LWN: Comments on "A plea for more thoughtful comments"

A plea for more thoughtful comments

sammythesnake — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 23:15:37 +0000

> I think that something which could possibly work would be to limit both the depth and number of messages in a thread

I use a relative of this idea myself - once a thread has gone deep enough that replies are formatted a single word wide, I assume there's nothing worth the effort if reading them in that format :-D

Ways to make voting work better

farnz — Sat, 08 Jun 2024 14:01:52 +0000

I've seen a few people suggest "voting", and then get shot down by being pointed at sites that allowed voting where it all went wrong. IME, the issue with voting is that it gets gamed by people who have an agenda to push, or it becomes something where people vote for the "wrong" reasons.

I'd like to suggest instead that you give people the power to "flag" comments to you; each account has a (hidden) weighting for flags, and if the weight of flags on a comment exceeds a (hidden) level, it's surfaced to the editors for handling; if it exceeds a higher threshold, you get an alert to investigate it. Then, there's no benefit to flagging comments if you have an agenda to push (because the most that will happen is that the "weight" of your account will be reduced), but there is a benefit to flagging comments that are taking things in a bad direction, because that gets the editors a chance to look.

As an extension, once a comment is sufficiently flagged, you could turn on moderation for replies to that comment and all of its children automatically, up until an editor comes along and looks, clearing both the flags and the moderation queue. Then, if a comment is heavily flagged you don't get the long thread of unhelpful replies to deal with - instead, you have a moderation queue to deal with. This depends on you ensuring that high-weight accounts are good at flagging bad comments, of course.

In terms of controlling weight, I'd suggest that accounts have an initial weight, and that you have the ability to give all accounts that flag a comment an increase or decrease in weight as part of clearing the flags on a comment. This means that people who tend to flag comments that need attention urgently can be increased in weight, while people who flag comments that don't need your attention can have their account weight reduced.

Comment voting usually ends up as mob rule even with the best of (initial) intentions

pmccormick — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 20:08:32 +0000

I _think_ reddit is a bad example of the outcome of comment voting because of the number and broad spectrum of users create a very low or average level of what gets upvoted eg obvious puns get more traction than insightful technical comments. I believe if you look at old old threads from the early days of reddit you see much better and high value comments.

Hopefully LWN's audience, being small, focused, and above average, would not fall into this behaviour.

Hiding subthreads

paulj — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:28:47 +0000

And what do I see today - a little [-] on comments, which I can click on and collapse (sub-)threads. Thank you dear editor! :)

Selling comment quotas

mtthu — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 20:59:12 +0000

Thanks a lot, you are my favourite Alter Ego ;-)

A plea for more thoughtful comments

ssmith32 — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 23:37:04 +0000

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...

A plea for more thoughtful comments

jengelh — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 21:15:36 +0000

>above the text box, there is the text

That's surely a case of "routine-blindness". But maybe "easily" fixable: Right now, the inside of the textbox just shows a gray nondescript "Comment text" string; what if we moved the politeness instructions to replace "Comment text" as the default graytext?

"Letters to the editor" maybe?

corbet — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 18:16:52 +0000

We once had a letters section; the last Weekly Edition to include it appears to have been almost exactly 20 years ago. It never really was what we wanted it to be, and we didn't get a lot (or any) complaints when it went away.

"Letters to the editor" maybe?

lunaryorn — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 16:06:25 +0000

Indeed. I'd love to have some kind of good old "letters to the editor" section like in a traditional newspaper, published once a week, with curated relevant and on-topic opinions from subscribers, but I wouldn't miss comments in their current form.

Selling comment quotas

Alterego — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 12:24:31 +0000

+1 i vote for you, i give you my residual second comment :)

A plea for more thoughtful comments

ChrisShort — Fri, 31 May 2024 21:27:03 +0000

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.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

Tobu — Fri, 31 May 2024 18:18:18 +0000

It's actually possible to put the names of CSS system colors in the accounts customisation page.

Background → Canvas, Text color → CanvasText, Link color → LinkText, Visited link color → VisitedText. However, it will pick light system colors, it also needs the color-scheme CSS property or meta tag to be set to something like "light dark" to indicate compatibility (see here).

Hiding subthreads

Wol — Fri, 31 May 2024 15:13:30 +0000

> That people can discuss what they want and explore stuff is one of the good aspects of LWN. I wouldn't want to lose the good sub-threads, just cause of some less-interesting sub-threads.

I bang on about Groklaw, but that was also why Groklaw was so good - you could discuss almost anything.

And Groklaw was aggressively moderated! I wasn't impressed when I fell foul on the odd occasion, but at least the rules were very understandable - PJ said "this is my blog, treat it like my living room. Anything I don't like gets deleted". But there was very little of that - the main rule was "if you can't back up your argument with logic or facts, don't stir the pot". So the debate couldn't get *too* heated because passion-based debate overstepped the line pretty quickly!

Cheers,
Wol

Hiding subthreads

paulj — Fri, 31 May 2024 13:29:26 +0000

Just to echo some other replies to you: A simple CSS based (sub)-thread collapse feature, that worked on article comment threads and the unread comment threads would solve 99.99% of issues for me.

The comments on LWN are generally good. LWN hardly has a problem. Yes, we can have tangents, but hey... Some tangents can be interesting (to some) and you learn stuff, others you don't - for the latter a CSS +/- collapse function would work perfectly. Let me ignore those and skip on easily. Problem solved.

That people can discuss what they want and explore stuff is one of the good aspects of LWN. I wouldn't want to lose the good sub-threads, just cause of some less-interesting sub-threads.

Hiding subthreads

madscientist — Fri, 31 May 2024 13:09:38 +0000

Yes, this. The main place I would use this kind of filtering is "Unread comments" and thread persistence wouldn't work (for me) there. I suppose the kind of "whole article" hiding mb talks about could be useful to persist: "don't show me any comments about this article ever again". But honestly I myself would probably never want that kind of persistence because even when articles seem overwhelmed by silly arguments you can often find a gem, and following "Unread comments" a few times a day (plus a few choice author filters) makes it reasonable to see them.

A great thing about the readership of LWN is they're virtually all technically sophisticated enough that proper threading and replies are simply ingrained even for the most contrarian (barring mistakes anyone can make).

Believe me I am familiar with the appeal, but we should try to avoid letting the perfect be the enemy of the good!

A plea for more thoughtful comments

SLi — Fri, 31 May 2024 12:46:57 +0000

If you really wanted to use AI, I can try to think of a way in which it might be useful, though I suspect it would be way too fancy and controversial for LWN. Still I think I'll throw this idea out there!

You could have a language model evaluate a comment before being posted, perhaps not only for tone and constructivity but also for clarity etc. (I suspect the prompt would need fine tuning to not nit about silly stuff like overly technical language.) And again, a soft power suggestion: Don't use that information to make any decisions. Only present that AI evaluation as feedback to the comment writer together with a "Post comment" button.

For fun, I tried how Gemini would comment this response (everything above with the parent comment and the article in context). I think it would be good to adjust it to be less positive and tell it to only give encouragement for really great comments. That is, I'm not sure this feedback was so useful, but I hope this comment is not a worst offender either:

<gemini> Your comment demonstrates thoughtful engagement with the topic. It acknowledges the potential controversy of AI moderation while offering a balanced, constructive suggestion. The idea of using AI for pre-posting feedback is innovative and could promote self-awareness among commenters, potentially improving the overall quality of discussions on LWN.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

SLi — Fri, 31 May 2024 12:26:24 +0000

FWIW, I came here to the comments section to suggest, essentially, exactly this, or some variation of it: Make the admonishment to behave more prominent in one way or another. I think this might already be enough soft power to improve things.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

mb — Fri, 31 May 2024 07:10:15 +0000

>I think you might not be fully understanding what I'm advocating for

I understood it very well. I don't want pre-filtering. It's the opposite of a free and informed society.

>You _would_ see those opinions, and you _would_ know if people disagree with you.

No. I would only see them for direct replies. Everything else (= the majority of text) would be pre-filtered.

>Because nobody is going to see it unless they specifically _go_ to that blog.

LWN is no different.

>I feel this was a much more pleasant place

That's just because you chose to not read the flame blogs.
And that is exactly why I think the better solution is to give the *reader* a filtering capability. Not the authors or moderators.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

rrolls — Fri, 31 May 2024 05:51:03 +0000

I think you might not be fully understanding what I'm advocating for, so I'll try to clear up a few things.

> I want to read opinions that are contrary to my own. I want to know, if somebody disagrees with me. I do not want this disagreement be filtered away by a third party.

You _would_ see those opinions, and you _would_ know if people disagree with you. Because when you post something and someone comments on it, _you_ are the first person to see it, _you_ are the moderator for that comment.

What you get is the ability to then cast a judgment on that comment before anyone else sees it. What everyone else gets is the knowledge that anything appearing as a comment under something you posted is something you deemed worthy of showing to the world, something you deemed interesting, not some spam or inflammatory remark. And obviously the way to use this tool isn't to only approve comments you agree with (though some surely would), but to approve comments you find interesting, useful, relevant, and considerate - whether you agree with them or not.

> And besides that, you can't even enforce that I can't comment on something. I can just do it somewhere else instead. For example by linking to your text in my personal blog and then commenting on it without any restriction.

And this isn't what I want to enforce! You absolutely _should_ be able to say whatever you want on your personal blog or anything else that you might host yourself. Because nobody is going to see it unless they specifically _go_ to that blog.

So:

You want to self-host something? You do what you want - only people who want to see your stuff will see it.
You want to post something up for display on someone else's thing? Then it should be that person that decides whether it actually gets displayed or not.

I'm pretty much calling for a modernised revival of the 90's/early 00's culture, where everyone just maintained their own little personal static website, people would email them if they had something to say, and if they received an interesting email, they'd post it up on their site and maybe add a response while they were at it. I feel this was a much more pleasant place to be than the world that social media and the general ability for anyone to post comments anywhere has given us.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

rgb — Fri, 31 May 2024 05:45:17 +0000

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.

Make number of blocks visible

raven667 — Fri, 31 May 2024 01:07:18 +0000

Maybe but there an old saying about this kind of negative hinting "Dollars of Shame, not Lira of Pride", because some people will perversely want to make the number go up.

Hiding subthreads

intgr — Thu, 30 May 2024 20:33:06 +0000

Perhaps there could be a setting to automatically collapse conversations that are nested N levels deep, but can be expanded if desired, similar to 'comment filtering'. I find that I mostly skip those anyway. (And they look quite ugly in the mobile version)

Collapsing comment trees

mpr22 — Thu, 30 May 2024 20:12:20 +0000

> 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.

I was thinking this exact thing just now, as I went through my 263-entry Unread Comments page.

A plea for more thoughtful comments: please add moderation/votes

geofft — Thu, 30 May 2024 19:50:12 +0000

Also, please add an edit feature and/or a delete/hide feature. It gives people a second opportunity to be thoughtful as well as a way to back out of a discussion that has become combative - right now, if you post something and realize it's flamebait, you have no way to _stop_ flaming people. (It's totally fine to make edit history available for transparency.) It will also help with minor corrections: if someone gives you a correction, you can do the correction and they can delete their reply and the off-topic discussion will stop taking visual space.

A plea for more thoughtful comments: please add moderation/votes

geofft — Thu, 30 May 2024 19:46:30 +0000

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.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

halla — Thu, 30 May 2024 18:59:13 +0000

I would love that...

A plea for more thoughtful comments

karim — Thu, 30 May 2024 18:58:22 +0000

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.

Hiding subthreads

tbird20d — Thu, 30 May 2024 18:44:23 +0000

I strongly agree with this. I think that deep nesting is a (often) a good signal that something has gone off-topic.
So even without the ability to hide it, nesting of subthreads is useful.
It's kind of like the kernel rationale for 8-space tabs. When something starts getting
indented too far, it's a signal that something has gone wrong.

I guess that's a vote from me to NOT go to a flat mode. If anything, it would be nice to have colored
indentation markers so you could easily return to the level of subthread that was interesting or
useful. Sometimes, on a long back and forth thread, there are other responses to early points
that are worth reading, and they are hard to find when the early messages have scrolled off the
page.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

elw — Thu, 30 May 2024 17:34:53 +0000

Well... now I feel silly not realizing this comment was in response to another and not the article, apologies.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

elw — Thu, 30 May 2024 17:32:47 +0000

Moderating content is different than moderating trolls. I definitely think what we're calling for here is the latter. I agree that LWN should provide a platform for opposing viewpoints to be expressed and discussed. But that's not what's up for debate here. The LWN moderators are tired of having to babysit the behavior of adults who act like children. I am almost 100% certain that they have neither the time nor interest in additionally silencing opposing views and opinions when they are respectful and constructive.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

ferringb — Thu, 30 May 2024 17:23:46 +0000

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.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

wtarreau — Thu, 30 May 2024 17:23:12 +0000

Then maybe also have an option to automatically hide comments from people having not filled these info. That's a matter of mutual respect: before speaking I introduce myself. If there's no way to know who I am you might not be interested in what I have to say anyway since you don't even know if I'm legitimate regarding this.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

wtarreau — Thu, 30 May 2024 17:05:33 +0000

> I believe it's one of the IETF rules; one may send no more than 3 emails per day to any given working group.

I don't think so. Maybe it's suggested somewhere but I don't remember about this. I've been participating to super-long threads in the past on heated debates, a-la LKML. And even without this, it happens that there are multiple topics in parallel that deserve a discussion, and you're sometimes only available on week-end to respond to everything, so it's very possible that I've sent 10 to 20 mails a single day and been silent for a week for example.

I think that something which could possibly work would be to limit both the depth and number of messages in a thread depending on the depth. It would force responders to respond to the more general topic rather than the contentious point. After all, (except for maybe some rare possibly vocal participants), a degenerating thread often involves multiple people, and if one reaches their limit, another one could continue. On the opposite, saying that the thread is full, talk about something else could generally work better. At least I think so :-)

Selling comment quotas

jzb — Thu, 30 May 2024 16:14:07 +0000

That's a creative suggestion, but I don't think we want to disappear comments - we'd just like to see fewer threads that go into tangents where it's a few people arguing with each other at length and getting personal about it in the process. It would also be extra work for us to manually bless comments for permanence.

Selling comment quotas

kh — Thu, 30 May 2024 16:00:43 +0000

I think one of the issues with Comments is their permanence, which causes them to almost gain the weight of the article - but unlike the article, they lack the time that is put into proofreading and editing.

I wonder if a better system might be to by default delete all comments after 30 days. Maybe non-subscriber comments after 10 days. Site editors could make some comments permanent if they judged them to be especially helpful addendum to the original article. If someone wishes to write in stone, rather than sand, they can submit an article.

Civilized Discourse ☺

Wol — Thu, 30 May 2024 14:22:09 +0000

Ta muchly! It's rather well hidden :-) - "hidden in full view" as me and my wife like to say.Once you know it's there it's obvious, but not before ...

Cheers,
Wol

A plea for more thoughtful comments

apple4ever — Thu, 30 May 2024 14:17:25 +0000

I hope that we can work it out. I do like some of the suggestions of "slow mode" and collapsing threads. I use the later a lot on HN - sometimes not even for "bad" conversations just ones I'm not interested in.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

flussence — Thu, 30 May 2024 14:02:57 +0000

I used to check the unread comments page once or twice a week because, in the distant past, it was a way to serendipitously learn new and interesting things. The quality of comments was one of the reasons that convinced me to open my wallet for this site and not, say, Slashdot or Phoronix. Both of which were much less of an insane hotbed of extremism back then than they are now.

At some point I realised I was no longer getting anything out of the habit and it was in fact damaging my mental health. So I plonked the link out of sight in uBlock and spent a few months with comments turned off entirely. That's not an action I want to take, but I have a very short list of verbs available and none of them will put the fire out.

A plea for more thoughtful comments

mb — Thu, 30 May 2024 13:59:37 +0000

I don't want to live in a world where I only read moderated and pre-filtered comments.
I want to read opinions that are contrary to my own. I want to know, if somebody disagrees with me. I do not want this disagreement be filtered away by a third party.

And besides that, you can't even enforce that I can't comment on something.
I can just do it somewhere else instead. For example by linking to your text in my personal blog and then commenting on it without any restriction.

Being able to publish random things unmoderated is the basic building block of the Internet.
None of the moderated alternatives has survived the test of time.

Civilized Discourse ☺

rschroev — Thu, 30 May 2024 13:47:01 +0000

Look for "Display old parent in unread comments screen"

It's only the direct parent, not the full history, but I agree with Jonathan that it's pretty useful (the headline has a different color to differentiate it from actual unread comments).