You're right. Someone went on a downmodding spree.

I restored your karma. Now I'm going to have to write some software to prevent this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do...

~Flashback to 2002~

"Hey Paul, I keep getting all these junk email messages and they're filling up my inbox!"

"You're right. Someone went on an emailing spree. Now I'm going to have to write some software to prevent this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

~Flashback to 1995~

"Hey Paul, my programs keep crashing and never get updated!"

"You're right. Someone went on a desktop software spree. Now I'm going to have to write some software to prevent this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."

http://www.paulgraham.com/first.html

~Flashback to 1993~

"Hey Paul, this C++ code takes ten thousand lines to get anything done and keeps doing a fandango on core!"

"You're right. Someone went on a blub spree. Now I'm going to have to show people how to avoid subjecting themselves to this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."

http://paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

It won't be anywhere near as complicated. All I have to do is not display down arrows on comments over a day old.

A week might be more fair.

What about for articles off the front page?

I actually have a little free time now while I let a professional designer loose on some of my pages. Just post the source to news.yc and I'll send you a patch.

>Crystal ball into future<

"Hey Paul, I am getting all these requests from YC clones to apply to their program."

"You're right. Someone went on a cloning spree. Now I am going to have to do something to prevent this kind of kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."

http://y2combinator.com/

Maybe limit the number of "voting points" you get per day based on your karma? Works great at Perlmonks. Whoever it was went through my posts as well. I just figured I had pissed someone off with my Disqus post :-)

Sure enough. It was the same guy. I'm not going to out him, because he has contributed significantly to the site, and I think this was just a lapse of judgement but please do not do this anymore.

Thanks for restoring my karma everyone.

Ohh, pq ... will you _ever_ have positive karma? :-P

Downmodded as irrelevant to startup news.

Downmodded for being mean, and you only joined two weeks ago. Who are you to say?

Edit: I apologize for not sensing teh humorz. It was not so blatant.

Upmodded for not sensing blatant sarcasm.

There's this new tech that could be useful in helping you two communicate ;-)

If you can't downvote away people's karma, how do you make people who suck go away?

Often it's behaviors that suck, not people.

If you dislike something someone has said, the best way to deal with that is to reply explaining why. That's more work than just downmodding them, but it can pay off in the long term if you can turn someone into a useful contributor to the site instead of just making them leave.

I applaud your ability to maintain an optimistic viewpoint about humans even though all evidence points the opposite direction. What you're suggesting is completely unprecedented on the internet. What always happens is that an open forum is eventually overwhelmed by trolls and morons, and all the smart people give up. There has never been a case where a troll or a moron turned into a useful contributor because of thoughtful response from a good member of a forum. Just review the history of Digg, Slashdot, Reddit and almost any other open forum, all the way back to ancient USENET times...

Wasn't this forum created partially because reddit was overwhelmed by the hordes and all the interesting startup information was lost in the noise?

Actual trolls we'd ban. Merely dumb posts slide harmlessly into oblivion because they don't get any upvotes.

We'll never get the onslaught of 14 year olds they got at digg and reddit because most of them aren't interested in startups. You don't get idiots in your comment threads till you have this on your frontpage

http://power-robot.blogspot.com/2007/08/when-in-rome.html

so as long as we kill offtopic submissions, we should be safe.

Doubly damning is that the post is a fake, at least in the context everyone thinks it's in. It's a screenshot from a porn movie, not a random picture.

(Thinking out loud, just skip the rest of this.)

Posts like that do attract fourteen year olds, and once you do you can never, ever get rid of them. It's self-reinforcing.. Fourteen year olds attract other fourteen year olds, who create submissions like the one above, which attracts more fourteen year olds. One way to fight it is to implement a harsh banning system, the way Facepunch Studios did. Check out their ban list: http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showbans.php ... I count 93 bans today alone. Most for a week or longer, complete with reasons and viewable to the public.

And yet, a brute-force approach like that only sorta works. What's needed are strong community values combined with a strong punishment system. But not so much as to stifle conversation innovation - just enough to filter the noise.

Karma works, but some people need to be made more equal than others in that case; someone that's been with a community from the beginning is a hundred times as valuable than a newcomer (not an exaggeration), because they help enforce community values. It follows that they should get a karma vote weight proportional to their contributions. This means karma points with a decimal value instead of an integer.

To decide how much vote weight someone gets, you could use a simple factor like 10% of total karma. But much more interesting would be: If you upvote foo's comment, you boost foo's vote weight by 5% of your vote weight. If you downvote their comment in the future, that 5% becomes negative to their vote weight. What that does is ensure that at any given instant, foo only has as much power as he should have. Time with the community only gives foo a small power bonus, since his power is mostly determined by current public perception. And it forces people to really back up what they say. If they say something horrible, they may be rendered powerless tomorrow.

If everyone's karma starts at zero, and everyone's contributing 5% of it, then how does anyone gain karma? Ahh, well.. That's where being with the community from the beginning plays a part. For each day you make a comment that is upvoted, you get one karma point which can never be taken away.

If you're a part of something small, you feel like you're a part of something special. So one way to fight noise is to stay small, or divide your community into sub-communities (almost imopssible).

But I think most important is a goal, the kind Startup News has (you better be submitting stuff related to startups). With a community goal, it's at least an order of magnitude easier to filter out the noise.

A more complicated karma system is a good idea, but it would take a lot of tinkering to get it to work. If someone figures out how to do it right, they'd have the beginnings of a reputational economy, like in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Perlmonks is the best example I've ever seen of maintaining a great place for smart people. It's been running non-stop for a decade. It's very open (even allowing anonymous posts) but has community rules that mostly reflect common decency. Over the years I've seen countless disrespectful newbies and trolls turned into contributing members of the community. The solution there has been to have long-time members volunteer to enforce the published rules in a consistent and fine-grained way. It requires implementing a user hierarchy, but we already have that here with the "editors". Publishing some rules and systematizing the editor controls would solve most of the problems reddit has faced.

You'll very much enjoy reading http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

But no, it was created primarily as a test for Arc. The fact that it's so beneficial and awesome is a wonderful side effect.

Max Goldberg, the creator of YTMND, has this to say:

"I'm straying off topic, but the point is, the users are what make YTMND. Crappy users make the site crappy, and rather than trying to delete crappy content, it would be far easier to just keep users who create crappy content off YTMND. The hard part is figuring out who to let in and who will add value to the community and the site as a whole. "

Well, sort of true:

http://ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html

Yes, because of reddit. Yes, because of Arc. But mostly because it's a good way to learn about people.

That group enemy link is really insightful. Mod parent up :)

Which is, I imagine, exactly why you can't downmod replies to your own comments.

Disallowing downvoting for some cases is the best feature of this site so far.

You should downmod the comments, not the person.

What's happening here is that troll decides he doesn't like startupgeek, so troll goes to the threads page for startupgeek and downmods every single comment on there.

If you think someone sucks, then downmod the sucky thing they said. Not all the non-sucky things.

Right. There is no such thing as downvoting someone's karma. What you vote upon (unless you abuse the system) are individual comments and submissions. Karma is an overall score, not something you edit at will.

It's better to discriminate comments instead of people.