Ask HN: Would this idea help keep discussion civilized?
- Have a staff member or moderator go through all the posts and flag the ones that are determined to be part of the decay of the community. A few hundred flagged posts would probably do it. A few thousand would be better. - Run a word popularity analysis and see what words are most common to each bad post. Throw out “is”, “at”, “the” etc..
- I would expect that the list would be populated with words like “Hitler, Obama, Bush, fuck you, stupid, bullshit, pedantic...” etc, a long list of curse words, political figures, notorious dictators and insults. (George Carlin could write the joke, “787 things you can’t say online”, if he was still with us)
- Make a filter that flashes up a message when a person goes to submit a post with one of the flagged words with something like *“Do you really want to post that? It has triggered our bad post filter, and we would like you to reconsider how and what you have written. We are all for civilized disagreements, but completely against attacks and name calling” to prompt them to reconsider how they have phrased their post. Hopefully with some gentle nagging, people would grow more civilized. Or leave, which would achieve the same effect.
- Maybe someone could take this idea and make a filter for my email so I could reduce my bad emails. The ones I regret later, usually with inflammatory language.