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Comment by Supermighty | Hacker News Reader

He's not looking for up/down votes. He's looking for a discussion. Which well-meaning participants in an open source project should be able to have with some civility.

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You can find discussion greatly facilitated when everyone has the power to silence the imbeciles by down-voting them into oblivion.

I agree that technical solutions help. But they will never be a real solution. The eager troll will find a way around them. The real problem is a lack of strong leadership and stewardship. There is no BDFL setting the tone and punishing those who don't toe the line. Or maybe there is and this is the result. Ha!

For a long time I've thought that rather than absolute up/down votes, collaborative filtering might work better.

I've tried to drum up attention to it before now:

http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...

The problem is the mailing list is open to anyone and the majority of people on the list should be providing input.

There are moderated lists. When someone gets out of hand give them a temporary ban, and tell everyone why there were banned. People will learn that if they want to participate they will have to behave. After time, when the community scares away the trolls, they can loosen the moderation rules. There are plenty of communities that self moderate after having a strong leader show them what was socially acceptable and what was not.

It's not necessarily about misbehaving. You can "behave" and yet still derail a discussion or provide no useful input. I'd say there wasn't terrible uncivil about the internals list.

But it's less like a technical discussion list and more like an open forum. The signal to noise ratio is pretty low.

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