I've been thinking about how to stop toxic and/or drive-by comments like yours.

One idea I've had is a new account shouldn't be allowed to comment until 24hrs after the most recent login until it reaches 7 karma. The only exceptions are if the account is commenting on an article that it submitted or the email used to sign up for the account matches the domain of the article.

This stops people like you making a comments like this and also prevents the sock puppet idea you gave. Even if you create a bunch of "burner accounts" ahead of time when you actually try and use it, you won't be able to comment for 24hrs after login. If you try to circumvent this by constantly logging in but never posting, that pattern can be detected by HN admins. It'll look odd seeing 2 or more accounts below 7 karma always logging in everday but never posting from the same IP address.

Of course you could work around this by posting good comments with the burner accounts then going silent after the karma-7 goal but that's a lot of work and I suspect more than 50% of mundane comments would disappear.

I would love for the HN readers to poke holes in this idea of how you'd get around it or if it would damage the comment quality/diversity significantly.

We do restrict comments by new accounts in some ways, but the cost of restricting them severely would be much worse than the benefits. For example, consider Alan Kay showing up the other day to comment on Xerox PARC history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8618736. That's worth putting up with a lot of trolls!

Our current approach is to ask users to flag comments that should not be on Hacker News, and to judge by the GP it seems to be working.

What about people who use throwaway accounts for legitimate reasons?

Wow, that was fast. That's the end of my idea.

^ seconded

Hacker News is already loaded with features designed to engineer good behavior - the reply rate slows down in deep threads in order to discourage flamewars. The text in text posts is dimmed to discourage 'blogging'. The moderators will change titles and tweak the weights if they feel a popular post is too controversial. There's a moderation queue which lets high-karma users preapprove comments in certain controversial threads, and threads with more comments than votes get auto-flagged. Slowbanning and hellbanning are designed, respectively, to annoy users into leaving and render their pariticipation irrelevant. You can downvote and flag - and downvoting even comes with a handy visual censor, making the easiest form of engagement with a downvoted user to downvote them further (and the most difficult to actually read their comments.) And I even think downvoting by high-karma users counts more. And yet, trolls exist here as anywhere.

Heck, lobste.rs goes even further. It's an invite-only community, and like the mafia, if anyone you vouch for turns out to be no good, they get whacked, and you get whacked. And yet you can find downvoted and low-quality comments there as well.

I think that putting friction in front of new users tends to do more harm than good. Although I have seen a number of forums which moderate a new users' first five or so comments, even then, it doesn't keep trolls out altogether, it just delays the inevitable. Proactive solutions tend to fail more than reactive ones. Don't feed the trolls, downvote bad behavior, flag bad threads, upvote good threads, good behavior and engage with other users in a civil and productive manner.

>I suspect more than 50% of mundane comments would disappear.

There's nothing wrong with 'mundane' comments per se. We're participating in a discussion forum, and most comments are direct replies between a small set of users - you can't expect most of them to be anything but mundane. We're not writing articles here.

Just downvote and flag. Ignore the trolls.

post anything about PHP, everyone will jump in

Attempting to use humor here generally results in a buffer overflow.