I hadn't looked at the comments on the story about the girl who died till now. I am so embarrassed for this community. I feel like this is the worst I've ever seen people behave on this site.
Here's some general advice: if you find yourself beginning a comment on a thread about someone who has just died with a disclaimer of the form "I hate to be that guy" or "I hate to write this," just don't say it.
From the discussion here, I conclude this quote is widely accepted among those who provide quality discourse: "I try to comment when I have useful, unique, original, or non-standard things to say." This represents a desire to deliver a certain promised value. When you post on a forum, (or send an email, for that matter) you are making an implicit claim: is worth the audience's time to read your post.
For users like me, there is friction in posting because I have to convince myself that I've satisfied the implicit claim. For others, I assume, this friction is absent. So add it artificially: somehow make the claim explicit.
Maybe require posters to select from a list of categories (e.g. Useful Information, Insightful, Civil Disagreement, ...), explicitly claiming their post meets that criteria. Or, less restrictive: a required checkbox that simply reminds you of the claim you're making with your post.
Perhaps it's valid to note that the story provoked polarized reactions and thoughts, and thus better avoid putting each other down for those reactions.
Would you consider adding that general advice to the official guidelines? The problem with "Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation." is that there are plenty of people in life (maybe just in hacker circles, but my sample is thoroughly biased) who would say outrageous things that they would start with a disclaimer in a face to face conversation.
Actually I feel one of the benefits of the internet is that one can say things that wouldn't go down well in a face-to-face conversation. Not everything that makes sense is easy to accept.
I find comments that start off like that extremely disingenuous. Whenever someone says "I <some adjective>, but..." I see that as "I don't want to offend anyone reading this because I don't want to get into an argument and/or don't want downvotes, but I'm going to say this anyway because this is how I really feel." Things like "I'm sorry, but...", "I hate to tell you this, but..." or "This is a great idea, but..." sometimes (emphasis on sometimes) have good intentions (like pointing out flaws in a website or bringing up an interesting point in the topic) but to me they end up sounding quite pompous and, in this case, offensive.
"All colors are made of light, but black is the absence of light."
"It looks like you covered all of the key issues, but you missed this one..."
"I agree with everything you said but this one thing..."
"I am not a lawyer, but it looks like it could be interpreted..."
I think you guys are just making these rules up, but maybe it is still good to keep them in mind, even if they aren't always true.
When I joined HN I decided to do an experiment. On reddit and slashdot, I go under a pseudonym except when I need to make an announcement. But on HN I always go by my own name. The result is dramatic: I'm much more careful and considerate on HN. It's a clear verification of Penny Arcade's famous theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/).
I think that the elimination of anonymity is ultimately the only thing which can keep HN from the inevitable slide toward 4chan that all comment sites are on.
Facebook knows my True Name, therefore I'm so careful there that I don't say anything controversial or substantive at all. It just gets a bit of cheerful pap, and mostly I don't use it at all. HN get what I'm really thinking about precisely because it's pseudonymous.
One thing a lack of anonymity forces you to do is to present your entire feelings about a story, instead of the one point that you feel is missing or needs correction. When people present points in isolation, it's easy to get the wrong impression about how they feel.
I didn't comment in the thread under discussion, but if I felt there was one point that needed to be added to the original story, it was the one made by many posters, roughly, "This smells like glurge, and when people are mourning for an inspiring little girl, it's common sense not to take what they say about her at face value." Of course that wouldn't reflect my whole reaction as a human being.
And that's the difference between reacting as a non-anonymous human being, where you are careful to present your whole feelings about a topic, and reacting as a member of a message board, where you're like to dismiss most of what you think and feel as commonplace and not worth mentioning.
Like any problem in communication, it's a problem of readers as well as writers. Reading a message from "asdf1234" or "prgrmrd00d4u" (not real names AFAIK) and reading it as representative of a human being's feelings doesn't make any sense, but it's irresistible for a lot of people. If the nerds on Slashdot and HN can't resist parsing comments that way, I think it's time to give up and accept that as human beings we can only see each other as whole human beings and not merely as contributors to a conversation. So the burden of solving this communication problem is on the writers to act like whole human beings.
The primary psychological resistance -- and believe me, I do rebel against being "human" on a discussion board with every bit of my being -- comes from the fact that most of us would prefer to sound more like scientists than like politicians. Scientists say, "Here is my tiny marginal contribution." Politicians say, "This is who I am." Geeks roll their eyes when a politician answering a question about tax policy in a debate spends all of his allotted time talking about how much he loves his children and then caps it off with half a sentence stating his position on the issue. We hate that and don't want to be like that. We want to hear how he differs from his opponents. We don't want to hear everything he has in common with everyone else. We want the diff.
Our humanity is what we have in common, exactly what is excluded when we present ourselves as a diff. If you read the original discussion and read every comment as a diff, then you don't see comments by inhuman people. You see whole human beings whose common humanity was redacted by the diff filter running between their brains and their keyboards.
Maybe the need to relax that diff filter a little bit so we all sound like human beings needs to be part of a FAQ somewhere....
Those comments are lamentable. However one of those you mention was made by an extremely active 4 year old account. The other was made by a relatively young one.
These are examples of 'bad' comments, rather than just 'noise'. However I think they both have the same immediate cause - community acceptance. For some reason the posts with little content are being rewarded. Discussions on how to change this (via the voting system or otherwise) have happened many times but I think more needs to be done.
As to why the community accepted such a negative comment I have no idea - and fixing this may be much harder.
Quickly checking in to respond, as the "extremely active 4 year old account" in question...
The comment was clearly poorly phrased. When I made it, there were no negative comments on the story, and it was really just intended to question the "programmer prodigy" aspect, not to criticise the deceased or imply that she was not an impressive young person.
I hate (!) to discard any part of the english language; I think all expressions have their place, including "I hate to be that guy, but" - however, in hindsight, the net effect was to lump my relatively neutral comment in with all the haters on the thread, so, in practice, it was proven to be a poor choice.
That said, I do dislike the habit of idolising deceased people as perfect in every way. It reminds me of the "HN Salesmanship hero" story (where I commented that he wasn't my hero and I resented this attribution, for which I got badly downvoted). This person was clearly impressive without making stuff up about them. From all the comments and interviews, it in fact seems that her programming ability, far from being prodigy-like, was in fact the least impressive of her other personal traits.
To conclude: had I known that there would be a pile-up of hateful belittling following my comment, I wouldn't have made it, or if I felt the need to ask that question, I would have done so in a much more carefully phrased way. I fully take the blame for not realising that this type of thread could descend down to that level, but my intention was certainly not to belittle.
Death is generally a touchy subject, if you were commenting on someone that had not just passed away I don't think the comment would have come off nearly as bad.
I agree with the post about thinking before you add something and not being mean for the sake of being mean. I think we also have to be careful here about a culture of groupthink and censoring alternative opinions via very negative feedback.
Maybe a little bit more understanding is due all around. If I can divide the world into two caricatured groups, we have:
"I can never stop feeling, but sometimes I'm too tired to think" -- rallying around the asinine "prodigy" headline.
"I can never stop thinking, but sometimes I'm too tired to feel" -- rallying around the emotionally tone-deaf responses.
I think we all tend to identify with one side more than the other, but instead of rallying ourselves on either side of the issue, we should see each side as a vital aspect of being human that each of us has, with one side often gaining the upper hand and then getting out of hand. If we want to measure the supposed "decline" of Hacker News by the fact that one side gets out of hand and provokes a response the other, I think both sides need to be held to account. Glurge begets callousness. A pervasive environment of callousness makes glurge seem like a welcome relief. If we want to avoid either, we should avoid both, and that means ignoring offenses instead of responding in kind.
An interesting quote from the half-beast, and slightly-insane Joseph Stalin -- "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
They weren't bad comments at all. The circle-the-wagons "we're better than this" reaction is worse.
While a death is usually a tragedy, made magnitudes worse when it's a child, the title of that post was absurd, and it was a giant elephant in the room that simply had to be rationally diffused. Like others I went into that story primarily to read how she was a programming prodigy.
Tragic death. Not a programming prodigy. The misrepresentation was noticed by all, and it will be a sad day when social convention means we all have to carry forward the lie lest we offend someone's sensibility about death.
Upvoted - this [groggles' comment] hits the nail on the head.
PG, given that you gray-out comments that get torrentially downvoted, perhaps you could bold-face (or render in green?) those comments that get a certain number of upvotes, or perhaps those comments that exceed X% of the aggregate number of upvotes for the thread.
I thought about this for a while and realized after sleeping on it that this quality problem seemed to occur only after points visibility was removed from comments. People can and should be able to say what they want, but if the only public feedback is greying out downvoted comments (negative) then you're losing the positive feedback cycle and hampering the ability of the cybernetic system to regulate itself.
I think we've reached the stage for an "Ignore" button. Clicking it would make that user invisible to me in the future.
There are some people who I am never going to agree with. Their comments are invariably ignorant or proselytizing or cruel to my eyes. I'd rather not have that.
Here's some general advice: if you find yourself beginning a comment on a thread about someone who has just died with a disclaimer of the form "I hate to be that guy" or "I hate to write this," just don't say it.