The purpose of that Hidden link next to to comments link was to allow HRs to be reviewed. If a comment gets two HRs, and that's an motion and a second, that comment is put under a temporary injunction while being posted to the recently hidden list, where trusted users view it, determine if it should have been HRed or not, and uprate if necessary.
Instead, it's used voyeuristically to view the worst our community has to offer, pile on HRs, and dredge up the worst comments a person can find to post in front of everyone in a diary proclaiming that dKos is filled with the kind of filth that only indiscriminate bannings can clean up.
I'm not going to link to those comments or those diaries. We all see them, I'm not interested in doxing anyone and making people feel like they have to come here and defend themselves, they probably already do anyway. I'd like to say to the authors of such diaries that if you don't want to see hidden comments it's as easy as not clicking on the view hidden comments feature. But for muckraking that just shows that comments and diaries that deserve to be hidden really do get hidden and people do get banned, a person can get 300 tips in their tip jar.
The real problem here isn't spammers or trolls. Or shills, or even people who have bad attitudes. I mean, really, give a dog a bad name and you can hang him by it. We're all here because we believe in this community and we share the same values.
I know how it happens, maybe you just finished writing a diary about something and you have your war face on, how dare a person come along and quibble with it. Sometimes people just like fighting. This one time, there was an I/P diary with a wonderfully calm and constructive comment thread. Unsatisfied, the diarist himself posted another diary about how not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic: not having gotten a fight in the first diary, posting another to ask for one. And he got his gratuitous fight.
As an aside, people should think about how other people will interpret it when they post that kind of thing. When I was new to political awareness, I saw a political advertisement on TV that went on and on about fatherhood. My first reaction was, well that's nice, who opposes fatherhood? Then I realized it was really saying that the candidate disapproves of gays. When you post that not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic when no one even said that, people think you're really trying to deny that anti-Semitism even exists. When you post something general about how terrible rape is, people think you're trying to insult men in general. This has lead to quite a bit of confusion, incidentally, whenein the diarist and likeminded individuals are bewildered that someone showed up defending rape.
It takes 2 HRs to hide a post, more if it gets uprates because if someone thinks a comment is worth uprating their views are also important. That's not enough for some people, they want to pile on trying to get as many HRs as possible on not only that post but every other post the same user has posted in the thread. Hoping, of course, to degrade that poster's mojo and trigger the autoban. There's something really disgusting about the psychology of voyeuristically jumping in from the hidden comments list and trying to get someone banned.
People here demand more and more bannings, over the most trivial shit even. In a sense, our focus on punishment here is just like what's happened out there over the past however long. First it was drugs, gotta keep these hard-core dealers off the street. Then how dare you keep a drug dealer in prison for longer than a rapist. Then murderers are facing automatic life sentences and people call for executions to send a message regarding the more heinous ones. In Britain, petty thieves used to be hanged, so they had to torture people to death to find a worse punishment. Anders Brevik is facing 23 years in prison for however many counts of murder. That's about what we give people who steal $100, and they probably don't brutalize people in Norwegian prisons either.
Here, you see HRs for disagreement all over the place. Someone once used all 5 of their donuts on my posts in a thread about nuclear power. This is especially severe, I guess, in discussions about race- there was one comment somewhere with like +15/-6 or something along those lines.
There are a lot of things people think about race. It's an important issue that people need to think about, and it's important for people to debate this issue and share what they really think. Because by now it's recognized that racism is a stupid idea that's hung onto mostly by losers, one of the worst things a person can be in our society is racist. That also means that you can't ever be caught on the wrong side of a debate about racism on dailyKos, because forever after your Internet identity is tied to that losing position. So people get stuck in pointless arguments. Worse, conformation bias ensures that when you get stuck in a losing argument, you end up believing it anyway.
When people are handing out HRs like popcorn and getting uprated for upbraiding people over trivial things, it really changes the scope of the debate. People get skittish about saying anything remotely controversial. As well they should be, because their Internet identity is permanently tied to whatever they say anyway. This enforces groupthink. If we are the soul of the Democratic party, we can't afford to make ourselves an echo chamber. Unlike the Republicans, we don't have the ca$h to be able to make our echo chamber big enough to fit half the nation into.
On every blog everywhere, there's the perennial problem with spammers and trolls. Requiring logins is enough to get rid of them. Unfortunately, when you make it difficult for random people to post, you lose potential posts from the random passers by who might have something insightful to say or a perspective that isn't very well represented here. Worse, with the loss of anonymity, people who have a judicious sense of discretion lose the willingness to say things that might be controversial. Spare me the purity trolling about how you always speak your mind.
So here are my suggestions:
* Get rid of the view recently hidden comments feature, or somehow change it so people don't click on it just to pile on HRs to comments that are already hidden or dig up crap that's already hidden to parade around
* There are too many HRs being given out. One a day is plenty. How about five a week, given on a tuesday, then people can have their tuesday HR party and for the rest of the week people can be more reasonable.
* Slashdot has a "post anonymously" feature. You check the box, it lets you post as "Anonymous Coward", and you don't get karma (mojo) from that comment. I think it's the best feature of Slashdot. People use it to avoid karma-whoring when they're just providing a link or otherwise not adding anything. Imagine if in order to be taken seriously when purity trolling you had to give up the potential mojo and fame from it.
* Slashdot also has anonymous posting for people who don't have a login. Naturally, they have to pass a CAPTCHA, and since most of the trolling on Slashdot comes through that feature, it's restricted to one post every like 20 minutes per IP address. The posts come with what would here be I guess the equivalent here of one HR, but it lets random passers by post their insights, which is truly valuable. It's easy enough to of hide them if they're obnoxious.
Lastly, no one has a right not to be offended. Just as terrorists are only as terrifying as you let them be, trolls are only as offensive as you let them be. If these suggestions would lead to jokes about fried chicken and gas chambers, it doesn't matter because judging by how trigger-happy people are with the HR button after 30 seconds only trusted users would be able to see those posts and then only if they want to. Beyond hiding them so trolls can't admire their handiwork and brag about it elsewhere, there's really nothing else that needs to be done. No one takes a person seriously when they say those kinds of things.
So I hope people can stop running around in gangs HRing each other, relax, and realize that we're all on the same side here anyway. Being stressed out all the time and looking for trouble isn't healthy. This site is great, it's sometimes like getting the newspaper a week early, and almost always has better political analysis than can be found almost anywhere else.