You know what your mom would say, right? This week, we got an above average number of useless negative comments. A project was described as looking like a “turd” – for the record I love the hacker’s angular and futuristic designs, but it doesn’t have to be to your taste. Then someone else is like “you don’t even need a computer case.” Another commenter informed us that he doesn’t like to watch videos for the thirtieth time. (Yawn!)
What all of these comments have in common is that they’re negative, low value, non-constructive, and frankly have no place on Hackaday. The vast majority are just kind of Eeyorey complaining about how someone else is enjoying a chocolate ice cream, and the commenter prefers strawberry. But then some of them turn nasty. Why? If someone makes a project that you don’t like, they didn’t do it to offend you. Just move on quietly to one you do like. We publish a hack every three hours like a rubidium clockwork, with a couple of original content pieces scattered in-between on weekdays.
And don’t get us wrong: we love comments that help improve a project. There’s a not-so-fine line between “why didn’t you design it with trusses to better hold the load?” and “why did you paint it black, because blue is the superior color”. You know what we mean. Constructive criticism, good. Pointless criticism, bad.
It was to the point that we were discussing just shutting down the comments entirely. But then we got gems! [Maya Posch]’s fantastic explainer about the Lagrange points had an error: one of the satellites that Wikipedia said was at an earth-moon Lagrange point is actually in normal orbit around the moon. It only used the Lagrange point as a temporary transit orbit. Says who? One of the science instrument leads on the space vehicle in question. Now that is a high-value comment, both because it corrects a mistake and enlightens us all, but also because it shows who is reading Hackaday!
Or take [Al Williams]’s article on mold-making a cement “paper” airplane. It was a cool technique, but the commenters latched onto his assertion that you couldn’t fly a cement plane, and the discussions that ensued are awesome. Part of me wanted to remind folks about the nice mold-making technique on display, but it was such a joy to go down that odd rabbit hole, I forgive you all!
We have an official “be nice” policy about the comments, and that extends fairly broadly. We really don’t want to hear what you don’t like about someone’s project or the way they presented it, because it brings down the people out there who are doing the hard work of posting their hacks. And hackers have the highest priority on Hackaday.
I see where this is headed.
Exactly. Like when the little league baseball team gives out trophies to the loosing team as well because they don’t want them to feel bad, and say everyone is a winner. That’s not life, and if you can’t deal with negative feedback you need to work on you, not others.
The old sticks and stones is a good point – people should understand that when anyone can say anything, people are going to say bad things, because there are uncalled idiots out there. You should learn not to take it personally.
But then, not everything has to be “life” – you don’t need to rub it in. That’s a bully attitude; one that justifies being nasty for no good reasons.
What you’re observing is the slow buildup of discontent reaching a boiling point over days and weeks. When the audience is bored of the show, at some point peanuts start to fly, and that becomes the entertainment.
Only a few years ago, the Hackaday comment section was, as one comment put it, “A shark tank”. It has improved considerably in recent years.
As for complaining about videos, “yawn.” Over half the world is on bandwidth constrained connections (even some folks in wealthy nations). I get it, we are not the target market for Hackaday advertisers, but it would be nice to have more articles without the majority of the content in inconvenient, usually skipped, video format (update yt-dlp [google breaks it, constantly], download video with yt-dlp and watch offline).
Anyway, whatever you guys did to clean up the comment section from what it was before, congratulations. The Hackaday comment section is no longer something to be avoided.
The AI I’d be most excited for would be one that can turn a video into a easy to read document.
I’d guess people don’t like videos not for bandwidth concerns, but for time concerns.
“Shorts” are taking over because they give you the info you want immediately. Like what Google did for search results when it provides a blurb of the website.
It’s time, and not.
Videos are nice when you want to entertain yourself and sit down for some interesting stuff, since it stretches the content and gives the opportunity to show tangents – but if the topic in question is only mildly interesting, then it serves the opposite purpose: do I want to spend 15 minutes for nothing, or would I rather just have the summary? “Here, watch this video” instead of an article then becomes a finger up to the viewer.
Yes.
Most stuff won’t contain enough for it to be worth my time. There is a firehose of stuff. Thus nowadays the key skill is to quickly determine what to ignore.
I can speed read at 1-2k words per minute. Video speech is 60wpm , or less when all the ums ahs and whoops are omitted. You can’t speedread/skip video.
Hence I don’t watch video unless I know I’m advance it will be worth my remaining life.
It didn’t help that some of the old writers were abrasive, came back to the comments to argue back and insult people, abused their powers as moderators by removing dissenting opinions, yet insisted on trolling the readers with topics and social commentary they knew would rub people the wrong way.
Of whomever do you speak..? ;-)
But TBH, I actually miss the writings and mannerisms of the old grumpy grampa in question :)
The trouble always is, any community that gets its laughs from acting like idiots will eventually attracts actual idiots who ruin it for everybody.
Though all that coincided with things like gamergate, captain crunch, the suitacase kid, etc. which were highly heated topics at the time, so it’s easy to see how people would fall into different trenches. The comment sections were nuked over and over, which further increased the anger because people felt that HaD was being blatantly partisan as a whole.
In the end they managed to maintain their cool pretty well and the noise died down after a while.
Another thing I just remembered was the amount of people back then, who were trying to “tone police” by shouting down any nay-sayers. A good half of the comments were commenters complaining about other commenters. They knew the moderators would come down and nuke the thread even if the original issue raised was valid, because the commentary went so far down the drain that all sensible conversation was drowned.
The general point of conversation at that time had gradually shifted from “I’m right, you’re wrong”, to “I’m right and you’re evil.” and that seemed to justify all means of controlling the conversation.
Comment sections exist purely to drive ad revenue through additional site engagement. On top of that, these days you’re probably agreeing to having your comments harvested to train an LLM.
Stop working for free.
These days, we all live under the “tyranny of the curated experience”. Playing devil’s advocate for a bit, one could understand comments being written by people half-knowing that they will be silenced anyways as a way of dealing with frustration. Also consider that nobody abstaining from writing a negative comment has ever been rewarded.
On the other side, the hand controlling “the system” can reset the comments section with impunity until the desired content materializes in the comments section.
Is deleting comments the answer? I think not. I would love to see though whether adding a “click here to see ‘meh’ comments” below the main comments section would help people feel more motivated to get past their first impression of a project. Maybe they’ll come back and write another comment then, and this time a more fruitful one.
At the very least, it would help maintain a level of transparency and sense of fairness. And if you must, you can also allow others to downvote the meh comments just to show that other readers are also not impressed ;)
I actually like the idea of having a “meh” comments section, perhaps behind a login so you have to actively choose to be inundated with negativity. It might be nice to see moderators (or the community) deleting negative anonymous comments with impunity but comments from logged-in users could go to a “meh” section where only those interested in the schadenfreude can view them.
Any metric that is used for social policy ceases to measure what is intended because people start to game it.
In other words, you don’t want to turn HaD into Reddit.
When I see a stupid project I always go to the comments because I love to read the negative comments. Please leave them there, they are part of the enjoyment of Hackaday. Remember, most of us are here to be entertained by technical stuff, the negative comments are part of that.
I think that all of us would find that our own work is considered “stupid” by many people out there. Personally, if the Hackaday comment sections become supportive of negative comments, I’ll just ignore the comment section completely … and stop recommending Hackaday articles to friends/family … and possibly never come back here myself.
There’s enough negativity in the world. Please don’t insist that this place becomes yet another “stupid” place.
The general point is that positive commentary rarely amounts to more than “Good job!”, which brings nothing to the conversation, while the negative points are what reveal the interesting sides and tangents to the matter.
The problem is the tone of the commentary, or rather, how people react to criticism of themselves and others. One angry comment leads to another, and then the point is lost. Yet, if you try to police the tone, you also anger people who feel they’re being suppressed…
gotta say, good comments or bad
if you eliminated the comment section entirely, I doubt I would bother with HAD anymore and I doubt I am alone in that sentiment. There was another website I used to dig but I havent read it in years after they cut the user comments.
I’m a big fan of the Slashdot comment system. In addition to comments, they occasionally give people (randomly) “modpoints” to add to comments they feel is insightful or useful (or flamebait or funny). Individual comments are thus “modded up” to level 5, or “modded down” to -1 (after which they disappear entirely).
They also have “metamod”, which is where people go and judge whether a comment moderation is valid. If someone hates Tesla, for example, and mods an insightful post as “flamebait”, the metamods will flag it as inappropriate and that person will be less likely to get mod points in the future.
The theory is that most people are reasonable and nice and a small subset are trolls. If you give people a way to police the area, the nice people will outvote the trolling. If you give everyone a way to police the area and then monitor how that is done, you can identify the trolls and avoid giving them the power to do anything.
This only works if the nice people outnumber the trolls, but it seems to work in our current society.
It also requires logged-in accounts to keep track of everything, and that might be a deal-breaker for Hackaday, but I personally wouldn’t mind that: I’m always entering the same EMail and name on the reply form anyway… having a logged in account would only make that easier.
Lots of sites had, at one time, a comment section. Specifically news sites that have articles of a political bent: trolls would come in and torch the comment section with all sorts of vile and disgusting text just to get people to stop reading the comments.
Lots of sites had a comment section, and subsequently removed them. They didn’t think the issue through deeply enough, they saw the Slashdot (and Reddit, and Stack Overflow) comment sections and said “we should have that on our site” and then implemented comments at first-level, without moderation, and trolling ensued.
I think a tiered process of commenting with moderation is what is needed to tamp down on the trolling, and metamod tamps down on trolling via moderation.
It seems to work well over there. If trolling is a problem for Hackaday, maybe they should move to a different system?
(As the saying goes, to be a success just find successful people and do what they do.)
+1 for sure on this comment. I’ve often wondered why it isn’t being used here. It would be great!
+5 Insightful! :)
I agree the /. ratings system seem to work. But login-to-comment would exclude at least my rare & random comments. I mostly read only the writeups, sometimes lurk through the comments and some-sometimes, rarely, feel the urge to chip in some random comments.
TBH, I probably don’t have that much insight to offer anyway, but usually don’t write negative complaints (and if so, only complaining about other complainers, never the creator of the hack itself).
But anyway, I also agree with a commenter above that the HaD comments are generally quite OK and have been improved the last couple of years.
So status-quo would be good’nuff for me; a slashdot-like system OK if really needed (but personally would probably never get any account or login to write anything).
But please don’t just nuke the comment section out of existence. IMHO they do contribute a net-positive value to the site & us readers.
I’m a longtime Slashdotter, and coincidentally I have modpoints there that expire tomorrow. I agree with everything you said.
I’m in favour of your suggestion, if only because then I could have an account to sign in to. Right now, I have to type in my email address and handle for Every. Single. Comment. That gets old really fast, and sometimes I simply don’t bother. The “save my name” feature never works, and never has, regardless of what flavour or version of Firefox I use.
So “yes, please” to accounts at least. I have some reservations about Slashdot-style user moderation on Hackaday, but it might be a worthwhile experiment, and I’d be happy to participate in it.
The main reason I remain anonymous in all my public comments anywhere is the ability to be wrong and not get hounded for it later. There is no such thing as changing your mind when it comes to something you said ten years ago, and somebody decides to dig it up to hurt you.
modded up to level 5. I believe stack exchange works something like this, though i rarely use it any more since ChatGPT came along.
It would help to have some sort of voting system.
LM337SP
If someone is making an effort to criticize someone else’s work they are likely just distracting themselves from their own lack of motivation and innovation.
Ouch. Why do you have to call me out like that?
Thank you for posting this article. I’m troubled by the callousness of people’s remarks, seemingly ignoring the fact that there are human beings on the other side. Maybe you’re smarter, more experienced, more educated, older, well congratulations. There is no prize for demonstrating it and making others feel bad. At least, that’s not the world we should accept. It should be about learning, problem solving, and sharing.
I can offer the idea that if there are those who aren’t satisfied or entertained enough, projects could be rated that provides a guide to the excellence or complexity and maybe category of the project. Then they can choose where to spend their time instead of denigrating someone’s efforts.
I’m surprised to see it here, an article defending censorship.
If it’s not offensive, being negative is actually a form of being constructive, since many negative comments actually give good points on the downsides of a project.
And there is Instagram to the ones who want false positivity…
Y’all. Be nice and, Hackaday, don’t be afraid to punt crummy comments to the back or completely out. There’s nothing wrong with enforcing community standards. Read on.
Remember the dream of the Internet we all had in the 90’s? If we happened to have been born by then anyway? It was that everyone was going to have a voice and that we were all going to be able to share our interests and that it was going to be like a massive, beautiful library where anyone could learn and collaborate, (queue the sparkles and unicorns) but we all see where this went.
Trolls have always existed. For hundreds of years and probably since before we came down from the trees even. These trolls, however, found their social lives difficult, because of social accountability. Now, with the Internet, there are nearly no consequences. People can be as disagreeable online as they want, and they don’t get stuck eating the tail, ears and balls all by themselves at the back of the cave where nobody has to deal with their dis-harmonious crap. Be nice, or at least keep your mouth shut and you can sit by the fire. These social guard rails are and have always been absolutely critical. In their absence, things get ugly.
But it’s funny, isn’t it? Being a jerk? Example, Reality TV. It’s entertainment ‘value’ came from taking down those limits and encouraging people to be complete douches in bizarre, contrived social situations. Put them in a box and shake it and see what happens! It’s also inexpensive. Bit I digress.
My point is, that in the very unnatural and strange absence of social consequences, like in online forums, some people will be jerks. You won’t fix the jerk part, so fix the other part.
I wonder what would happen if for every time a comment was flagged as meanspirited, it’s font size was reduced?
The thing is that you are TOO nice, and you promote projects that shouldn’t be promoted.
The very first comment I ever made on here was a “negative” one on an article singing the praises of outright dangerously mislabelled multimeters. Actually dangerous, not just the stuff that triggers “It’s dangerous!” boilerplate in your articles.
The most recent “negative” comment I made was on a project that was not practically useful for what both the article and the people building it claimed it was good for… but, worse, was part of a pattern of stuff coming from a group of charlatans who seem to be primarily in the business of setting other people up for serious health problems by promoting distrust in the expertise of the actual health system. These are not people who should be getting amplified or given any credibility.
The one before that was on an article that amounted to an advertisement for a commercial product.
It’s not uncommon for you to gush uncritically about projects that aren’t just personal hacks. Some of the things you write about are meant, or at least suggested as possibilities, to be widely deployed– and are, or at least are trying to be, socially harmful. For example the repeated cheerleading for self-driving or remotely-driven cars, complete with uncritical acceptance of their promoters’ framing of the issues (safety, in the narrow sense of avoiding crashes, is not the issue). That stuff should be called out.
There have been a couple of memorable projects that purported to protect people from “repressive regimes”, but that would, if actually used in the conditions that actually exist in such regimes, have put most of the users in far worse danger. Ideas that can get people killed deserve to be dumped on.
I bite my tongue on the more numerous articles that are just about low-value, uninteresting projects… but it’s still true that nobody asked you to publish an article every three hours, or to publish articles on any particular artificial schedule.
If you force yourselves to push out low-value content, you can’t really blame people for calling it low-value content. If anything, how about scaling back until you find you have to actually reject a significant number of possible projects? Maybe set a maximum of one a day?
The creative team and moderators are saints. Putting time and energy into writing and illustration (and often showcasing someone else’s passionate work in the article), then being met with a handful of one-liners from people who use the comments as a daily microblog for their general discontent in life has to take some thick skin.
I miss Brian Benchoff and the comment section troll whose name I don’t seem to remember at the moment.
perhaps hack a day has no place on my bookmarks toolbar. the uk, canada, etc, may have abandoned free speech in favor of ersatz kindness, but some of us haven’t. can you imagine what would happen when apple or google or whatever start lobbying the governments of the world to suppress sites such as this? because fixing your iphone hurts their bottom line. they could easily do to hack a day what canada tried to do to the flipper zero. one of the things i have always admired about the hacker/maker community was its rebellious streak and values of independence of thought and resistance to control from tyrannical groups. to be told to “fall into line or be censored” is contrary to that.
if you can only say nice things, then what is the point of saying anything at all? all this does is create an echo chamber where any meaningful discourse is impossible. the comments section is part of the draw to the site. take it away, and i could just as easily find this kind of content on another platform that believes in the values that us hackers and makers hold dear. granted its your comments section, do with it what you will, moderate as you see fit, but this has consequences just as posting an intentionally hostile post does. ive seen a lot of communities wither and die from over moderation. dont join them.
For those of you who are posting harmful comments about moderators finally taking a stand againt hate, please read “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”. You must understand that your behaviour in this safe-space that is HackADay is neither acceptable, not helpful. We must preserve others from criticism, otherwise we’re building a society made of violence, not rules and understanding.