Title: Here's an open-ended question for all of you. I saw the recent thread on the main page about "honeypot" submissions, including a comment by pg, the site founder, that the quality of comments on Hacker News has declined. What can I do about that? What can we all do about that? What voluntary cooperation can we engage in as users of Hacker News to make HN a more useful, friendly, and informative online community? I invite open discussion of this issue here, with any and all suggestions welcome, including suggestions directed specifically to my own online behavior.<p>One suggestion I have made before is actively to upvote comments that either 1) ask for follow-ups with more details or facts to clarify or back-up a parent comment's statements, or 2) provide asked-for details or facts (especially with links to reliable online sources or citations to dead-tree reliable sources). I also like to silently upvote comments in which users are polite and say "please" or "thank you," as a measure to promote civility. What else is good to upvote? How else besides upvoting good comments and asking follow-up questions can each user here promote better comments?<p>Thank you for any ideas you share here. And many thanks, of course, to the dozens of users here whose posts and comments make HN a valuable community to me and to other users.
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