Comment by unethical_ban
3 years ago
It's an interesting phenomenon for HN in particular. The quality of comments tends to be higher than other platforms, so I feel more comfortable (and more fulfilled) reading the experiences and opinions of those who do so.
I imagine a meatspace analogue where a presenter works for a period of time on a slide deck and a presentation, only for most people who come to stand in the back and chatter - or at best, for many people after the presentation, to be discussing things entirely beside the point you made. "Why are they caring more about their own chat instead of my insights?"
I get it, but that's the rub. And as someone said, HN strictly speaking has no obligation to be any site's commenting system. Install and manage your own, use a 3P tool, or even manage your own personal subreddit if you feel like it.
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Off-topic, regarding HN comments: I believe Slashdot to this day has the most useful and effective balance of "free speech" and of quality control of any forum on the Internet. It doesn't require oligarchic mods to filter out undesirable or rash comments; the community does it just fine. Rationale for the comment's value is put in a few buckets such as funny, troll, low effor, insightful, and so on.
Having a metamod system, reducing the number of dead/shadowban comments, and a few minor UI tweaks would be amazing for this site IMO.
I agree with your point on Slashdot's moderation. In the 25 (ow) or so years I've been reading Slashdot it's been very rare to see genuinely bad comments remain at a 4 or 5 or genuinely good comments buried at -1. The semi random distribution of mod points and meta moderation have been highly effective.
Slashdot didn't really ever fall prey to the sort of manipulation that destroyed Digg or has made Reddit's major subreddits a cesspool. HN seems to skirt by on being slightly more niche and dang's tireless moderation efforts.