We're actively trying to avoid the nastiness that seems to take over so many online discussions. That's why there are fewer down-arrows here, for example. I suspect that down arrows are more often clicked on stupidly than up arrows, that if you don't have down arrows you give people fewer ways to inject stupidity into the system.

I'll probably never get around to supporting bold text in comments either, for the same reason.

To some extent news.yc is protected by being about a topic only a small number of comparatively smart people care about. With any luck we'll never have the full-blown trolls you find on general news sites. I have some ideas for solutions if trolls do start to appear.

^ ah, sounds like communism :p

I've joined well over 50 social networks and what I've noitced is that freedom to choose appeals more to people than the right choices already made for them. More features, more niches, more startups, more choice. Users might complain about features, but fundamentally they like choice.

The more time a user spends making choices on a network, the more loyal he or she becomes. You don't spend 12 hours of your life customizing your profile if you don't plan on sticking to it.

Lastly, too much of anything is bad. The state should have control over medical supplies, education and energy. But beyond that, it should trust the consumer with running the country.

I think you're doing the right thing by retaining the down arrow on comments, however. When someone writes a comment you dislike, there are four things you can do with it:

1. Ignore it

2. Downmod it

3. Write a quick reply

4. Write a thoughtful reply

Option 4 is ideal, of course, if you have the time, but you usually don't. Quick replies are what we want to avoid. That's how flamewars start. Ignoring the post is going to be unsatisfactory for the flamewar-prone. That leaves the down-arrow as a sort of relief valve. So I think its presence can actually reduce nastiness.

Aha! I'd not had the realization that the the downmod arrow only appears probabilistically. It meshes interestingly with a notion that dfranke and I were discussing earlier tonight, namely the appropriate ratio of up to down mods. By controlling the prevalence of options to downmod, you can exert some control over that ration--very sly. :)

I love the bareness of this site so far. Keeping it simple may hopefully maximise the honeymoon period before the deluge of crap that any small web success appears to attract.

I suspect the ability to successfully transition from this honeymoon period to moderate popularity will become a defining battle for a certain class of social web start-ups.

I noticed that the other day- no down arrows on replies to your comments. Very nice.

Copy-paste from my reply to jwecker: "From a user's perspective, there is more to gain from posting topics than comments." Top users are more active in the discussion because they are already high above the ranks. The top user doesn't have to spam the site to gain karma, we already have enough.

This is an interesting notion; there is an implicit assumption that the low-karma user has something to lose by posting comments. Am I missing something here?

I do see your point, though, wrt top users not spamming the site. That's largely why I liked your idea of throttling submission rates based on karma. New users should have to develop karma by being useful, rather than just prolific.

Exactly, the user with low-karma is better off posting topics than comments. Comments don't receive nearly as much points as topics do. Even worse, comments require far more thought than blindly submitting links. What is the economic gain the user with low-karma receive from posting comments? Not much.

I know I suggested it, but throttling submission rates based on karma might not be fair to the end users. Once a karma-archy is established, the rich will get richer at the expense of the poor.

Well, I certainly hope that news.yc users are a bit more than Ricardo-programmed economic optimization automata. :)

One solution to older users having a perpetual advantage would be to implement some sort of aging of karma, or at least of the karma value used to determine throttling. Such a thing would actually be a win in terms of SNR--it doesn't really matter how karmic someone was a year ago, if they have only made low-quality posts/comments in the past month, they should be treated (in the submission system) as a low-karma user.

An addendum, stimulated by dinner with dfranke: under certain assumptions about the growth rate of the community, karma ages without any algorithmic intervention: as the community grown, the number of moderators grows, and so the mean and maximum moderation per post increases. As a result, new post are effectively weighted relative to old posts.

The problems, of course, are that there is some fixed point, and also that news.yc may not fit the growth model that makes the above true for a community like Reddit--and that may be a good thing.

This is Y Combinator. We *like* fixed points.

Another idea I mentioned elsewhere- if a story gets to the bottom of the new page without any up-marks at all it adversely affects the submitter's karma.

I think this should remain neutral. Ignoring a submissions DOES indicate its worthiness to a point, but sometimes things get missed. Only a true down-mod should degrade the submitter's reputation.

I can see where we're heading with this idea. You're right -- to gain noteriety (karma), a user could easily engage in submission abuse. Submit enough links and enough will get upmodded.

Points, or karma, could be rewarded based off a ratio of useful contribution to total contributions instead. Such a system would encourage a user to make sure his contributions to the community are good. This would be beneficial implemented in any crowd-generated news site.

While not another news aggregator, our project is addressing similar types of issues in other channels. I am loving the applied relevancy to here already.