The biggest danger is not the obviously bad comments, though. It's the meretricious ones-- the zippy one-line putdowns and strident political statements-- because the newer users actually vote these up.

The big surprise for me is how much the mere voting power of the new users is changing the character of the site. A zippy one-liner that a year ago would have languished midway down the thread now becomes the top comment.

So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and more dangerous decline I've been seeing.

I suppose I should be encouraged we made it to 40k in decent shape. Maybe I'll be able to come up with some kind of fix.

I think the best way to handle this is to apply a sort of social equivalent to the PageRank algorithm to users. Thus, when a user votes up/down an article, its points change as a function of that user's karma level. Consequently, users with greater karma have greater direct input into the community.

Eigenvalue centrality is a fascinating algorithm that provides such a use case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality#Eigenvector_centrali...

Another benefit of such a system is you would no longer need to enforce karma thresholds for downvoting, as this sort of meritocracy arises naturally from the algorithm.

It would be interesting too because over time as a user's karma rises or falls it would change the current score of all the articles and comments he's voted. That would be interesting for two reasons: 1. It could cause old, interesting articles to bubble back up onto the front page months or years after they were originally posted and 2. It could help alleviate people's anxiety associated with their own karma score-- it would be something that you know bounces around in an out-of-your-control manner and not something that monotonically trends upwards. The loop between user's karma, article and comment points would be closed. We could use our fancy math to analyze the stability of the system and figure out the proper controller to insert in the loop to prevent positive feedback making it all go to the rails. It could be beautiful.

With popularity comes the masses and that will always lead to lowest common denominator winning out. Hopefully there will never be any lolz cats on here!

Great job btw pg.

You could establish influence as a factor of a user's "distance" from the community's founders: you'd have the founders, the founders' friends, the founders' friends' friends, and so on, each with diminishing influence in community moderation.

However, this and other suggestions are not new, and pg doesn't tend to comment on them.

So in the end it's all a waste of effort.

edit for additional explanation: Democracy is another name for the tyranny of the mean. You can try to educate the mean all you want, but at some point it's a losing strategy due to the sheer weight of the numbers.

Further thought: stackoverflow is an example of a community that has implemented an incremental rights model successfully. Universal rights are cleaner and more elegant, but ultimately give a community over to the mean.

- The community of readers will keep growing.

- New readers will continue to find it easy to comment and participate.

- New readers will mostly enjoy and prefer the kind of content PG and many older users want to discourage (not a big reach, since there are tech-oriented sites with millions of readers and participants having pretty shallow discussions.)

Then we have a different problem; we're trying to suppress the majority of users and rule with the minority. Incremental rights with a simple "karma" model won't help us in any way I can see, because the majority will vote up people who contribute the kind of content we don't prefer, and those people will have the karma to perpetuate that content.

(As I understood, that was your original point here, but I don't see how incremental rights is a good way of tackling that issue, at least not the way SO does it.)

Imagine a 30-day waiting period between joining the site and being able to influence content. You won't stick around unless you like what is already there.

pg, you've done a hell of a job thus far. i've never seen an internet hangout get this big and this old, yet remain this polite and civil. but as external forces conspire to drag the site down toward the mean, fighting them off will require increasingly severe countermeasures.

If you don't want the character of the site to change then don't allow new users to vote. It annoyed me on StackOverflow at first, but now I see the wisdom in it.

In this way, ultimately PG determines the character of the site by spreading voting power directly and indirectly via his voting.

I think it makes more sense for voting power to be associated with karma level.

This could be gamed, or lead to runaway karma effects within a small, incestuous cabal.

If I were pg, I would handle it similarly to amichail's suggestion, but instead of voting power going to submitters of articles that I like, I would have it go to voters of articles that I like.

In other words, I would restate the problem as, "I can't be awake 24 hours to moderate every single submission, so instead, I'll assign invisible voting power based on how reliably a given voter's running and recent preferences match what I would want to see on the front page."

I would add some random jitter to the algorithm, to mildly penalize people whose votes are too similar to my own.

The bonus to consistently good submitters would not be better voting privileges, but better submitting privileges (better initial placement and/or slower decay).

And I would silently give voters and submitters whose patterns negatively correlated with my preferences corresponding penalties, and use their poor taste as valuable data on what not to put on the front page.

If you wanted to go that way why not make a user's 'voting power' be based on their own karma / time on the site. This rewards users who have been around longer and have been 'peer reviewed' through their karma.

"Feel free to enhance the discussion" or "Feel free to add value to this thread"

Any other ways to word it worth considering?

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In the old days comments always had to be previewed in context (with a full refresh) before they could be posted. The "New Post" pages have huge search fields for dupe avoidance, dupe search on preview, stern warnings about what is allowed, and occasionally a row of siren.gif from the Drudge Report.

I would suggest one additional thing, which is a little bit more invasive. After a user submits a comment, show a confirmation question like "Are you sure you are making a positive contribution to the conversation? [Yes] [No]"

I believe the posts are only part of the problem, though. The post obviously needs to exist, but it's the votes that make a comment insipid or insidious. Votes are multipliers: nobody cares about a stupid comment with few upvotes and a great comment with many upvotes is an even greater comment. It's when the votes are distributed the other way around that problems start.

Furthermore, a poster that gets downvoted will probably learn from the experience whereas if he gets upvoted, he's encouraged.

The problem and the solution therefore probably lie in the voting system. There's a few options I can think of right now:

* Giving high-karma individuals more voting power. Maybe tiered or maybe on an analogue scale. This has the problem that not all karma as it is now is deserved. (Take mine: I seem to get most upvotes for snide remarks and snarky questions, not for the posts where I want to make a point.) That said, karma probably still is an indicator of quality of posts, so it may work.

* Make upvoting cost a bit of karma. I don't think this will work well, since you'll end up with a closed economy where only the top X% of the users can really participate. And X will be decreasing when more players come in.

* Give a certain amount of points each day to spend on votes. (I'm not a user of that site, but I believe Slashdot uses it. Is that correct?) This will make upvotes a scarce resource, making people be more careful what they upvote. Of course, if unused points get deleted at the end of the day, people may try to spend unused points on things they wouldn't normally upvote.

* Up the current karma-limits. Right now you need X karma for feature Y, but with the influx of new users, karma has inflated somewhat. It's much easier to get to X if 10 people read your posts than it would be if only 1 person read it.

Just a few things of the top of my head. I'm not the smartest guy here, so it may not be a whole lot, though...

"I'm not the smartest guy here, so it may not be a whole lot, though..."

Please don't ever think that. 'Smartness' is just a function of few things which are in your control, at least in the long run. Thinking "I am not smart" is self-fulfilling.

I'd also place a bet that not too many people with lots of karma are flippant spammers; even the ones I think can be jerks sometimes (myself totally included) at least are putting in an effort.

I would also add one item to the list. Make all comments cost Karma. If you are saying something that you do not think has the potential to be upvoted, just don't say it.

At least in this case if people want to be strident or acerbic, they have to work for it.

Another possibility would be to look at the words people used. I'm pretty sure you could train a spam filter to recognize lame comments.

I think you are onto something here.

Also, not related to the topic so much, I find it funny that I often see people say "I do not care about points." but are also the most likely people to make suggestions about new ways to implement the points system.

It is supposed to reference the idea that there isn't any intrinsic merit in verbosity, and that we often prize writing that is pared down and says only what it needs to - prose or code, and as a group prize languages that allow conciseness with joy going to Ruby, reverence to R and J, and fear and loathing to XML.

Particularly PG who has written more than once about Lisp and how it allows dense code to express a lot, so much so indeed that he reduced function creation to 'fn' in the language that backs this very site on which you are suggesting longer comments are the answer.

(See? Not so insightful, sharp and cool now, is it?)

Instead, you should debate the merits of the idea. I was actually not so much advocating the idea as I was bringing it up for discussion - you can tell by the tone of my comment. And, while I questioned myself for even bringing up the idea of a length requirement, your response makes me lean a little bit more towards the idea.

When voting, I vote up for "interesting point", for "you put a lot of effort into this reply" and for "I agree" and "ha!". I feel conflicted downvoting a comment I like even if it's not contributory, and I don't want to upvote a comment I disagree with even if it's a good contribution. Split the two up so the conflict goes away.

You are playing into the cult of personality

It's what the site's design encourages - usernames are prominent, vote scores are prominent and tallied as the main measure of a person, popular comments get votes. Big thoughtful comments and deep discussion get squashed into nesting and pushed aside by the ever increasing flood of new submissions. "Furthering the discussion" as you put it ... what does this mean to you? Who is supposed to benefit and how, and does the site design encourage that?

Since the site owner pg is in on this thread, the community may benefit by Paul getting some feedback and ideas on how to improve the site.

The site's design does encourage conversation of course. Comments are threaded to encourage back-and-forth, and voting moderation promotes good comments and helps to keep the discussion civil.

I too like to get some karma, but I'll sometimes write something that I suspect may be down-voted (or even that I may not believe) just because I like to discuss things. Karma doesn't really matter on this site or affect your experience (other than being able to down-vote comments), and I think that fact encourages people not to treat it very seriously.

I'd like to see a more sophisticated quality detection system - a learning text classifier of some sort. PG might have enough experience in that field of programming to come up with something useful along those lines.

Okay that took nine.

One or two comments to the effect of, "I agree with this, but the way it was phrased is toxic to the site, so I downvoted it" can't hurt either.

I don't think yours is a problem that requires a technical solution. You've already got a critical mass of people who give you extraordinary deference. Just use them to to fix it.

I was thinking it would contain the offending comment, a little message about it being flagged for not meeting community standards, then briefly list the community standards. A little word of encouragement and a button to show they've actually got the message- and off they go. I don't think it would need to be confrontational or make them actually agree to anything (since they might have good reason to disagree). But a gentle reminder about acceptable behavior could help new people get acclimated.

With that said, I'm sure it has been mentioned before, but maybe restricting new users from commenting at all until they have held the account for a significant period of time would help.

Don't be! Another way of looking at it...

Everybody is really good at some stuff and not so good at others. Use this community and its experts as your sand box for the stuff you need to work on. Better to practice here than out there.

and afraid I'll get torn up for saying something dumb.

So what? The real experts here would never "tear you up". They'd just teach. Anyone who'd tear you up probably has issues of their own. You mustn't let that bother you. And even if it did, just log off and come back fresh later. We start over every day.

Glad you stopped lurking, heed. Welcome.

That's a good heuristic for what a lot of us are looking for here: not necessarily agreement, but a chance to learn. Some comments promote learning more than others.

I'm not so sure, if you say something uninformed about computer security I completely expect tptacek to tear you up, for instance.

On the other hand you'll learn some real stuff in the process.

But forget about the "black swan" event of Rob Pike posting here on a Go story. Think about the Zappos redesign story. It's not black-swan-crazy to think the UX guy from Zappos might comment here. And lo, he did! There are lots of "normal" people who are close to the stories we post that have a moment to comment on them.

Kind of like a karma multiplier so you get an instant separation of quality and then you can look at penalizing those that take the down delta rather quickly.

Choosing to assume someone is guilty before they commit an offense would surly drive bright people away.

Anyway good comment and don't get to intimidated, many of us are just wind bags anyway, bright sure but wind bags none the less.

eg if a user with 1 karma upmods a comment, it adds 1 to its score, but if a user with 100 karma upmods a comment, it adds maybe 10 to its score.

Effectively tipping the balance in favor of those who have karma, and away from newbies.

(That's if we think those with lots of karma can be trusted to have a good feel for what is useful discussion and what isn't of course).

I think it might work well though - You could make a trollish comment, and a few newbies would upmod, but the big karma nicks would downmod, vastly reducing your karma, and thus the influence you have over upmodding/downmodding others comments.

Effectively your "ability to judge good comments" would then be tied to your "ability to make good comments".

Just an idea...

Also the whole downvoting thing doesn't even work half the time. I usually see the down vote button in only like 10% of the threads, the rest I can only upvote.

    w = ln(k * m)

    w = weight of vote
    k = karma of voter
    m = median points per comment by voter

Good luck with that.

I've seen content that was much more on-topic killed off ruthlessly, it creates a sense of class-justice.

Whoever posted it and how long they have been a member should not be the deciding factor in killing stuff or letting it be.

Anyway, of course it is your call, but that's how I feel about it.

I've been wondering for a while now if this flagging is useful or not, it doesn't seem to have too much effect, if any.

I wasn't referring to the 'auto kills', but to the editor kills.

Now why on earth would you do that ?

If and when it isn't doing that, said group of people should prune away the topics they don't want - otherwise it will grow into a general discussion site. Like pruning a shrub or guiding a vine. Yes, it's a bit dictatorial and a bit undemocratic, and that's fine because it's not a popularity contest trying to target the majority of people.

Often when googling for a problem and finding a result, there's a languishing forum post that goes

"problem" "irrelevant suggestion" "irrelevant suggestion" "unhelpful but well meaning comment" "me too" "answer"

and I wish someone had enough care to weed out the drivel.

I think code and culture can shape this curve in useful and beneficial ways, but fundamentally, once an aggregation site gets popular, its quality declines. And the site gets popular because it has high quality.

So we are thinking about trying to shape the curve with code and culture; that's good. I bet there's a more 'meta' solution though.

I'm not really proposing this, just throwing the idea out there. For a given site, once popularity starts pushing down voting and submission quality, make a new site. Obviously something as trivial as http://news2.ycombinator.com/ won't work. I'm not sure how this could be accomplished, but it's interesting to think about.

Regarding the exclusivity of the core group of users, I understand that would tend to be the outcome. But I think the 'forking' method would be a little more dynamic than just locking down the user list. It would allow new, high quality users to come on board, if they really wanted to.

I realize how 'classist' this sounds, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable. But as we all know, good things came come out of dwelling on uncomfortable topics.

Anything involving kharma or other metrics is also likely to fail, and will probably lead to lots of benign but likely popular posts so that people can get more "power".

Basically I think your options are to freeze the community (or make it invite only) or to be ok with the fact that trolls will start showing up and all we can do is ignore them. I don't particularly advocate either of these, but generally believe less extreme measures are superior.

There's a fine line between trolling and radical new ideas and sometimes radical new ideas are a good thing.

No. If signal:noise gets too low, good people will leave.

usenet was designed in a more naive time, and it has zero defenses against disruptions. and that's why it died.

The user's upvote count scales up per some formula, and beyond a certain point, it becomes uncapped.

I wouldn't grandfather anyone, either. KISS, and so that it also addresses the problem with the current population.

Potentional problems with this:

+ In line with the general policy of transparency that is practiced here, you may want to show users how many upvotes they have. But you may not want the load of additional profile page hits that might occur as people check their counts. Perhaps it would be a lower load to show that count in a fashion similar to how karma is shown in the banner next to the user name. However, I don't have a suggestion for a design that wouldn't make the banner look too busy.

+ A scarcity of upvotes might promote more low-value commenting. Perhaps a user's minimum time between comments needs to be defined and similarly throttled. (Simply cutting off comments when the count hits zero will merely result in people turning to comments before their count hits zero.

To take the glass half full view, perhaps such throttling would not eliminate participation, but would help people observe and become accustomed to the community's values before handing them the keys to the kingdom. And if they don't respect those values, it's going to hinder them from progressing to greater influence.

Including karma in the formula allows for high value contributors to progress more quickly. Tenure keeps a one hit wonder or clique of friends from gaining undue influence.

I only realized a couple of days ago that one can flag comments by following the comment's permalink -- why not make this more obvious and promote its wider use as an experiment?

This is not the same as just not counting the votes. Point here is by preventing voting you're explicitly communicating your expectations to the new user.

How about using your ideas from your antispam series* to limit maximum karma points awarded to a comment? Would it trigger too many false positives/negatives?

I remember someone applying a learning network or something like that to filter HN articles a while back and it didn't turn out that bad.

*http://www.paulgraham.com/antispam.html

That way you can acknowledge the wit in zingy one liners and agree with political and ideological statements while still shoving them down to the bottom as being poor contributions. You still get the feeling of being able to chime in while not facing the "I agree so I don't want to downvote" dilemma.

Would it be difficult to integrate comment filtering for /classic and /noobs while they act as somewhat of a controller and items behave like views?

Please keep us updated as to your thinking & actions. It has been consistently interesting to watch you manage HN's evolution and growth.

So, why let newer users vote at all? They can't downvote either, so there ought to be a karma threshold for voting as well, too. Then you would have to own some credibility (=karma) before you can begin to affect the site's future.

You get karma by posting good links and writing good comments. Who decides what's "good"? Those who have karma, of course! Back to the circle of insiders! So, you ought to gain karma normally if a high-karma user votes up your submission or comment. If lots of low-karma users do that you might get a tiny bit of karma but no more. If only few low-karma users do that you get nothing.

That should at least give most of the control to users with high karma. Note: I'm not entirely sure how HN works for beginners these days, so some of the above might already be in effect.

I think this would also alleviate the issue of having people upvote stores on the front page as a sort of bookmarking feature. I have strong opinions that many of the upvotes on the front page come from new people who are using it as a bookmarking feature and not a bestowment of karma to a good post.

I like what Twitter is doing for their (IMO, similar) spam account problem. Users flag for review and block updates from suspected spammer. We already have flagging, but we don't have blocking. It would be nice to be able to selectively hide specific comments or users (perhaps behind a "[blocked]" tag, like deleted comments are done now), so existing users at least could more easily ignore these trolls.

Account banning could be done by voting. Once an account is flagged, it gets added to a list of suspect accounts. Users (potentially above a karma threshold) can vote on these accounts based on their usage history; if enough people flag and confirm these accounts as spam they will be deleted, with their posted comments masked under a "[spam]" tag.

Id make upvote power logarithmic in Karma, vis -

    upvote = K log( karma )
    dnvote = K/4 log( karma )

Not sure how to solve karma hunting, but that's orthogonal, and a smaller issue.

Id weaken downvote power because it is more damaging when used, and also because it seems to act in a way to reduce freedom of speech : people may be scared to speak the truth due to fear of losing karma, which devalues the site. Id almost prefer not to have downvotes, but there are comments I might want downvoted [racism, personal abuse, religious bigotry etc]

You could even combine them, so that the threshold is different - you can post stories with karma of, say, 30 but you can't vote before you have hit a karma of 500.

I have lived in my country all my life, but I was 18 before they let me vote.

There should just be a high karma+average requirement to flag comments.

"OMG She is t3h winrar of t3h intarnets!". Their point was that somebody had done something very noteworthy. It added nothing to the conversation and was exactly the type of thing I think we're talking about here.

I did what I think this thread is asking me not to and responded with something like this:

"Just so you know, you're being downmodded for using the word 'internets', people around here don't like that" (or something to that effect).

My question is if this was the "wrong" thing to do? I was wrong, and the user I was responding to had been here for a long time, but I felt like it might have been helpful to inform new people that the sorts of things that are welcomed and encouraged on reddit, are not here.

Is this thread encouraging us NOT to do stuff like that?

That goes triple for comments in the middle of bona fide comment threads, because the [troll, rebuke] comment pair is going to be stuck right in the middle of the comments page, not at the bottom.

This way it would appear in the users's comment's page, but would be down-modded to the bottom of the page, with the trollish comment?

Maybe just include a "no points" button or checkbox on the comment edit screen?

The best clarification possible is to create a sea of high-quality comments around his, so that he can contrast them with his, and learn.

Just the other day in the Python language moratorium story I was asking about a particular PEP making the cut-off and the author of the PEP responded. I was blown-away.

The HN experience balance is still massively in favor of those latter moments rather than the former.

The level of the technical discourse is still higher than any other general technology site, even if there are a few ankle-biters around now.

This is just slashdot with a different frontend/theme and less sci-fi.

The rest of my response I'll take offline to you directly. Why clutter the thread further?

Beyond that, it seems like the overall quality of the newer users has been fairly low. I'm sure there are some exceptions, but I can't think of any that have been created in the past, say, 200 days or so.

[Edit: See tptacek and mquander's responses below to see why this is a bad idea]

I'm asking for us not to freak out about them, and just let the site do its job. Don't comment. Just mod down and, as was pointed out upthread, flag. Make it not worth it for them.

Why are you convinced that you are better than newer users, to the point that all new users should be forbidden? It sounds a little harsh. You could impose some new thresholds so that people's votes and comments only start mattering once they have some amount of reputation. That should help get rid of the obvious trolls.

But please, not extreme measures.

tptacek made the best counter-argument for this idea; in that it would also prevent the people we want to hear from from registering; so my idea wasn't that great to begin with.

I don't know where you get the idea that I think I'm somehow better than anyone else; all I said is that the newer users haven't been of the same quality as the older users. That's just my opinion, and you're welcome to disagree with it. I've been very careful not to jump on the "this site is turning into reddit!!!1!" bandwagon, but the unfortunate truth of the matter is that the overall quality on HN has declined, and I blame the new users for that.

Perhaps it would be possible to fold (hide) the responses to negatively scored comments, so they aren't an interruption to the flow?

And is there a reason you suggest to 'just let the troll comments drop' rather than actively voting them down to the bottom of the page?

Use your own best judgement. But please don't talk about adjusting the behavior of the guy who signs up as "shitcock" 15 minutes ago and channels 4chan onto the thread.

Self-moderation works to a degree, though the only sites I've ever seen maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio are those that either don't appeal to trolls (low profile sites, sites with no game/karma aspect, etc) or prevent you from just signing up for a free account and messing with people (metafilter/pay wall, moderated mailing lists, small communities that reject outsiders by default.)

A site with high-quality discussion and participants typically becomes more visible over time as it is increasingly linked to by others, raising its visibility. Instead of people being attracted to a site in order to participate in high quality discussion, now people are joining because it's visible. The signal-to-noise ratio drops, and if the site doesn't eventually implement some kind of protection, it will also be overrun by trolls/spam.

If you watch the "New" section in HN right now, 4/5s of the links that roll through at some points in the day are either dupes, spam, or trolls. Auto-kill flagging helps to a degree, but I think at some point pg will need to relent and disallow new signees from submitting stories or voting.

It's not like this is a new phenomenon in internet behavior, people write about this all the time. HN is interesting because it remained pretty high quality for a while, and the "broken windows" theory seems to be true to a certain degree. But the internet isn't entirely like moving neighborhoods in real life – you can easily participate in as many sites as you want, and just as easily screw with as many as you like, provided they have little or no barrier to entry.

I think if HN was changed so that accounts can't vote at all (up OR down) or submit links until they reach a certain karma threshold from just commenting, it would go a long way in raising the quality. (The reason you take away upvoting is that the troll/spam/etc accounts will just start slinging useless votes everywhere. Comments accrue points for seemingly no reason, votes become devalued, and illegitimate accounts start gaining karma. Additionally, you need some smart 'voter-ring' detection algorithms to prevent people from making multiple accounts to vote each other up.)

I've helped run a couple of community-driven meta-moderation sites before, and watched more than my share of ones run by others become mired and sink over time. Just my two cents.

Good post. I agree, but the danger is confusing misguided people who want to contribute from those who are intentionally damaging the conversation. Once it can be determined that the trolling is intentional, I'm all for the heavy guns: ban the account and do what you can do to make it difficult to obtain another one.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/

That said, I was recently guilty of the commenting on a troll comment But I think it was justified in that instance, because the original poster was being attacked in a particularly vicious way, and I didn't want him to feel nobody was backing him up.

So, making registration hard or invite-only, or making new users feel inferior is not the answer. I like the fact that I can vote on articles right after joining. Having to "earn my privileges" by having my opinions validated by someone first would have likely made me leave. And though I'm a newbie, I solemnly promise I won't be posting any lolcats :)

This doesn't mean a lack of policing, but with this many users it has to be improved. One problem that pops out right away is: there is no feedback associated with votes.

Are private messages a possibility? Or even a limited implementation, just for votes? A downvote would require a reason (to be sent to the poster by PM). This way the user can learn to write better comments. The downvote should be anonymous for the receiving user, so the discussion doesn't devolve into vengeful bickering. Upvotes could also have a reason (perhaps optional). I think this would balance out the impression of being shot down all the time.

Though you are correct that many communities suffer when they restrict membership, that isn't an infallible rule.

Communities that have benefited from restricting membership include the Freemasons, Mensa, and the online community TheRoot42. Those are just a few we know about! Many closed communities are also at least somewhat secret. Barriers to community entry are sometimes beneficial (not that I'm advocating it for HN).

Entry difficulty is a significant contributor to group cohesiveness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_cohesiveness).

The HN equivalent of a mural is to submit something really interesting, that will be voted to the top quickly.

The HN equivalent of covering up graffiti is to flag a post or a comment, or to post better stories and comments that push the garbage out. Though a way to mark duplicates would be nice.

What we really lack is a way to catch offenders. I have seen several "karma: 1, created 15 minutes ago" accounts, that are always attached to useless contributions. Sure, I can flag a comment, but it's very obvious that the entire account should just be banned (and perhaps the IP it came from), and there's no flag that applies to an entire user. Perhaps there should be, at least for accounts that have only existed for a short time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows

So while I agree with you that the right thing to do about overtly troll posts is to silently flag them, I'm still not sure what to do about the subtler and more dangerous decline I've been seeing."

Perhaps a lot of the new users are relatively unsavvy about some things and some instruction is in order. This might be done in the form of a "best practices" listing. I have found when dealing with Internet Newbies, it helps to list out a few things like "Don't say anything online that you wouldn't want on the front page of your local newspaper." A lot of times, inexperienced people just don't realize the potential consequences of doing certain things online. It may seem "obvious" to most people here what the best thing to do is, but perhaps the newer users just have no idea. If that is the case, some of them might be very cooperative in going along with some "best practices" posted somewhere.

This may be especially true if you are finally attracting more women. I'm female and I've spent a lot of time in online communities where the majority of members are female. The culture is very different from male dominated online cultures. It's been a bit disorienting for me to try to figure out how to effectively participate here. I consider it a growth experience and I expected to have to adapt. But not everyone will show up with that expectation.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=935085 - a response consisting of 'I disagree' with no additional content - is currently sitting at 6.

The comments can still be killed, but it's a mistake to not give people a chance to change their behavior.

The users are the strong point of HN, and losing that would not be good at all.

I say +1 for invitation based system. Also, users could have a more active role on moderation. Just not sure how, exactly.

How might it work?

I think HN could do worse than add an intro guide for newcomers that carefully explains the difference between this and other sites the newcomer may have experienced before. e.g., a big difference IMO is the lack of playing for +1 Funny as is done on Slashdot. "Like Slashdot, but with just Insightful and Interesting." ;)

An invitation based system could work, but there would have to be some kind of 'fast track', some people are only here because their stuff was once discussed on HN and then signed up to be able to provide a different point of view.

If they would have to wait for an invite that would take some really good stuff out of the mix.

My pet peeve is repeat submissions. I'd like to see a primary source focus.With news that's difficult as many outlets break the same story more or less simultaneously.

I get annoyed when I see something for the second or third time from different source, sometimes weeks later after it's made the rounds of the blog-o-sphere.

Not that there aren't problems; I just haven't seen this specific one as being the biggest myself