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Comment by evolve2k | Hacker News Reader

When I first learnt to program the thing that I really enjoyed was learning to make a terminal app that took in the users input and used it as a conditional.

I’d make all these little toy apps where my family had to type in the right word to continue. Eg “Who is the leader of the autobots?” => “Well done. Transform and roll out!!”

It strikes me we could encourage better discourse with one word locked comments that the writer of the post draws from the article.

“New research and on the impact of race on tenure”

Per the article, what % of tenured professors identify as people of color in 2019?

What do you think of something like this?

Micro quiz questions, one up on ‘are you human’ to ‘prove you read one key thing’

View on HN

> Micro quiz questions, one up on ‘are you human’ to ‘prove you read one key thing’

I have gotten good results from including these in my expository writing. Having the reader stop and go through actively using the material at even a basic level seems to really help them integrate and retain it. They're multiple choice questions embedded throughout the text.

There's no reason you can't force everyone to correctly answer them before being able to comment. That being said, writing good incremental questions like this is actually quite a bit of work.

I've been considering doing something similar, except with plain CSS:

    a.paper ~ a.comments {
      display: none;
    }

    a.paper:visited ~ a.comments {
      display: inline;
    }

Some users (including myself) disable the :visited command.

Sometimes we must all make sacrifices for the greater good.

Thinking of reasons one would want to disable that caused me to do a Google search and find this:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Privacy_and...

I guess it can't be observed from a script? That would be a neat way to get potentially sensitive info.

As mentioned in the article, firefox also limits what you can actually do with the visited selector so there is no way you can use css to change something which is detectable with js so the comments hidden thing won't work.

That won’t work. :visited was neutered for privacy reasons a decade or so ago, so that all you can change with it is colours, and if you try to inspect it with JavaScript it will give you the answers it would if :visited didn’t apply (e.g. it’ll tell you that purple link is blue).

The closest you’ll be able to get is a JavaScript click handler on .paper revealing .comments. If you do such a thing, you should probably only hide the comments with JavaScript in the first place, so that users with JavaScript disabled can still see them.

It’s a reasonable suggestion, but I would predict comment participation to plunge. Maybe that’s just fine?

Yeah, you’d get an increase in quality at a loss of quantity. As you suggest, that may be the key to the discourse we’re all looking for.

You'd get an increase in target-specific informed commentary at the loss of the hallway discussion.

you lose a bit of quality, too. It might up the ratio towards quality, but you'll definitely lose some comments that the author doesn't feel like jumping through hoops to send through.

example : captcha/captcha-like services.

I've written well-thought out responses and comments on various forums and communities , and finally when asked to identify all the buses or traffic lights I quit the process.

Why? Is it because the comment isn't worth while? Is it because some moral repositioning enticed me to not to go through with the comment?

No.

Clicking every bus increases friction, I may not be all that motivated to begin with -- this friction pushes me over the edge and I close the tab. The captcha/whatever process may have succeeded in the job of fighting spam, but it also lost my comment to the ether.

I contend that gatekeeper systems like pop-quizzing the reader, and to an extent captcha-likes, are not necessarily a good gauge for content quality but rather of poster motivation.

Captcha doesn't stop spammers, it sets the bar higher -- requiring spammers to harbor a larger motivation in order to create the systems needed to circumvent captcha-likes.

A pop quiz would not hinder someone filled with vehement hate from posting a comment -- they'd skim the text, cherry pick the answer, and proceed to post the hateful or incorrect comment.

A community filled with people who post due to a large motivation seems like a bad thing.

I already abort a lot of comments I've written to post on forums, Reddit, HN, etc. Sometimes multiple paragraphs of written and re-written text. Usually my thinking is "someone will inevitably misconstrue my intent and start a dispute" - the chance of that often seems higher than the chance of someone finding my comment useful. So, I figure "what's the point?"

Adding a gateway, like your example with the CAPTCHA, would only reduce that chance of my posting further.

But as you indicated, it is a small barrier to a motivated, angry, agenda/conspiracy-fueled commenter.

I agree. On certain places I just give up. That place that is complete different from your opinions? But who cares? Your comment on an echo chamber will just be deleted, ignored, you banned, downvoted at hell at best. The only places to give dissenting opinions is places where all posts have no score and are merited not by the ego of the poster but the content of the post, the anonymous places have been both the most accepting and the most toxic.

Just be a little smarter than the average commenter. It's not reached critical mass yet. https://github.com/dessant/buster

I agree. It does sound like a valuable process. However, now we've increased the burden of work on the author. It is not only the author's job to conduct research, validate and share learnings; but also their job to make sure to keep noisy commenters away.

At the limit, this could lead to knowledge getting concentrated to small groups of people? :shrug:

In situations where this could be used and the author would have the opportunity to create and enforce the use of such a "quiz", the author (or the collective of people the author associates with) has already chosen to give the commenters a platform when they don't have to.

I like the idea, Im not sure how you could implement it on Twitter though.

It doesn't need to be one or the other. The quiz could be optional, and answering correctly would simply give your comments a rating boost - or inversely, you could put a badge of shame on any comments from people who hadn't passed the quiz. Then you just let the natural human dynamics play out.

> Then you just let the natural human dynamics play out.

This sentence sent a shiver down my spine for some reason.

Does it even need to be judgemental? Sometimes I see great comments in which the author admits they only read the title (and really, are just sharing some related insight, not responding to the article. I'd be up for just having two comments sections. The hard part would be getting people to use it correctly; I'm not sure exactly what incentives would accomplish that.

Just collectively hellban everyone who fails.

Drawing on making the quiz optional and taking some inspiration from HN.

Two ideas:

1. ‘Verified’ comments sort to the top.

2. Unverified comments go 50% grey.

Eg “Wait whys my comment gray? Oh actually I’ll answer that verification question to push it up”

This feels like the old anti-piracy techniques games used in the 90s... asking specific questions along with the page number of the answer in the manual.

I can't help but think the top comment will always be the answers to the prompts.

I adore this idea, and it's brilliant. It would get me to stop commenting on things I have no business commenting on, and make me consider whether or not I really want to read a certain article.

And, of course, the more honest and balanced discourse we can have the better. This is one of the reasons I appreciate HN over other social media.

That would be fun to implement in election voting worldwide. I still don't get why you have to pass a test before driving, healing and working at your profession, but not before changing how your society works.

Historically, societies have given a pretty shitty deal to people who can't vote, and a much better deal to people who can.

After all, if you're a politician, you want to get re-elected - so appeasing voters is much more important than appeasing people who can't vote. And appeasing demographics where 90% of people can vote is more important than appeasing demographics where 50% of people can vote.

So any type of testing to be allowed to vote - high school graduation, reading, IQ, current affairs - would be quite detrimental to the people who don't get to vote.

I'm not saying that you have to be cool and smart to vote. Just ask them how much percent a candidate is going to increase/decrease <xyz> in their program to be sure that a voter is able to at least read and understand the damn booklet before putting their [V] into the bin.

But a problem that you described could be addressed by counting invalid votes as 0.5 instead of 0. That would be fair — you didn't care to inform your decision, so it doesn't count as much as one's who did.

> But a problem that you described could be addressed by counting invalid votes as 0.5 instead of 0.

Unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem - because spending money in the town with lots of people with a full vote will produce more votes than spending the same amount of money in the town with lots of people with half a vote.

> Just ask them how much percent a candidate is going to increase/decrease <xyz> in their program

Everyone knows whether they feel happier, healthier, more successful, and whether they've got more money in their pocket today than they had 4 years ago.

Why is a candidate's policy on tariff rates on steel imports from Canada more important than that?

Maybe I'm wrong with election math, sure have to check it, but the point is not that some towns are completely dumb forever. The point is that voters would be more aware of candidates plans intellectually rather than emotionally.

>Why is a candidate's policy on tariff rates on steel imports from Canada more important than that?

Not more important. Important thing is voters would better realize what a program actually is and in future elections vote a little more for programs than for candidates to be sure that their votes count as 1. It is $subj idea — "please read on the paper before you comment". By looking for tariff rates you have to read the paper at least until these numbers.

Ed: as a politician you also cannot be sure if that town would or would not read their plan this time. You can agitate them to do that and convert 0.5 to 1 for you (and not for others). Isn't it a positive feedback all things considered?

Sounds like a job for GPT-3?

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