anticipated. While I admire the tinkering which goes on with moderation here in an attempt to keep discussion civil and interesting, sometimes it has counter-productive effects. In particular this rule doesn't seem to work very well:

In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with too many comments will get heavily penalized as controversial. In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes.

Is a vigorous discussion bad? Should everyone commenting also upvote?

>>grey-a+(OP)
I find this interesting as well. Flamewars are counterproductive, but if I had to pick between flamewar and no discussion at all, I'd probably pick flamewar. After all, it seems like flamewars sprout when ideologies clash, and shielding ourselves from ideological clashes feels like it encourages insularity of opinion. On the other hand, one could argue that heated arguments increase polarization, so I'm not really sure what should be done. I just think there needs to be more dialogue on topics that people disagree on, not less.

>>md224+H5
I've seen communities that banned flame wars. They succeeded, in the same way that ghost towns have no crime.

>>grey-a+(OP)
I used to imagine that scores were positively influenced by commenting. If there are comments then people thought the post worth noting.

I typically comment without upvoting. Maybe now that needs to change if I want to see discussion continue on topics I'm involved in.

>>grey-a+(OP)
My personal heuristic for reading is "if more comments than upvotes, don't bother". Such posts usually have a lot of repetitive, obvious comments -- typically bike-shedding, people trading anecdotes, etc.

Some specific examples might be questions that touch on child-rearing, or college experiences, or city-of-residence questions. Everyone knows next to nothing (sample size 1) but feels compelled to share. It's not information-dense enough to bother with.