Title: Several people have mentioned to me that the comments on Hacker News seem much better recently, and asked me what changed. As far as I can tell, two of our experiments are working.<p>The first is posting feedback in the threads about what&#x27;s good and bad for HN comments. Right now, dang is the only one doing this, but other moderators may in the future. We&#x27;ve learned some things about how to do it: 1) the feedback should be as neutral as possible; 2) it should be about the comment, not the commenter; and 3) where possible, it should say what would make the comment better.<p>Other HN users have been pitching in with feedback too, which is great! If you&#x27;d like to help, please do. Just try to follow the three guidelines above.<p>The second experiment is a change we made to the comment scoring and ranking algorithms. These algorithms do more than just counting and sorting because pg wrote a lot of code to address systemic issues as they came up over the years. But the community doesn&#x27;t stay static, so the algorithms shouldn&#x27;t either.<p>After studying the data, dang and kogir tuned the algorithms to make some downvotes more powerful. We&#x27;ve been monitoring the effects of this change, and it appears to be reducing toxic comments.<p>The majority of HN users are thoughtful and nice. It&#x27;s clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls (and specifically, they don’t silence minority groups—we’ve looked into this). What dang and kogir found was a way to turn the volume up on this kind of downvote. We believe this has made the comment scores and rankings better reflect the community.<p>We will be trying a lot more experiments. We&#x27;ll stop the ones that don&#x27;t work and continue the ones that do.<p>dang and kogir, great work so far. I&#x27;m enjoying reading HN much more.
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