One general class of solution are tools that satisfy an author’s goals in an easy fashion, while keeping discussion as visible/transparent as possible.
An idea Ben and I came up with was having an off-topic comment section of a post. Authors get to decide what is “on topic” for a discussion, and there’s an easily accessible button that labels a comment “off topic”. Off topic comments move to a hidden-by-default section at the bottom of the comments. Clicking it ones unveils it and leaves it unveiled for the reader in question (and it has some kind of visual cue to let you know that you’ve entered off-topic world).
(child comments that get tagged as off-topic would be removed from their parent comment if it’s on-topic, but in the off-topic section they’d include a link back to their original parent for context)
A common problem that bothers me with my own comment section is comments that are… okay… but I don’t think they’re worth the attention of most readers. Deleting them (with or without hiding them) feels meaner than the comment deserves. Moving them to an offtopic section feels at least a little mean, but more reasonable.
A related idea is “curated” comments that authors and the mod-team can label, which get a highlighted color and move as high in the comment tree as they can (i.e. to the top of the comments list if they’re a top level comment, or the top of their parent comment’s children)
A common problem that bothers me with my own comment section is comments that are… okay… but I don’t think they’re worth the attention of most readers. Deleting them (with or without hiding them) feels meaner than the comment deserves. Moving them to an offtopic section feels at least a little mean, but more reasonable.
Maybe you could invert punishments to rewards, and create an “author highlights” section instead of an “off topic” section?
If you’re running a blog and want to apply this approach to comment deletion, then instead of framing it as a “reign of terror” where you mass-delete comments from your blog, you would have an “email the author” field below each of your blog posts and a “featured responses” section highlighting the best emails you’ve gotten on this topic. ‘Being accepted to this scientific journal feels like an honor’ is connected to ‘being rejected from this journal doesn’t feel like an attack or affront.’
The New World moderation over at Hacker News has been handling off-topic stuff similarly to how you describe (perhaps that’s where you got the idea.) My impression is that they don’t have as much a system, as just a button that reparents a post to the root and marks it as ‘sorts last’. This seems to work pretty well IMO.
I thought about that variant. I think I personally prefer having them actively hidden, because a major thing I want it for is attention management. When there are 100+ comments, I think it’s a valuable service to split them into “here’s what you should definitely look at if you want to be following key intellectual progress from this conversation” and “here’s what you should look at if you want to participate in long, sprawling conversations that I think are more about people engaging socially.” (I think the latter’s important, just not something I want to force everyone to read).
If the comments are just moved to the bottom, it’s not at all clear where to stop reading, and if I see a lot of comments I sometimes feel too intimidated to even start.
“When there are 100+ comments, I think it’s a valuable service to split them”—I agree with splitting them as well and I don’t have an issue with hiding them, but there’s two ways of splitting them. There’s the hiding option you’ve proposed and there’s the option of having a seperate Offtopic Comments header that marks that a new section of comments has begun. I’m not advocating for this as better than the other option, just listing it as a possibility.
An idea Ben and I came up with was having an off-topic comment section of a post. Authors get to decide what is “on topic” for a discussion, and there’s an easily accessible button that labels a comment “off topic”. Off topic comments move to a hidden-by-default section at the bottom of the comments. Clicking it ones unveils it and leaves it unveiled for the reader in question (and it has some kind of visual cue to let you know that you’ve entered off-topic world).
My new belief: this option should be called “collapse”. Rather than having a new element in the comments section, it just forces a comment to be collapsed-by-default, and sorted to the bottom of the page (independent of how much karma it has), possibly not showing up in the Recent Discussion section.
This has two benefits of a) not having to create any new sections that take up conceptual space on the site, instead using existing site mechanics, b) is more ideologically neutral than “on-topic / off-topic”, which would have been a bit misleading/deceptive about what sort of uses the offtopic button might have.
This is the only approach I can see that will not leave open the possibility of a mirror that unhides deleted items—you simply integrate that mirror into the website.
I’d think that making the hidden section available via a button would trigger those who do not want to be reminded of bad comments. Perhaps make it a flag in the URL?
I’d like to see an option to instead read hidden comments not at the end of the thread, but inlined, marked, to where they would be if not hidden.
Of course there’s no reason to split the reader experiences between what the author wants and everything-goes. Let anyone submit metadata on any post, build filters out of the metadata for the community, and use any filter to choose or highlight what they see. Example filters:
Anything goes.
That filter which the author has chosen for me, or if none that which they use to view this post.
Posts which I have not deemed ban-worthy, by people I have not deemed ban-worthy.
That which the Sunshine Regiment has deemed worthy of highlight or hiding.
Posts that fit in my filter bubble, having been upvoted by people who usually upvote the same sorts of things I do, or written by people who usually reply to the same people I would reply to.
An author could choose what filter they would suggest to the user if the Sunshine Regiment attached the front page tag and then the Sunshine Regiment can use that to decide whether to attach it.
Karma would play no role in this beyond being another piece of metadata.
This is reminiscent of Usenet-style killfiles, only fancier. I think anybody designing a discussion site could learn a lot from Usenet and newsreaders.
This sounds like a really good idea. For my personal tastes, I think this would hit the sweet spot of getting to focus attention on stuff I cared about, without feeling like I was being too mean by deleting well-intentioned comments.
I would suggest experimenting with an off-topic section first and reserving the ability to delete comments for mods. It would more transparently give us an indication of how this is likely to play out if high karma users were to later be given the delete ability. Further, by providing these feature first, high karma users would be more likely to default to marking as off-topic rather than deleting.
If Elizier wants to delete comments on his posts, just give him mod privileges if he doesn’t already have them. That’s far better than distributing them widely as per the current plan, even if it is limited to their own posts.
So on one hand “just give Eliezer mod powers because like the whole site was his idea and it seems fair, and most other users have more restrictions” isn’t obviously wrong to me.
My main preference for not-that-plan is that I just don’t actually expect people to abuse their powers much, and if it turns out to be a problem a) it won’t be that hard to undo (both for individual comments, and for users with mod privileges), and b) the people who did so will almost certainly end up facing social judgment.
the people who did so will almost certainly end up facing social judgment
Hm, Oli told me that complaining about bad moderation is not allowed. Has that policy changed? If not, I don’t see how social judgement can serve as a corrective.
One advantage of a non-participant referee is that a participant referee has to worry more about social judgement for appearing partisan. (I also think participant referees are, in fact, more partisan. But the degree to which partisanship is affecting one’s moderation preferences might not always be introspectively obvious.)
A possible compromise would be to have authors write moderation guidelines for third party moderators to follow on their posts. However, it takes time to accumulate enough examples to know what good guidelines are. I suppose this is an argument in favor of centralized guideline development.
I see a risk with this approach, that author will have oportunity to hide comments, that does not agree with his opinion. This might kill some discussions in favor of author.
One general class of solution are tools that satisfy an author’s goals in an easy fashion, while keeping discussion as visible/transparent as possible.
An idea Ben and I came up with was having an off-topic comment section of a post. Authors get to decide what is “on topic” for a discussion, and there’s an easily accessible button that labels a comment “off topic”. Off topic comments move to a hidden-by-default section at the bottom of the comments. Clicking it ones unveils it and leaves it unveiled for the reader in question (and it has some kind of visual cue to let you know that you’ve entered off-topic world).
(child comments that get tagged as off-topic would be removed from their parent comment if it’s on-topic, but in the off-topic section they’d include a link back to their original parent for context)
A common problem that bothers me with my own comment section is comments that are… okay… but I don’t think they’re worth the attention of most readers. Deleting them (with or without hiding them) feels meaner than the comment deserves. Moving them to an offtopic section feels at least a little mean, but more reasonable.
A related idea is “curated” comments that authors and the mod-team can label, which get a highlighted color and move as high in the comment tree as they can (i.e. to the top of the comments list if they’re a top level comment, or the top of their parent comment’s children)
Maybe you could invert punishments to rewards, and create an “author highlights” section instead of an “off topic” section?
If you’re running a blog and want to apply this approach to comment deletion, then instead of framing it as a “reign of terror” where you mass-delete comments from your blog, you would have an “email the author” field below each of your blog posts and a “featured responses” section highlighting the best emails you’ve gotten on this topic. ‘Being accepted to this scientific journal feels like an honor’ is connected to ‘being rejected from this journal doesn’t feel like an attack or affront.’
The New World moderation over at Hacker News has been handling off-topic stuff similarly to how you describe (perhaps that’s where you got the idea.) My impression is that they don’t have as much a system, as just a button that reparents a post to the root and marks it as ‘sorts last’. This seems to work pretty well IMO.
I thought about that variant. I think I personally prefer having them actively hidden, because a major thing I want it for is attention management. When there are 100+ comments, I think it’s a valuable service to split them into “here’s what you should definitely look at if you want to be following key intellectual progress from this conversation” and “here’s what you should look at if you want to participate in long, sprawling conversations that I think are more about people engaging socially.” (I think the latter’s important, just not something I want to force everyone to read).
If the comments are just moved to the bottom, it’s not at all clear where to stop reading, and if I see a lot of comments I sometimes feel too intimidated to even start.
“When there are 100+ comments, I think it’s a valuable service to split them”—I agree with splitting them as well and I don’t have an issue with hiding them, but there’s two ways of splitting them. There’s the hiding option you’ve proposed and there’s the option of having a seperate Offtopic Comments header that marks that a new section of comments has begun. I’m not advocating for this as better than the other option, just listing it as a possibility.
I love the idea of an off-topic or “deemphasize” button, for the reasons you describe.
My new belief: this option should be called “collapse”. Rather than having a new element in the comments section, it just forces a comment to be collapsed-by-default, and sorted to the bottom of the page (independent of how much karma it has), possibly not showing up in the Recent Discussion section.
This has two benefits of a) not having to create any new sections that take up conceptual space on the site, instead using existing site mechanics, b) is more ideologically neutral than “on-topic / off-topic”, which would have been a bit misleading/deceptive about what sort of uses the offtopic button might have.
This is the only approach I can see that will not leave open the possibility of a mirror that unhides deleted items—you simply integrate that mirror into the website.
I’d think that making the hidden section available via a button would trigger those who do not want to be reminded of bad comments. Perhaps make it a flag in the URL?
I’d like to see an option to instead read hidden comments not at the end of the thread, but inlined, marked, to where they would be if not hidden.
Of course there’s no reason to split the reader experiences between what the author wants and everything-goes. Let anyone submit metadata on any post, build filters out of the metadata for the community, and use any filter to choose or highlight what they see. Example filters:
Anything goes.
That filter which the author has chosen for me, or if none that which they use to view this post.
Posts which I have not deemed ban-worthy, by people I have not deemed ban-worthy.
That which the Sunshine Regiment has deemed worthy of highlight or hiding.
Posts that fit in my filter bubble, having been upvoted by people who usually upvote the same sorts of things I do, or written by people who usually reply to the same people I would reply to.
An author could choose what filter they would suggest to the user if the Sunshine Regiment attached the front page tag and then the Sunshine Regiment can use that to decide whether to attach it.
Karma would play no role in this beyond being another piece of metadata.
This is reminiscent of Usenet-style killfiles, only fancier. I think anybody designing a discussion site could learn a lot from Usenet and newsreaders.
This sounds like a really good idea. For my personal tastes, I think this would hit the sweet spot of getting to focus attention on stuff I cared about, without feeling like I was being too mean by deleting well-intentioned comments.
I would suggest experimenting with an off-topic section first and reserving the ability to delete comments for mods. It would more transparently give us an indication of how this is likely to play out if high karma users were to later be given the delete ability. Further, by providing these feature first, high karma users would be more likely to default to marking as off-topic rather than deleting.
If Elizier wants to delete comments on his posts, just give him mod privileges if he doesn’t already have them. That’s far better than distributing them widely as per the current plan, even if it is limited to their own posts.
So on one hand “just give Eliezer mod powers because like the whole site was his idea and it seems fair, and most other users have more restrictions” isn’t obviously wrong to me.
My main preference for not-that-plan is that I just don’t actually expect people to abuse their powers much, and if it turns out to be a problem a) it won’t be that hard to undo (both for individual comments, and for users with mod privileges), and b) the people who did so will almost certainly end up facing social judgment.
Hm, Oli told me that complaining about bad moderation is not allowed. Has that policy changed? If not, I don’t see how social judgement can serve as a corrective.
One advantage of a non-participant referee is that a participant referee has to worry more about social judgement for appearing partisan. (I also think participant referees are, in fact, more partisan. But the degree to which partisanship is affecting one’s moderation preferences might not always be introspectively obvious.)
A possible compromise would be to have authors write moderation guidelines for third party moderators to follow on their posts. However, it takes time to accumulate enough examples to know what good guidelines are. I suppose this is an argument in favor of centralized guideline development.
I see a risk with this approach, that author will have oportunity to hide comments, that does not agree with his opinion. This might kill some discussions in favor of author.