choice architecture, continued

So, a further thought about Paul Graham’s Hacker News and its comments policy. (See yesterday’s post for details.) If reddit allows you to approve or disapprove of things you haven't even read, Hacker News appears not to allow you to disapprove of things at all: you can click the “up” arrow or . . . well, do nothing at all. Or so it appears. Because it turns out that when your karma points reach a certain threshold — apparently 100 — you suddenly acquire the opportunity to downvote a post/link. Interesting! It’s only when you have contributed value to the community that you are entrusted with the power of negativity.

Something similar is being done at another hacker site, Stack Overflow, where upvotes add 10 karma or “reputation” points to a post’s author, while downvotes remove two reputation points from the post’s author — and one from the reputation of the person doing the downvoting. This too is interesting! Here you have to ask yourself before voting something down whether you feel strongly enough about it to take a chunk out of your own reputation to register your disapproval. Kinda like real life.

These are great examples of “choice architecture,” but not quite of the “nudge” variety. They are more than nudging you to make certain kinds of decisions, though. Hacker News is allowing you to purchase power with good behavior, while Stack Overflow is subtly threatening people who consistently misbehave with expulsion from the community.

I like these models very much, but at the moment I can't see how they could be applied to sites where there are just comments rather than votes on the value of posts. Regular old blogs — as ace commenter Tony Comstock remarks in relation to my previous post — may have to depend on the blogger’s own ability to model civil discourse and to gently manage comment threads. But I have seen many, many peaceable and thoughtful bloggers get overwhelmed by trolls and other hostile figures. So there is, I think, a desperate need to develop a choice architecture that works for the garden variety blog and its comment threads.

flamethrowers and fire extinguishers

I keep chewing on the problem of blog architecture: If the basic structure is going to be based on posts-plus-comments, how could thoughtful, sane, reasonable posts and comments be encouraged? Can that structure be re-engineered so that the “choice architecture” nudges people towards something other than snarkery and contempt?

As I have noted in my previous posts on this subject, the karma-based moderation system at Slashdot is the most famous example of such an attempt, and has been imitated in various ways. Another example within the hacker world is reddit, which simplifies the Slashdot system into a thumbs-up and thumbs-down model. Interestingly, reddit is happy to let you give your opinion about a link you haven't even followed. If you’re logged in, you can just run down the page clicking up or down arrows at your pleasure. You can do the same for comments, though you at least have to look at them, if only out of the corner of your eye. Perhaps not surprisingly, reddit is known for its exceptionally fierce flame wars. What would you expect from a site where you arenudged towards giving opinions about stories you haven't even read?

Paul Graham, an internet entrepreneur who helped fund reddit, has started an alternative to it called Hacker News. His primary goal here was to construct an architecture that would discourage the hostility and craziness that often seems to dominate reddit. As he has recently written:

It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.

I'm not criticizing Steve and Alexis. What happened to Reddit didn't happen out of neglect. From the start they had a policy of censoring nothing except spam. Plus Reddit had different goals from Hacker News. Reddit was a startup, not a side project; its goal was to grow as fast as possible. Combine rapid growth and zero censorship, and the result is a free for all. But I don't think they'd do much differently if they were doing it again.

In other words, flame wars draw eyes. There are a lot of people out there who like participating in flame wars — who like breaking windows and just wants someone to provide them lots of windows to break. Paul Graham doesn't seem to have a problem with the existence of such people or even with sites that encourage them; but he does want to create a site that covers similar issues but promotes a different kind of conversation. How he does that, and whether it works, is a topic I’ll take up in another post.