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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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

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

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”

Just collectively hellban everyone who fails.

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 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

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

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.

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