There's no shortage of moderators. The question is what to have them do. Are you suggesting all comments should be approved by moderators before becoming visible? I've considered variants of that, e.g. for new accounts.
Slashdot went down this road as you may well know. Moderators, then meta-moderators. ("Was this a fair moderation?") based on karma.
I have a low 5-digit UID on slashdot, and registered well after I started reading, so I was sort of in the second wave there. The discourse quality fell off and leveled out, but my experience is that low digit UIDs generally contribute at their historic high quality levels.
In my opinion, a low UID filter on slashdot would be far more effective than the mod/meta-mod/complain about mods and meta-mods response this system created.
I don't know how this might translate to HN; "Filter by age of account?" What if by default you only showed comments and posts from accounts older than two years? (This would disqualify me, by the way, so maybe one year..) :)
People could select to see comments from younger accounts if they liked, or perhaps very well seasoned accounts (two years on the site) could promote up comments to general visibility. This would be patently unfair, in that new awesome commenters would not get to contribute to the discourse immediately, but it would almost certainly immediately increase the quality of discourse.
Slashdot's system has some echos of this, but they made it far, far too easy to become a moderator as they wanted to spread the work out. They also I think created a mental expectation with the '-1' score which created a trolling subculture, that is, reading slashdot at -1 is a cesspit, and so nobody does it, hence people use it as a cesspit, hence.. What I'm suggesting is making it the strong default to do the equivalent of reading slashdot at say 4 and higher, but using age of account as the heuristic.
This would be a reasonably easy chrome extension, but obviously easier to do on your side. If you demo this yourself, I'd be curious to hear if you think the quality is improved.
In real life, we might call this an apprentice system, that is, you have to sit in the back, and only occasionally get your answers while you prove you wish to belong and that you deserve to belong. It's a known effective way of maintaining quality of members in a desirable group, from religious to musical to .. I imagine secret societies?
Filtering comments by account age sounds a bit too xenophobic to me. However, your idea of an apprentice system is interesting. This is a random idea based off that, but what if new users were given posting privileges only after demonstrating that they can recognize quality comments by upvoting them? Since HN no longer shows vote count for comments, if a user is able to consistently recognize quality comments, then there is a higher probability that he/she will also contribute quality comments. This would effectively require users to read and learn HN posting etiquette/standards before they can start posting themselves.
Intriguing. You'd need some way of providing feedback to them if they 'picked right'. Combining our ideas, this would mean 'picked like long-time users did'.
Re: xenophobia, it's not precisely that, as I'm not suggesting a date-joined-cutoff, just that it takes a long time for HN to be convinced you should contribute, rather than just learn.
"... In my opinion, a low UID filter on slashdot would be far more effective than the mod/meta-mod/complain about mods and meta-mods response this system created. ..."
/. 2774/4UID user here, seniority doesn't necessarily correlate with quality as high performance users are a subset of early adopters just as they are with later adopters.
I mostly agree. It reminds me of stop-and-copy GC: you have a root set (very old accounts, or maybe current moderators) and you see what you can reach from it (the accounts the root set consistently upvotes), and you chuck everything else periodically.
What it means for an account to be GC'ed is up for experimentation, but a reasonable default might be that it doesn't get any voting or submission rights. Arguably it's a bigger problem that stupid comments get upvoted than that stupid comments exist at all.
If there's no shortage of moderators, then have them moderate according to HN's missions and objectives like those in a startup does. This includes penalising comments that go against HN. If you're worried about the possible risks and outrage, then the alternative is to die slowly.
I like that idea. Penalize submissions (hype,linkbait,fud) that go against HN's mission with 20pts and bad comments with 10, 20 or even 50pts for spam.
Or something like that, if you get to negative score, you can't vote anymore until you go back to positive with nice comments and good submissions.
WP's a great example ... it's years since I've seen that site but as forums went it was and prob still is light years ahead of anything else that was around including the harsh but transparent moderation.
Depending on how much you trust them, they could liberally delete comments, or knock them way down in their weighing. Of course, you run the risk of pissing people off.
Concurrently, you could use the votes (esp negative) of the users tracked and identified as described above as notifiers to the moderators. That way you leverage more volunteers, but with less power (and they wouldn't know they had it, either).
Maybe have them
- delete posts that are meaningless (memes, 'me too', 'you suck', etc - aggressive post removal may 'feel' like censorship but I think it would be great, even if only to keep threads small
- move 'meta' posts into a separate thread (each article would have two threads - the 'regular' comments, and the 'meta' or 'off topic' section
- temp- or permaban accounts that post many comments that have to be deleted
- more controversial - investigate algorithmically found voting patterns, e.g. the same accounts always upvoting comments by the same user(s)?
Combined with a 'you get two posts for each post that scores +2 or higher, or 1 post every 3 days' to limit the amount of posts and incentivize people to may high quality posts (or at least posts that they think will score well).
