Today I'm introducing some noise controls, starting in the comments drawer. Although HN shouldn't be approached as a popularity contest, we need the ability to protect our sanity from bots and provocateurs. It's not about popularity, it's about curation^{1A necessary sentence written with revelatory prose that's unique to me, surely.}.

First, you can see a user's average karma next to their username in the comments. This number can be a helpful signal for whether further engagement is a good use of your time.

Second, you can set two optional threshold filters: (1) min average karma and (2) min account age. Since these also filter out child comments, the pruning effect can be significant.

Take, for instance, the most commented story of the past week, the announcement of the MacBook Neo with 2300 comments. A one-karma threshold reduces that to 1,900 comments; a two-karma threshold reduces that to 900 comments. You were never going to read them all, but at least now you have a fighting chance.

This number is a pretty good proxy for a user's ability to engage in good faith. Having an avg karma < 1 is hard to do. But it's a metric, and it's imperfect^{2There are conspicuous exceptions. dang has an avg karma of 0.5. I've made mods (dang & tomhow) immune from filtering.}. Good commenters may get filtered out. It's your choice.

Happy to hear ideas on how this could be made more useful!^{3After this... maybe filtering out new-account submission spam?}

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1. A necessary sentence written with revelatory prose that's unique to me, surely. ↩

2. There are conspicuous exceptions. dang has an avg karma of 0.5. I've made mods (dang & tomhow) immune from filtering. ↩

3. After this... maybe filtering out new-account submission spam? ↩