I'm sure you're smart enough to make changes that will boost the level of civility, and not reduce it. At the moment, the biggest reason not to zing someone with a cheap shot comment is the fact that you will soon find a negative number attached to the comment (how humiliating!). I suppose you could hide the points and completely hide comments that wind up with negative points (and, to have the discussion flow make sense, you'd have to also hide the responses to that comment). I'm sure you'll iterate, and find out what works best. Good luck, and thanks for caring enough to try to improve things around here.

Could each user get a customized view based on similarity to comments they've previously up-voted? This could be based on a simple Bayesian filter, similar to the "Plan for Spam".

This could also encourage users to vote more as voting would (hopefully) improve the filtering.

An idea I just had that might help civility is to require every post to "explain itself" with a limited set of tags. Sort of like the ./ point system in reverse; you would get some set of options like "Information," "Opinion," "Related," "Off-topic" and you pick one or more. So if you want to start making a fuss or interject something outside the immediate discussion, you have to announce it.

Doing this adds filtering metadata and an gives additional incentive to downvote comments that don't contribute - they're going to be more likely to use few tags or inappropriate ones. On the other hand, posts that use a lot of tags simultaneously and actually encompass all of them are probably detailed and well-considered.

Downsides: more work to post(not always a bad thing), more room for nasty rules lawyering("This is not Hacker News").

One idea: disconnect the visible down-votedness of a user's comment from a user's visible karma- which seems to upset people. I often see posts regarding 'why are you down voting my comment?'. Not allowing a post to get publicly, visibly, lower than 0 would prevent meta discussions about 'why'- even though the hidden negative score would move the actual comment down the publicly visible thread hierarchy.

Not showing downvoted scores on comments would never cause a user to exclaim 'why aren't you upvoting me?'

Disconnecting a user's visible karma from the hidden negative points a user acquires from negative/poor comments would be important for this idea to work well.

I'm relatively new here, but if I may offer a suggestion:

I don't care much for the points on comments at all. Comments that float to the top regularly defend commonplaces, and while they certainly deserve a positive vote, there's not much to learn from those.

But interesting comments, that I gather new insights from, are often written by the same commenters (->commentators? my English is lacking). Thus, a system that would work well for me, would allow me to rate individuals, so that on the next thread it will show me my favourite commenters first.

(edit: wow, suddenly lots of replies in this thread - maybe I forgot to refresh. I believe jefffoster's idea of Bayesian filtering may be more powerful than mine)

I have a few ideas:

1) No comments on a post until its at least an hour old

2) More time to delete my comments. I made one just a few hours ago I'd like to delete because of its tone.

3) A "stop being a jerk" flag. It would only be shown to the commenter, anonymous, and have no impact on points.

4) Alternative to #3: same flag, still anonymous, but too many flags "mutes" the commenter for 1 day.

Ultimately, of course, its a culture problem. We all need to take personal responsibility for our behavior. Whether or not that can persist in a forum of size remains to be seen (I am optimistic that it can).

I also have to come up with alternative ways for people to find the comments they're most interested in on big threads

I think this is the key. People come to HN because the quality of the discussion is high. With increasing community size comes dilution, but only of the average comment quality.

In fact, as the community becomes larger there are more, perhaps many more extraordinarily good comments, so long as the original contributors are all encouraged to continue participating. These great comments are really the key.

Consider the Netflix Prize. Entries were judged based on RMSE. This is not the right metric, though, because out of all of the thousands of movies in the dataset, only a few dozen would ever be recommended to a given user based on any conceivable algorithm. And the user only really cares whether the particular movie that they use the algorithm to select is good or disappointing.

Similarly, users come here to read the exceptional comments, and a community in which every comment deserved to get 3 karma points would soon find itself without users.

In this way, removing comment scores may be part of an effective solution, but it may not be the crucial component because it only indirectly changes the accessibility of excellent comments.

Instead, actively trying to make it easier for people to read what they consider exceptional is a goal worth pursuing.

The vast majority of users are of the highest quality so I fail to see the benefit of eliminating points on comments. The reality is that the entire problem is downvoting comments. Trust the users, eliminate DV comments, and the quality comments will rise. What is the downside of losing DV while keeping UV of comments?

What if you just let logged-in users have the option to turn off the display of comment points?

FWIW, One method I often use to find interesting discussion here is to just go to the threads?id= page for certain people who I think make interesting comments like you, tptacek, patio11 etc..

Simple [possible] solution: restrict the number of downvotes and force people to prioritize. Further, you should get future downvotes only as a function of how many downvotes you already have. If you have 0 downvotes, you don't get to do it again, ever.

In this way, downvoting stops being a privilege you get at karma X and starts being something that's not to be squandered. I believe (or maybe hope) that every person here internally wants hacker news to be a good community, and that change will make them cognizant of the fact that downvotes are for special occasions where discourse is uncivil and not for "puttin' noobs in their places"

There's more discussion about this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006725