Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

What I have in mind would be a direct message to the author, not a public message. That should further discourage spammers -- I imagine they're not particularly interested in sending spam to one blogger at a time.

You might want to have some feedback that informs a person who is about to report a typo that 4 or 5 other people have already reported a typo on a given post. That might help discourage the phenomenon where a single typo generates a flood of 10,000 helpful reports.

View on HN

Yes, I meant a direct message too - like a flag - because it would discourage spammers. I didn't unpack it, so it was ambiguous.

I'm not sure if the "10,000" reports would happen; have to try it and see. It's probably more like bug-reports, or 37signal's "feature requests" (that they read and throw out). And, if you fix the typo, the reports stop. :-) It's hard to judge, but I think you'd have to be massively popular to get even one or two typo reports. But I don't know: need to do the experiment.

Maybe a lower-cost solution would be just to add "prompting" text next to the comment box, something like: "typo corrections are welcome", to encourage people.

Typo reports (bug reports?) aren't that common: for example, I made a comment on a typo to Tim O'Reilly's recent blog - but no one else had.

The problem is that grammar flames are socially awkward. They've got a bad reputation on the web that goes way back to Usenet days. To issue one is kind of like telling someone that they've got some food on their face. But it's worse, because on the web you can't whisper: By default your criticism is preserved forever, smack in the middle of what's supposed to be a conversation about something other than grammar. Unless the author takes the trouble to delete some comments -- which is an extra step, and which can also sometimes be socially awkward, since comment deletion is generally reserved for trolls.

I wouldn't have bothered correcting this one if I hadn't been able to make a lame joke at the same time.

I agree that a feature to fix this might well not have enough utility to be worthwhile, which is perhaps why nobody's built it yet!

I hadn't thought of that aspect. Being public makes it worse. Personally, I've always appreciated feedback on a website - but in a discussion, I agree it's a diversion that undermines the message (and is annoying). Commenting on blogs are sort of in between those two (really, a discussion if the blogger also comments, as they often do).

Some kind of threaded comments might help. e.g. on reddit, you can compress the joke-thread and the pun-thread, to get to the on-topic commentary. A "typo thread"? Or an explicit "typo" tag (which you could hide from the public, and so disable captcha, if you wanted).

But I haven't seen threaded comments on blogs - maybe they aren't needed? It seems an obvious idea to try.

> I imagine they're not particularly interested in sending spam to one blogger at a time.

I get a ton of spam via the GitHub web interface. It is really annoying.

How much spam qualifies as a ton?

Oh, well. There goes another theory out the window.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com