Comment quality

Well I have found that being able to ignore many posters has been very useful. Sadly I have to ask that I can turn off Guest versus paid subscribers as I am finding that the 'guests' are increasingly trolling.

> That said, I'm not sure that the current system is working all that badly?

Yes, it is. The signal/noise ratio in here has made it increasingly pointless to even read the comments. There's so many repetitions of the same inflammatory bullshit that the significant number of very capable people here that I very much want to read are a) completely drowned out b) commenting far less c) understandably can't always resist the trolls.

It also makes the 'Unread comments' feature far less useful because there's always just lots of repetitive stuff in there. While sad I'd much prefer ignoring certain article's comments so I can read the rest in peace. Sifting through 50 comments to two flamed articles, just to find the two others is annoying.

Experience elsewhere suggests that comment voting has many negative effects and few good ones. That LWN doesn't do that is one of the reasons I've thought that it's generally higher quality.

Back on topic here, more then complaining— there is something you can do which provide absolute protection against this stuff: don't run it. E.g. Gentoo runs fine without you using the latest trendy mac/smartphone architectural imports.

If you're like me, there are alternatives that better meet your principles and work styles— and perhaps they're only not as attractive because they don't get the enormous resource investment that things like Fedora do, but there is only one way to fix that...

> That said, I'm not sure that the current system is working all that badly?

The discussion here is significantly better than the "discussion" unfolding at That Other Site around the same topic, so I'm an advocate for leaving things as they are.

Are we getting a bit nostalgiac perhaps, remembering all the wonderful articles over the years and forgetting the minority of rude and flame-provoking comments, most of which appear on hot-button issues of the day?

I still find the signal to noise ratio much higher here than almost anywhere else, and am pleased that my subscription is helping support this community with such excellent leadership.

This is a complex topic. As a generalisation, I think that voting on comments is a bad thing that, if anything, increases the level of trolling.

Censoring is both a very emotive word and an extremely complex topic. If a site publisher has a clear policy that abusive and/or spam postings will be removed then all users of the site have to accept that policy or go elsewhere. I believe that removing posts as part of the process of maintaining that policy is _not_ censorship. And of course, users, particularly paying users, are free to lobby for a change in policy.

However, I think the best policy of all is that the editorial team publicly call out the postings that they consider abusive. As has happened twice in the comments to this article. It makes it clear to all where the borders of taste are and generally most people are willing to go along with this kind of social pressure. Serial offenders may eventually have to have their posting privileges curtailed.

Like many suggestions, mine have the downside of requiring more effort from the editorial team that would be better put towards identifying high quality news and (continuing) writing higher quality articles.