This polarization isn't mostly a technical problem, but my experience hosting forums at a previous company did give some insights:
- smaller communities are more civil. As forums get more popular and their power to influence grows, assholes want to use that power to get their way
- reasonable people might put in their 2 cents on a discussion, but will not continually argue with the assholes. The assholes know this, so pour lots of energy into turning a discussion into a shitstorm.
I have seen this same thing here at HN: two people go back and forth on a point until the discussion is two words per line on the far right of the screen. Once I see that starting, I usually quit reading the whole topic.
I'm not that familiar with the reputation thing here, but in my previous life I had some ideas about how to rescue our forums. Most of the ideas revolved around limits, like:
- limit the number of posts per userid on a topic. This would require that a person get all his thoughts out on the table and think before posting to do that, rather than going back and forth forever.
- limit the number of posts per userid per day. Then if someone went on a rampage, they couldn't just pollute one topic and go to another to vent (or create new topics to vent). My hope was that if you force a person to cool off for a day, they might not want to get into the same argument the next day.
Once our support forums got popular, they got ugly. We tried everything we could think of, but eventually had to shut them down and went to a model where we anonymously posted questions that users had and posted our responses. Users couldn't post. The support forums were still informative, but all the heat (and a lot of the interest) was gone.
I'd never have forums in another business. They're great in the beginning, but in my experience, impossible to manage when they get popular. HN has done a great job here, but it's also a specialized, highly educated community.
- smaller communities are more civil. As forums get more popular and their power to influence grows, assholes want to use that power to get their way
- reasonable people might put in their 2 cents on a discussion, but will not continually argue with the assholes. The assholes know this, so pour lots of energy into turning a discussion into a shitstorm.
I have seen this same thing here at HN: two people go back and forth on a point until the discussion is two words per line on the far right of the screen. Once I see that starting, I usually quit reading the whole topic.
I'm not that familiar with the reputation thing here, but in my previous life I had some ideas about how to rescue our forums. Most of the ideas revolved around limits, like:
- limit the number of posts per userid on a topic. This would require that a person get all his thoughts out on the table and think before posting to do that, rather than going back and forth forever.
- limit the number of posts per userid per day. Then if someone went on a rampage, they couldn't just pollute one topic and go to another to vent (or create new topics to vent). My hope was that if you force a person to cool off for a day, they might not want to get into the same argument the next day.
Once our support forums got popular, they got ugly. We tried everything we could think of, but eventually had to shut them down and went to a model where we anonymously posted questions that users had and posted our responses. Users couldn't post. The support forums were still informative, but all the heat (and a lot of the interest) was gone.
I'd never have forums in another business. They're great in the beginning, but in my experience, impossible to manage when they get popular. HN has done a great job here, but it's also a specialized, highly educated community.