It's a combination of user flags and us burying/killing duplicates. We kill duplicates unless they have an active discussion, in which case we bury them (i.e. demote them in rank while leaving them open).
There are also penalties for flamewars. Originally I turned up the penalty because the discussion was so horrible. Users pointed out that a story of this magnitude needs to be on the front page, which was a good point, so I lightened the penalty.
By "horrible" I mean violating HN's values of intellectual substance and personal civility so badly as to be irremediable. There are some topics the community here has empirically proven itself to be incapable of discussing without that happening. I resisted this view for a long time—ask tptacek or davidw, my adversaries in this debate for years!—but my position either was wrong or at some point became so.
I don't know yet what the long term solution is, but the status quo is untenable, especially because these things aren't static—they get better or worse, and the trend has been worse.
Driving content off the front page may well make the discussion worse.
It takes time and effort to write a thought-out comment on contentious issues and if I invest that time only to find that the post has been flagged off the front-page then I'm much less likely to invest the effort next time.
It'll essentially mean good comments are driven away from contentious posts resulting in a downward solution.
Flagging should be focused on bad comments and not on the contentious stories themselves.
When I find myself entering into discussions like those surrounding the Eich story, I often get to the end of a long and thoughtful post and realize that it was just catharsis and my view doesn't add anything but my reaction to the thread.
I think part of being a good HN commenter is avoiding contentious discussions. That's not the same as avoiding contentious topics, but recognizing that the tone and tenor and volume of a comment thread is hopelessly bad. Stories are bigger than a particular submission.
Objectively, the submissions for the Eich story are low quality by HN standards, and the submission for something like Eich isn't the story. The story is a hydra and over time the heads which grow back look more like this than a retweeted press release and the discussion is becomes more that the reactive tweets.
What is unique about HN are headlines like "The Inside Story of Eich's Resignation [2014]" that will make the front page in 2018. To me, there's nothing wrong if people are forced to go elsewhere to passionately opine on breaking news as it breaks. Threads with 100 comments in the first hour are mostly noise and noise attracts mostly more noise.
None of this is to say that the Eich story doesn't touch on deep important issues, or that I would not prefer that HN could handle such stories. But the problem with the comment threads were not caused by individual behavior but by group behavior. It's not a few bad actors but the collective result of group interaction.
Driving content off the front page may well make the discussion worse.
I doubt that, because some attention-getters only seek high-value targets. But even if you're right, the disadvantage is more than offset by the benefit of marginalizing lunacy. We're not talking careful pursuit of the truth across honest differences of opinion here; we're talking ragefests.
Nor is it story content we're seeking to drive off the front page. The stories in question are all on-topic (or they would already be buried), so the stories aren't the problem. The problem is that, like evil catnip, they drive HN mad.
Newcomers treat the front page—stories and threads—as representative of HN. I don't think they're wrong to do so. But if what's de facto representative routinely flouts HN's values, then our values—intellectual substance and personal civility—are a joke. Our values are not a joke.
It just feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water; I can understand where you're coming from but I think the focus should be on penalising fluff and incivility (maybe some kind of sinbin to encourage positive behaviour ?).
Often major issues are contentious; the interplay between personal and professional life is a major issue and one that many HN contributors deal with on a daily basis (for that matter many personal comments on HN result in professional relationships). If we can't discuss contentious topics in a reasonable manner then we're already in trouble.
If you look at Usenet or Digg historically even minor issues often burst into flamewars (remember Emacs vs Vim wars?) - it's not the issues that cause incivility. It's the people.
I fully agree, except re baby/bathwater, which is to say we see the tradeoffs differently.
If we can't discuss contentious topics in a reasonable manner then we're already in trouble.
Precisely—and it's clear that we can't, and that we're in trouble. I regard this as, perhaps not a crisis, but certainly an existential issue for HN. Because of it, the site has drifted away from its values: intellectual substance and personal civility. Those values are why I'm here. They are our priority and not open for negotiation.
But everything else is open. There's nothing we're doing right now (including these feedback comments I've been posting) that isn't just an experiment. If we get better data or better ideas for genuinely improving HN, nothing would make us happier. We don't claim to know the answers—it's all about seeing what works.
Most Usenet readers at least supported comment tree folding. In a contentious HN thread, I have to hold page down for a few minutes to reach the second top level comment. My experience with Reddit tells me the substantive discussion happens a few trees down from the top, and that part of these threads is effectively inaccessible.
My observation is that low quality discussions correlate with high rates of commenting - more than about 50 an hour and there is likely to be a lack of self control regardless of topic. Shared tragedy is perhaps an exception, but only perhaps.
Thinking about the threads as bandwidth and too many posts as congestion, then the solution would be some form of rate limiting. Maybe weighted maybe not.
Instead of banning the discussion, consider banning the people making it bad. Or, if they are otherwise worthwhile contributors, warn them first.
I'm not sure what options the moderators have right now, but perhaps you should consider adding a three-strikes policy for users making clearly awful comments, with a simple "warn"-UI button for mods.
Having read part of the threads (I know, I shouldn't have), the problem wasn't so much abuse or bad behavior. It was well intentioned people talking past each other.
I don't think you should ban people for that. @dang is right to just demote it.
Yes. This is what I hate most about political stories on HN. They mostly just create opportunities for people to misunderstand each other, yell at each other, and then get angry at each other. For no good reason.
In the worst of these threads, people don't even disagree; they just don't agree with each other the right way, or don't agree as fiercely as they'd like. No matter; they'll still yell and spit at each other.
The number of times I stopped myself from "yelling" at people that they weren't even disagreeing or that they had simply misunderstood each other in the last two days....
We know that they algorithmically detect flame wars and automatically demote threads that devolve into them. It would be shocking if the Eich threads weren't setting those off.
There are also penalties for flamewars. Originally I turned up the penalty because the discussion was so horrible. Users pointed out that a story of this magnitude needs to be on the front page, which was a good point, so I lightened the penalty.
By "horrible" I mean violating HN's values of intellectual substance and personal civility so badly as to be irremediable. There are some topics the community here has empirically proven itself to be incapable of discussing without that happening. I resisted this view for a long time—ask tptacek or davidw, my adversaries in this debate for years!—but my position either was wrong or at some point became so.
I don't know yet what the long term solution is, but the status quo is untenable, especially because these things aren't static—they get better or worse, and the trend has been worse.