If people were to pick one reason HN has 'gone downhill', disrespectful comment replies would top the list.
A controversial feature request- when a new account reaches a negative karma level within a certain period, HN will display all other usernames associated with the IP address of the throwaway.
I'd suggest something different. Reduce the value of throwaway logins by making it impossible to comment for, say, 40 days. We can then modulate the quarantine period according to the level of hostility present on the site. Of coursesmart, flagging and hellbanning remains as usual.
Yeah. My idea isn't great, just a frustrated response to this person who claims to have been here for a long time yet still feels it's appropriate to make offensive posts about others here.
I like the idea of an incubation period, but I've seen valuable comments posted from new accounts- I bet a ton of people lurk for months before seeing a thread they feel they can make a valuable contribution to.
You may allow them to contribute - just make them work a little for it. Trolls are lazy - they won't go through a captcha just to harass other people - they'll go to Digg instead. And those who use throwaway logins to troll are also cowards, who don't want to be exposed as who they really are. We can work with that too.
We don't have (or, really, want) to prevent the use of quasi-anonymous logins. All we need is to make life more miserable to trolls than they make it for everyone else. With enough frustration, trolls will gravitate towards places where they can sublimate their frustrations more easily and, hopefully, leave HN for those who really want to engage in civil conversation.
How about a "silent shadow" system? When an account reaches a slope on the negativekarma-time graph, just make it so that a very small, random group of users are the only ones who actually see what they posted. To everyone else, it would be as if they hadn't posted at all. All the while, if what they do post gets a large percentage of upvotes compared to the amount that see the post, shorten the "shadow silent" accordingly.
It will not be made known to the user that their posts cannot be seen. They will have no reason to use alts, and we will have no reason to IP tracking, which could affect non-troll users.
While this wouldn't be a bad idea (for this reason) if every IP-number was only linked to a single person behind the screen, I would expect a lot of people on HN to be hidden behind VPN's and other solutions for masking IP-addresses. These normally use the same IP-addresses for several people.
It appears that you have committed the fallacy of composition here. The claim that Jobs and Stallaman have some similar characteristics is not the same as saying that they are the same.
For example, you can objectively say that Hitler was an influential head of state (e.g. starting WW II) and FDR was an influential head of state. These are both true statements, while at the same time, these were two very different men.
I wouldn't call it stupid, so much as superficial. Those qualities, apart from the temporal connection, could be applied to most people who have achieved any notable stature.
He has that same drive, the unwillingness to compromise, Steve Jobs had. I don't find the comparison inadequate at all - not all people with notable stature have that lack of pragmatism both Stallman and Jobs present.
