Richard Hollerith hruvulum@gmail.com
2019 Nov 09
During the first 2 years (and maybe longer) of the blog Overcoming Bias, we had a rule intended to stop people from uploading comments at too fast a rate. In the right column was listed the latest 10 comments uploaded to the blog (specifically the name of the author and the first few words of the comment). The rule was that your name should not appear on that list more than 3 times.
On Usenet for a few years in the late 1990s, more than one or 2 regular posters exhorted participants to avoid posting more than N posts per day. (Usenet did not have more than 1 or 2 rules: the best you could do to change the culture was to repeatedly exhort others to change their behavior. The socially accepted place to repeat yourself was in the "signature file" that automatically got appended to every message you posted, which is where these appeals not to post at too fast a rate were put.) Sadly I do not remember the details, but N was about 3.
The HN comments that lower the quality of the conversation the most IMO tend to be uploaded by people who uploaded at least 8 other comments that same day. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484347 has at least 2 participants of that description. I think it would improve HN for HN's moderators to dial up the sensitivity of the code that rejects comments that come too soon after the user's previous comments or since HN's moderators are already probably very busy, for someone to make available an alternative interface for reading HN comments that omits comments from those who have uploaded more than N comments in the previous H hours. I don't have time to implement such an alternative interface, but maybe you do.