A plea for more thoughtful comments

Indeed, let's make that happen. Free software is not so much about code as it is about people. After all, it's people who should have freedom, not code… But one person's freedom ends where another person's begins. Whoever does not want to respect the freedom of others cannot be part of the community.

I have also noticed you having to intervene more lately as well, and for a lot of what seem like just trivial arguments. Perhaps it's just the stress levels in the world right now? You mentioned a comment quota, and I've not heard of that kind of idea anywhere else, but it seems like it could work! If you know you've only got X number of comments a day (to come up with that number you'd probably have to run some kind of historical analysis combined with closing your eyes and pointing at the screen) you may not choose to spend it on a nonsensical and emotional reply, or it might cause you to think just a moment longer about it. It could be easier and work better than the ubiquitous comment upvote/downvote system implemented everywhere else (which is at least something, but I suspect there must be something better).

When a user is entering a comment, above the text box, there is the text "Enter your comment text below. Please try to be polite, respectful, and informative, and to provide a useful subject line".

Unfortunately, I suspect that this is rarely read because it is easily overlooked, and the user is most likely just to focus on the text box, and their great comment idea...

Instead, when the user clicks on the comment button, perhaps it would be better if they got a page containing an edited-down version of this article, from where it would then be necessary to click on an acknowledgement button before being presented with the comment entry text box?

This is somewhat of an imposition of course, so perhaps it could be deployed using A/B testing, to see what impact (if any) it has on the number of comments requiring moderation?

Would you consider dedicated forum software like Discourse? https://www.discourse.org/

Discourse in particular is built from the ground up (among other things like well structured discourse and archival fidelity) for sustainable communities through self-moderation. Through (customizable) trust levels, users get progressively more moderation powers based on their engagement, meaning administrators stop being a bottleneck for moderation.

It would exist standalone, but article specific comments can be also embedded here so that the current experience can be maintained and users can use whichever they prefer.

For an example, see how articles in this blog: https://blog.codinghorror.com/
embed comments from this Discourse instance: https://discourse.codinghorror.com/

Disclosure: I work for Discourse (though not in sales!)

I will say that I don't comment very often but I haven't really come across anything that would put me off the site. That's likely because of how hard you guys have been working at moderation and handling things. That said I love the fact that comments happen here, for similar reasons that I like them on some other sites like Hacker News. On articles about topics like Linux Kernel development we frequently see comments and engagement from some kernel developers themselves that are talked about in the article that tends to give more context to events or decisions that happened and it's been wonderful to be able to see and get that kind of insight into things to understand why something happened. I see that sometimes on HN with technical topics like discussions around Nagle's algorithm when John Nagle himself chimes in on people's questions and I would hate to lose similar things here at LWN.

Yes please. This. Some of the endless and/or unfriendly commenting here is quite off-putting. I'd really not want to see the insightful comments go, or drown in the noise.

I personally think that trying to solve this with technology (quotas, upvoting, downvoting, ...) only heads down the wrong path. But hey, if that's the way it goes, I'm not going to argue about it in the comments.

Use AI to moderate comments....

oh, strike that....

A bit off topic, but I'd like to take the opportunity to congratulate the LWN team for their awesome work. This place is one of a kind and extremely valuable to the community, and it's all thanks to you. Kudos!

Maybe getting rid of the "unread comments" link might help; I sometimes think that there are people who keep refreshing that link all the time that so they they can deposit their teaspoon of salt on some else's snail's tail.

But yeah, the comments on "BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)" were kinda a breaking point. There was nothing anyone could learn from those comments; they all read like "No sir, I assure you you were completely wrong! Now give me satisfaction!"

What about showing users in their profiles how many people blocked their comments? One could hope this would bring self-reflection. And maybe improvement of behaviour?

I'm guessing the Bitkeeper post was the straw that triggered this plea. I wanted to call out three points from it.

First, while it wasn't the best example of efficient communication, there are quite a few comments that did provide useful and at times surprising detail (for instance, mjg's comment on GPLv2 Section 3, and the debate about license violation vs client used vs online services) so I think the signal level wasn't that low. And some of that knowledge came out in the middle of the post's somewhat monotonous debates.

Second, a post about BK, Linus and Tridge is kind of asking for it; while it is ancient history, many of us are really are that old. And we all know the topic is controversial, way more so than, say, flatpak vs snaps, or say, EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL; there's quite a bit of drama and also gray area in the rules and ethics involved, which is the sort of thing that in our community we just love debating.

And third, what I read of the debate appeared a bit circular but in proportion quite civil; there wasn't anything there very crude, so I'm not sure it really does warrant implementation of a policy or technical mechanism. Eyeballing it, I think the top poster did 36 posts, second 17, then everybody else seems under 7? And only two editor comments? Maybe the right approach would just be to contact the top posters directly ("hey, that wasn't a great example of online debate and we want to ask you to keep it constructive, and if you can't, we'll take action"). Sometimes it's not clear to the poster they aren't being helpful.

I don't comment often, as I rarely have anything valuable to add that anyone else hasn't already, and even then I've been guilty of the occasional ill-considered comment. One of the things that keeps my impulse to make useless comments in check has been the very high signal-noise ratio of the LWN comments (perhaps with the exception of the comments on some articles on more contentious topics). As a reader, the LWN commenters provide additional value and interest to me beyond the articles, especially as there are many notables and experts among them.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that even if our esteemed editors are afraid of the trend of comment quality, I haven't noticed a problem from my end, and my thanks goes to all of the fellow commenters that are doing the right thing.

> The LWN community has successfully straightened out comment-related problems before; we can certainly do it again now.

As someone who wasn't around to see such events, what did the community do to achieve that? I can think of two obvious guidelines:

1. Try to make only constructive comments.
2. Ignore unconstructive comments.

Are there specific actions you've seen from the community in the past which you would like to see again?

I think being able to collapse comment trees (and subtrees) would help a lot. It's a feature I often miss when looking at LWN comments.

At the moment, if I hit an unproductive conversation (or just one that doesn't interest me) and I can't easily scroll past then I often give up on the comments altogether – so that conversation effectively kills later ones. If I could collapse that whole tree then I could forget about it and focus on more productive conversations.

It also has the benefit that you could look out for which comment trees are more often collapsed as a way to help focus moderation.

As it is not always clear if a comment goes ballistic or not, and IMHO sometimes the misunderstanding of the poster/replyer to the post
(sometimes out of lack of knowledge, sometimes not to obvious irony/sarcasm/..., the huge difference on cultural background, age (why is the cynicism growing with age ;-) ...), ...)
- it might help to allow deletion of a post/comment (which also might backfire, as the latecomers can not see why there is so much fuss around it)
- or a "please disregard" flag, settable later, to show that one understands that the post "backfired".

I personally don't read overly curated/moderated forums, as the content there is "boring", as mostly only the middleground arguments are repeatedly posted in different viewpoints ans writing styles, but real advantages (which automatically mean that there are real disadvantages, or vice versa) will not be put on the table, as in the end there are "moderated" away.
Also humor/sarcasm/irony/... is next to impossible to not be offensive/off-putting/... to someone else, but leaving it out would again render the stuff more boring.

I personally like comments which I disagree, as they are mostly more enlightening, as they (may) point out a perspective or advantage/disadvantage which I did not consider relevant beforehand.

Please make it optionally possible to expose the "Personal information" to the public.

I do *not* think that this would prevent people from posting stupid things.
However, it would help *other* people to put the written text into perspective.

It matters whether the commenter has a background on the topic or not. That would help me as a reader to better categorize what was written.

There are many people here with deep knowledge of certain topics, but probably only few people recognize them.
That is where a text from a commenter who knows things degrades into a Joe Average flame sometimes.

I think many people are not posting anonymously here, but still only few people actually know who they are, because the information is not visible anywhere.
It makes a huge difference, if you realize, that you worked with that other person before or even met the person in real life, before replying to their comment.
It's often not easy or even possible to go from the LWN nick to that person that one has met a couple of years ago.

By having comments LWN is a form of social media platform.
The value in a social media platform comes from the community, and that requires moderation to keep it from getting toxic as it grows.

The comments are often insightful as community members chime in with their expertise, but I think LWN would survive without them. Links to articles get shared across other platforms and those communities' moderators can do the work if LWN's staff would prefer not to.

I suppose this runs the risk of people only reading the articles through links from other sites and not seeing that they could read articles early if they subscribed, but I'd guess there's a decent fraction like me who check LWN when taking a break rather than having everything come through social media.

For some years now, I have been of the following opinion:

We - everyone, not just LWN readers - shouldn't be able to just write a comment on some random thing on the Internet and have it show up automatically for everyone else to see. Platforms should not allow this - despite that this is currently the norm just about everywhere. Instead, if someone wants to write a comment on something, the platform should allow them to write their comment, and the comment should then be shown to exactly one person - the person that posted the thing they commented on - and that person should then have the option, with no obligation, to publish the comment for all to see. (In turn, comments would also count as "things", such that if one writes a comment on a comment, it goes to the writer of the comment, not to whoever posted the original thing.)

I doubt I'll ever see it happen, but I do think it would be a much better world to live in. There would be no vitriol, because it just wouldn't be approved. There wouldn't even be any spammers, because they'd realise there's no point trying. And moderation would become an _enjoyable_ activity, because basically everyone would be a moderator and each would be dealing with replies to their own stuff, which would mostly be good comments that related to what they wrote and were hopefully interesting to them, whereas currently, only a small proportion of people do any moderation, and those brave souls that do are mostly dealing with unpleasant things that need to be removed.

(Of course, this all applies to the ability of the _public_ to interact with something. It isn't intended to prevent someone communicating with someone else, or for a reasonably small number of people to communicate as a group, where those people already set up a mutual agreement to communicate in a particular way.)

So, as far as LWN in particular is concerned, comments on articles would be sent to either the writer or the full editorial team as a group to be approved - and comments on comments would be sent to the replied-to commenter to be approved.

farnz, a couple posts up (in /975961), suggested the ability to "reply in private"; this post of mine is a rather more idealistic/ideological opinion, so I didn't feel it appropriate to make this a reply to their post, but there are certainly some similarities in the technological implementation required.

You may want to consider adding the option for logged in users to flag a comment as violating content rules (you know, don't be a dick). That's not going to stop the message from being posted, but it has the potential of increasing the signal/noise ratio for your moderation and intervention times.

My hope is that it would result in a faster "hey, play nice" injection into the thread- a faster feedback for the folks causing problems.

I *have* seen the degradation in the comments- it's a minority doing it. I probably could set off one of those threads just via saying "I think lennart does good things" for example; the responses in threads like that aren't discussions as much as a couple of users just comment-bombing everyone else. Other subjects can trigger the same thing, systemd's just an easy one to point at.

I've been reading/subscribing to LWN since forever and I have a very high regard for the editors. Truly, an absolutely stunning cast of insightful experts.

But ... like many other people I'm over-saturated with articles/content from everywhere. On most other sites I do this: skip to the comments and read the 3 or 4 most upvoted comments to get the gist of the novelty/debate and in light of that decide if I'm going to read the article . When I come to a post on LWN I'll generally at least read the intro first. But with regards to the comments I generally ignore any of the children posts unless I'm involved in that particular thread.

That being said, please consider adding some sort of comment up-voting/labelling system. If you do truly hold your readership in high esteem, as you state in the article, then they should be more than capable of upvoting those discussion items worth reading and downvoting those that don't. Incidentally, it would also make me more inclined to really read the back-and-forth since it'd help me see what's more useful.

Thanks again and I trust you'll find what makes the most sense.

I really think you should add some sort of moderation (in the Slashdot sense)/voting system to the comments. The dynamic range of the comments here - from deeply valuable discussions from the exact people who are working on a feature, to arguing about FOSS ideology in ways that have not been novel since before the words "open source" were coined - is astounding, and the low end hurts the high end.

As a starting point, please add a "flag" button for egregiously off-topic / combative posts, which goes into an internal moderation queue. I know we can email in reports but the activation energy is high.

Past that, Hacker News's system is pretty straightforward: every post can be upvoted or downvoted. You get/lose karma from the votes on your post. Once you have a bit of karma (I think 300 or so?), the upvote button is unlocked for you; once you get a bit more, you also get the downvote button. Scores don't show up on comments, but they do influence sorting, and comments with negative scores get dimmer and harder to read and eventually collapsed with a button to click to expand them.

The specific problem I have with comments is sorting by threaded timestamp - if the first top-level comment is engagement bait, nothing will ever show up on screen before that comment and the comments it baited. You can have a vibrant and meaningful discussion in reply to the second top-level comment and it will only get pushed down further.

On a side note - I would be willing to implement these changes. I know there's been a mention of interest in open-sourcing the site code, and while I'd still love to see that, I'd be happy to send in patches privately too.

As a reader I find the LWN comment section works reasonably well because it is a relatively small community and subscribers only. Even if there is some occasional flaming I still find it rather mild in comparison, but it also gives a somewhat honest impression on what the community feels about certain topics, which is valuable I think. In particular I would not like to see up/down voting being introduced which is in my mind the distinction between journalism and social media.

I pulled comments from my sites long ago. I also never read the comments anymore because of an array of reasons. I commend the effort y’all put in but, I think many of us aren’t here for the comment section.

On the upside, I saw this article, and had to find out what all the kerfluffle was about.. and *that* motivated me to finally getting around to renewing my subscription :D.

If you're wondering what a long-time LWN bystander thinks of this...

(Bystander means...)
I've worked in the industry for a while now - I was reading LWN when BitKeeper was in use! But largely my contributions are bug reports.. which I have spent some time on harvesting information for, to be fair.. and of course projects I wrote that I went through the trouble to paste GPL licenses into.. until I realized no one really cared about a weird niche of evolutionary algorithms except me...

(1) Yes, I could do better on commenting. Always.
(2) That Bitkeeper article was a fun trip down memory lane - remember when that was the big drama in open source!?
(3) Are we more worried about _civility_ or.. productive outcomes?

I mean, the Bitkeeper article itself showed how people being rather uncivil can still yield rather productive results. But I do like LWN for the fact that it doesn't really go off the rails like other subscriptions I've canceled in other domains.

Tongue-in-cheek, with a point: if we really care about productive commentary, maybe a rule for ranting about something is: If your rant ends with you filing a bug report or publishing code to address the issue at hand, your comment stays. Otherwise it's deleted ;)

On the suggestions above: I would be curious about what comments I wrote that trigger someone to filter me. Would be a nice way to judge provocative comments on the "useful vs useless" trade-off. Obviously, if I'm filtered widely enough, it's impossible for me to convince myself that my comments are useful & productive, as no one is reading them....

Final tidbit: if you read LWN on mobile firefox, the comments are always nested such that, past a certain nesting depth, I get a long column one or two words (or so) wide, at which point I start scrolling to the next legible comment. It kind of ends up being a nice feature...