[HN Gopher] The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it...
___________________________________________________________________
The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)
Author : yellowyacht
Score : 114 points
Date : 2021-04-14 18:20 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stackoverflow.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (stackoverflow.blog)
| kodah wrote:
| I've been downvoted to [dead] before, though I've never gotten
| mad about it.
|
| One trend I have noticed is that on HN you won't necessarily be
| downvoted for your idea but you definitely will be downvoted for
| how you present it. If you come off as vitriolic or angry, you
| can expect a proportionate response. Frustration seems to be
| tolerated intermittently.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| You can definitely be downvoted for ideas here. Comments that
| go significantly against the political norms of the site seem
| particularly prone to this.
| rocqua wrote:
| Whilst that us true, I think many of these comments are
| combative, argumentative, or implying more than arguing.
|
| I think a thoughtful and compassionate but unfavored argument
| here will not be downvoted to death.
|
| That is a higher standard than what the accepted political
| stances face. But it feels better than what is achieved in
| any other place.
| tremon wrote:
| In my experience, it's not the idea, but how they're
| presented. I rarely see a well-reasoned post downmodded. It's
| usually snipes, sarcasm (my own guilty pleasure), or a poster
| repeating the exact same argument multiple times without
| engaging any of the counterarguments.
| Oblouk wrote:
| I think the content at HN is pretty good. Some other novel
| approaches I have seen includes upquest.com which has voting
| based on where you think the score is headed. I think (as others
| have mentioned) downvoting introduces issues like for example
| downvoting articles around the one article you want upvoted.
| minikites wrote:
| >It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to
| community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad
| behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of
| graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I
| was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that
| made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was
| miraculous.
|
| The success of "broken windows" policing is not supported by much
| evidence, so the rest of article based on this concept is
| suspect:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticis...
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I have no opinion on New York and its implementation of the
| theory but I think it's indeed very clear that the theory
| applies to community management.
|
| I manage an instant messaging community of about 10000 stem
| professionals and you can see negative community feedback loops
| develop or die down in real time depending on how you act on
| them. It's evident new members take in the vibe when they
| arrive and act to reinforce good or bad trends. If you let
| people make crass jokes, soon they're posting rude comments
| then insulting each others. If you let people post memes about
| technical topics, soon it's random tiktok videos, then it's
| porn. If you let a regular member go off on a newbie who asks a
| bad question, the next thing you know people are bullying
| newcomers left and right.
|
| All I wanted was to build a nice virtual gathering spot and
| meet cool people but now I have to play fascist because the
| feedback effect is so strong.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Most of the criticism appears to come from misguided CRT roots.
| Thus the criticism itself is suspect.
| [deleted]
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| To those of you addicted to Hacker News; I can offer this tip.
|
| Get a Hellban. It's not hard after all. I'll probally get
| hellbanned over this post?
|
| You will find you will still pruse HN, but very rarely will you
| feel the need to contribute. Your time here will decrease.
|
| Hacker News does not need much improvement. It does seem like
| it's on the back end of it's business cycle though, like all
| current social sites? I used business cycle because I don't know
| the word for a social site's decline. Decline is too harsh a
| word. Maybe predictable conversations, and a bit of a echo
| chamber, is more appripro? Hacker News is still the best site for
| scientific conversation on the the internet though.
|
| It seems like we have hashed out the important scientific stuff,
| and most issues computer related.
|
| I'm so greatfull to the hard nosed scientists whom hang here, and
| take umbridge to unsupported claims. I really do appreciate you
| guys. You know who you are. You are usually the first one to
| comment on a study's flaw, or whether the Placebo Effect is
| rearing it's magical head.
|
| Graham should add a few more moderators though. Never give too
| much power to one person, and an owner. This Plus--if Graham pays
| more Moderators, he could write off the added expence? It could
| be his gift to humanity? Oh yea, block a person, but do away with
| hellbanning. It's wimpy, passive aggressive, weak move. I
| understand moderation, but just block a person. Don't let them
| rattle on to open air.
|
| I would like to see a few more political discussions though. Not
| a lot, but some. Maybe one every other week? Expose the political
| fakers, and hypocrites. Expose the political hacks on both sides.
| Track every dime both parties bring in by way of Lobbiests?
| disgrunt wrote:
| For those of us unaware, what is a hellban?
| krapp wrote:
| It's a ban designed to make it appear to the banned user that
| they aren't banned. The intent is to allow them to continue
| to post (so they don't make a new account and avoid the ban)
| unaware that their posts are unreadable by the rest of the
| community.
|
| It works, but it's extremely controversial. It used to be the
| case that talking about it (and making banned users aware of
| their status) could get you banned here, and vouching for
| banned users wasn't available until relatively recently. Some
| users have only discovered they were banned _years_ after the
| fact.
| disgrunt wrote:
| > It's a ban designed to make it appear to the banned user
| that they aren't banned. The intent is to allow them to
| continue to post (so they don't make a new account and
| avoid the ban) unaware that their posts are unreadable by
| the rest of the community.
|
| How is that distinct from a shadowban? Or is it the same
| thing?
| krapp wrote:
| It's the same thing. Hellban is just a less polite term
| for it.
| disgrunt wrote:
| I've experienced a similar thing on HN. I'm calling it
| the "insta throttle". I've been met with a "You're
| posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." message
| after posting just once.
| krapp wrote:
| I have that too. After four or five posts I have to wait
| an hour.
|
| They'd probably remove it if I asked them, but I find it
| helps me choose my comments more wisely, or at least make
| certain the ones I know will be downvoted will be worth
| it. And being forced to take a break now and then isn't
| so bad.
| BrandonM wrote:
| _> Maybe predictable conversations, and a bit of a echo
| chamber, is more appripro? [...] It seems like we have hashed
| out the important scientific stuff, and most issues computer
| related._
|
| I think you're totally right with the first sentence I've
| quoted. The second has some truth to it, but I think it's a
| more personal effect than you seem to be acknowledging.
|
| The most common complaint of long-time forum members is that
| the signal-to-noise ratio has gone down. In reality, the
| signal-to-noise ratio could stay the same, but for any
| individual community member, we will personally find less
| signal in the noise. The discussions will inevitably become
| predictable to us.
|
| When we first join a forum with a particular focus, we likely
| have an incredibly incomplete view of the topics being
| discussed, or at least that community's interpretations of
| those topics (some of which might change our mind). We'll have
| lots of epiphanies. We'll connect a lot of dots that we hadn't
| connected before. We'll have real world experiences that we can
| anchor to discussions in the forum, allowing us to bring our
| life context into the forum and the forum context into our
| lives.
|
| Over time, though, we'll be learning less and less from the
| forums. The forum discourse can initially advance somewhat as
| we come to useful consensus on some topics, and as the earlier
| members have more life experiences. For any forum that allows
| new members, the discourse is bound to hit a steady state of
| much more slowly evolving discourse. In the long run, forums
| likely evolve at roughly the same rate as society as whole.
|
| The forum still fills a very useful function for those new
| starry-eyed members who have a lot to learn and much room to
| grow. For them, the adventure and discourse and overall
| experience is nearly as good as it was for the early forum
| members.
|
| Meanwhile, those early members continue to grow at human rates,
| not society rates. We outgrow the forums. We start to see
| similar points over and over again, ones we've already argued
| to death and assessed for ourselves. We've personally
| experienced supporting and contradictory anecdotal evidence for
| many of the forum's consensus viewpoints. The "signal" at this
| point mostly comes from discussing entirely new events in the
| forum's focus area. The sorts of things where you might say, "I
| wonder what HN thinks about this?"
|
| Therein lies the rub. As we personally have discussed to death
| the technical topics that drew us to HN, we almost wish to give
| "the HN treatment" to broader areas, especially philosophy,
| politics, and other current events. But we are not experts in
| these areas. It might feel exciting to us to discuss these
| things with our peers, but to anyone looking in from the
| outside, we're a bunch of bumbling idiots who think we know it
| all. If these topics start to dominate the conversation, the
| forum is no longer interesting to newcomers. Foremost experts
| in these areas have little reason to visit the forum, so any
| advancing discourse is much slower than it was for the original
| forum topic.
|
| Sorry, I'm kind of thinking out loud in this comment. I guess
| my conclusion is that it's probably best to strive to keep the
| forum on topic, even if it gets boring for the oldtimers. I
| think it's totally fine for members to realize they've outgrown
| the forum and move onto other ways of spending their remaining
| time on this planet. We can take some satisfaction in the role
| that we played in the forum's early growth, and we can be
| grateful for the role that it played in our growth. And we can
| let the next generation muddle on in our stead, experiencing
| their own adventures while moving the center in their own
| direction.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's kind of amusing that the entire premise of this article is
| undone by the aside:
|
| > _update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which
| I never realized._
|
| But while downvotes seem useful for _comments_ where there 's a
| lot more scope for false information, trolling, etc., I'm not
| sure what the additional value would be for _posts_ -- they 're
| either popular or not, and you can still flag posts that are
| actively harmful.
|
| And then this:
|
| > _Is it realistic for users to expect to post in an environment
| where there are no penalties at all, no way for their peers to
| express disapproval or disagreement with their post?_
|
| Huh? Peers express disapproval and disagreement by _commenting
| within the post_. As I am doing precisely right now. ;)
|
| Jeff Atwood is a super-smart guy who's done amazing things but
| this particular piece leaves me quite baffled.
| cryptoz wrote:
| I used to read Coding Horror but stopped paying attention to
| Jeff Atwood after his anti-coding rant. He repeatedly insisted
| that "learning to code" is a really dumb thing to do unless you
| intend to make a career out of it. A really shocking opinion
| that I was surprised to hear from him, and made me lose all
| respect for his coding-related opinions.
| disgrunt wrote:
| I have no opinion of Atwood and am unfamiliar with his work.
| But a single opinion/rant made you lose all respect for a
| person?
|
| I see this sentiment a lot on HN. The fatal opinion
| minefield.
| phpnode wrote:
| I saw something earlier today that said (inelegantly
| paraphrasing)
|
| "developers read articles as if they themselves were a
| compiler, immediately stopping as soon as they reach a
| sentence they disagree with and then throwing a syntax
| error"
|
| I think the same thing applies here
| prichino wrote:
| At least he has opinions. The "everyoness must code" folk
| sometimes do sound like markov-generated text. Funny that you
| hold his coding opinions in less respect for what is most
| decidedly a not coding-related opinion. Substitute coding for
| "advanced mathematics", "investment banking", "nursing".
|
| Would you lose respect for a professional nurse's nursing
| opinions if he said learning to nurse is a really dumb thing
| to do unless you intend to make a career out of it?
| vcxy wrote:
| Not the parent commenter, but kinda, yeah. Saying that it's
| stupid to learn x if you aren't going to monetize comes off
| poorly to me. So does saying that everyone should learn x.
| I don't understand either view.
|
| Is it weird to have an interest in nursing and learn about
| it but not be interested in monetizing it? Sure, it could
| be. Is it dumb? No.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| An alternative analogy would be "learning first-aid is a
| dumb thing to do unless you become a medical professional."
|
| I wouldn't lose respect, but it is a narrow view, and one
| worthy of debate.
|
| "Programming" is such a powerful tool for everyone to
| interact with technology and we could do a better job
| exposing programatic abstractions. Think of how many people
| use spreadsheets with complex expressions. Is that that not
| also programming?
| jokab wrote:
| Upvoted :)
| ergot_vacation wrote:
| Belief in Downvoting seems to be an artifact of idealistic
| naivete (that I used to have as well), in the same way as
| enthusiastic, unquestioning belief in the writings of Ayn Rand,
| Karl Marx etc (not calling anyone out, everyone was a teenager
| once). Downvotes SEEM good on paper. In the real world, they're
| garbage because they're never used as intended.
|
| Nearly every implementation of downvotes assumes they will be
| used as a way for ordinary users to moderate bad content, _and
| that this power will not be abused_. The reality is that we 've
| known mob rule was a terrible idea since at least the
| Enlightenment era, and probably much earlier. But apparently we
| need to keep re-discovering it.
|
| There is a certain kind of person that mostly likes to attack and
| destroy, in any given situation. Not for any good reason, but
| simply because they like conflict. Give them a downvote, and
| they'll latch on to it and destroy communities. Give them only an
| upvote and they'll lose interest and go cause problems somewhere
| else.
|
| Moderation is for moderators. Users cannot, and should not, be
| trusted with it.
| dang wrote:
| Getting it wrong for 12 years now:
|
| _The Value of Downvoting, Or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong
| (2009)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633668 - Jan
| 2021 (1 comment)
|
| _10 Years In, Was He Right? "Value of Downvoting; How HN Gets It
| Wrong"_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23409231 - June
| 2020 (1 comment)
|
| _The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong
| (2009)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13325726 - Jan
| 2017 (12 comments)
|
| _The Value of Downvoting or How Hacker News Gets It Wrong
| (2009)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10875619 - Jan
| 2016 (36 comments)
|
| _Reddit 's Discussion about HN_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508801 - March 2009 (24
| comments)
|
| _The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948 - March 2009 (114
| comments)
| tpmx wrote:
| Those are mostly out of date. Maybe stop self-celebrating past
| victories, it's not very becoming. ;)
|
| Flagging is where HN gets it wrong, IMO. So many slightly
| controversial and important topics are being removed with this
| mechanism. We're left with all the vanilla stuff.
| wvenable wrote:
| Flagging is necessary to keep the site on-topic in my
| opinion. People will happily upvote controversy that has
| little value or importance to this site.
| tpmx wrote:
| It makes for a nice beige set of topics for sure.
| dvt wrote:
| It's funny you say this, because the topics on HN are
| actually quite broad. If flagging weren't a thing, all
| we'd be talking about is Trump this, guns that, free
| speech this, trans that, racism here, racism there. Now
| _that_ would be quite boring.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > controversy that has little value or importance to this
| site
|
| What do you mean by "this site"? The participants in this
| forum are the site. I've had discussions flagged that I
| thought to be valuable. Why would you want to get rid of
| controversy anyway? Do you want to discuss only popular old
| hat things? Stability under diversity is a sign of health
| in an ecosystem.
| wvenable wrote:
| Participants want to discuss politics, current events,
| sports, etc. But this site is Hacker News and it is for
| specific subject matter.
|
| If you want to discuss off-topic controversies, there's
| an entire Internet full of sites to have that discussion
| on.
| tpmx wrote:
| I've seen purely technical discussions being removed from
| page 1 just because some people really wanted that stuff
| to go away, and had the power to make it happen.
| wvenable wrote:
| Where's this technical discussion? Lets see if I agree
| with you.
|
| Because I've seen people totally make up stuff to make a
| point.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an
| ecosystem._
|
| And yet part of that diversity is that ecosystem has
| different niches :).
|
| You can discuss politics, sports and controversy anywhere
| else on the Internet. HN has a different focus, and many
| of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way -
| because that's literally the basis for the whole value of
| this place.
| type0 wrote:
| > HN has a different focus,
|
| This needs to be expressed more often, too bad often
| people do write that but not in a friendly way and some
| threads go on with countless bickering.
| freedomben wrote:
| I agree that flagging has value, but it is grossly misused
| to suppress discussions that are on topic but are outside
| of the overton window.
|
| Generally speaking I think HN is wonderful, and if staying
| wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship, I'll gladly
| make that trade, but I do wish people had thicker skin
| (that's a problem on all sides by the way).
| wvenable wrote:
| Individual comments are rarely flagged for anything other
| than outright spam or harassment. I browse with "show
| dead" turned on.
|
| I have seen entire heated topics killed but that kills
| both sides of the argument equally. What value is a
| 500-comment talk-over-each-other argument, fundamentally
| about politics even if on-topic, on this site? I doesn't
| seem like something we should waste time on.
| tpmx wrote:
| The fallacy here: when you're only exposed to stuff that
| everyone agrees about, you're missing out.
| rocqua wrote:
| I have recently found a whole lot of value in figuring
| out what everybody agrees about. A lot of the time that
| is right. And when it is wrong, it is good to know, and
| encourages (me at least) to really figure out why the
| fence is there before I remove it.
| wvenable wrote:
| Rarely does anyone ever comment to agree on something.
| And merely being contrarian is not valuable in of itself.
|
| If a few things are over-moderated I _might_ be mildly
| missing out. So what? Humans are fallible. There is no
| perfect system. You 're not arguing that HN is _so_
| moderated that it 's completely worthless. You're not
| even getting close to that.
|
| So what do we do about a system that isn't perfect but is
| doing a pretty fine job?
| type0 wrote:
| > if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate
| censorship,
|
| The rules to stay on topic is not the same as censorship.
| Often I noticed people talk (write) past each other and
| get into misunderstandings; it happens to me I'll admit.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > Flagging
|
| Flagging is a problem sometimes. I feel like it's common for
| a comment to get flagged when someone strongly opposes it.
| It's really upsetting to see that. Especially since it feels
| like the flaggers are a small minority, but they're shutting
| down discussions for everyone.
| [deleted]
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| It is still wrong. But even brilliant
| people/groups/institutions can get it stubbornly wrong. Let us
| say that HN thrives despite the disutility of the downvoting
| regime.
| minimaxir wrote:
| It's worth noting that 2009 was a _eon_ ago in internet time.
| Almost nothing from that era is applicable to social media
| behavior in 2021. _Especially_ Hacker News, which IMO was much
| more elitist /hostile at that time and fortunately has improved
| in that aspect over the years.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Seemed friendly enough in 2010. There was a lot less news
| cycle discussion and more tech (but less product) discussion,
| so that might have been alienating. Also a lot more YC
| specific stuff, so maybe that felt elitist.
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| The value of downvoting, or how Stackexchange gets it wrong
| about HN's voting system.
|
| It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about
| downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead
| without updating their understanding.
|
| If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4
| for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a
| ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise to the top, but
| _conversation_ keeps them there. Why downvote a story that isn
| 't interesting? Just don't comment and it will go away soon.
| Flagging is for problematic stories.
|
| What I love about HN is that, unlike Reddit and SE, is that
| discussion is the major feature. The moderation system is
| tailored around facilitating that. Contrast that to other
| sites, reputation is the game, and content revolves around the
| people playing that game.
|
| 12 years later, SE is still getting it wrong. Not just in their
| understanding of HN's downvotes, not just in their
| understanding of HN's purpose, but they're still a reputation
| game and the quality of the site suffers for it.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| As far as reputation goes, I see little difference between HN
| and Reddit. Why do you think HN does it right and Reddit
| wrong?
|
| SE prominently displays reputation points, which is
| different.
| rocqua wrote:
| In reddit, karma is much more prominent than upvotes on
| hackernews. At least as far as I am aware.
|
| Though I doubt redditors reddit just for the karma.
| klyrs wrote:
| Reddit shows up/down totals on users, comments, and
| stories. It's really in your face. HN has a subtle little
| arrow or two, and you only see the sum of up/down on your
| own comments. We know when things have been downvoted, but
| it's much harder to tell if something has been upvoted. And
| when things do get downvoted, they're grayed out -- it
| takes more effort to read downvoted comments (click the
| date), so if you're skimming you'll just skip unpopular
| comments until it gets relevant again. So display-wise, I
| like the cleaner HN over the noisier and visibly gamified
| Reddit.
|
| Also, not insignificantly, HN is a side project, not a
| startup. It can succeed at its goals and stay small, not
| worrying about "capturing the market" or whatever. Staying
| small means dang can generally be expected to read most of
| the comments on the site.
|
| And by "small", I mean that there's rarely much action on
| the page-3 stories. Threads that get paginated are rarely
| worth wading into. If a million people started using HN,
| then it would quickly become so unusable that they'd all
| quit within a week. Reddit "solves" this "problem" by
| making subreddits, and now it's a poison-breathing hydra.
| type0 wrote:
| Not sure about reddit but here the reputation doesn't
| really mean anything, please downvote this comment as you
| please and I will prove my point :-)
| oceliker wrote:
| > the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they
| suggest
|
| Correct, -4 is the lowest a comment can go:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
| type0 wrote:
| Do title submissions also start at -4? I noticed that there
| is often almost a hard line where article submission gets
| much more visibility if it goes over 4 points.
| chalcolithic wrote:
| I always assumed SE got voting right because why else are
| they the top dog? I never felt any need for them to exist
| because programming forums (or usenet groups earlier) exised
| since forever and once Google give us usable search(sorry,
| Altavista) I could find an answer for basically any question.
| klyrs wrote:
| > why else are they the top dog?
|
| They've got really good SEO game, and answers to most of my
| newbie questions when I'm learning a new language. But I
| tried contributing to the site for a little while... nope,
| it's wickedly political for all the wrong reasons and I
| quit before long.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I think SE has terrible voting. Voting fundamentally
| doesn't work for what they're trying to do, because if you
| want wiki-style best-of answers to specific questions you
| cannot use a simple counting algorithm.
|
| For one, answers change over time. The best answer five
| years ago will have accumulated the most votes. The _most
| current and correct_ answer will never be able to catch up
| with that.
|
| Two, there's a lot of nitpicking and irrelevant point
| scoring. Making answers a competition instead of a
| collaboration brings out the worst in some people.
|
| Three, there's an assumption that voters know what the best
| answer is. Because they often don't - which is why they're
| looking for answers - the answers with the most upvotes are
| the ones that _look plausible._ They 're not necessarily
| definitive, or ideal.
|
| Four - for code - the code sometimes has obvious bugs or
| typos. Upvotes are supposed to fix this, but clearly they
| don't.
|
| Five - the mod problem, where valid questions are closed
| and duplicates aren't really duplicates.
|
| I think SE would work better as a collaborative semi-wiki,
| or something else in that ballpark. I don't think the karma
| scoring does a good job - except in the very basic sense
| that you get some relevant answers in one place, and it's
| still up to you to decide which one (if any) solves the
| problem.
| type0 wrote:
| > I don't think the karma scoring does a good job
|
| They introduced it to gamify the whole charade without
| any deeper thought. At the beginning they had a lot of
| people addicted to answering questions and displaying
| their points on blogs which to me always looked
| ridiculous.
| Tenoke wrote:
| > Flagging is for problematic stories.
|
| If you follow at all which stories are rejected flagging is
| used as downvoting on a daily basis unless your definition of
| 'problematic' is extremely broad.
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| The notion that HN is well-moderated is bizarre. HN is
| exceptionally hostile to those who hold beliefs contrary to
| HN-acceptable norms.
|
| If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio
| companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out
| that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so
| long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate
| speech are _not_ tolerated.....
|
| The community here used to be absolutely amazing. 10-15
| years ago the discussions here were actionable, and I was
| able to make valuable professional connections in the the
| comments.
|
| These days, that doesn't happen. The discussions are lower
| value, less open minded, and more strident. It's a pile of
| shit.
|
| And candidly, that's why I'm logged into a banned account
| to post this. Uncomfortable truths can't be posted from
| IPs/cookies/users that you want to preserve. Daniel Gackle
| will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he
| tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.
| krapp wrote:
| >point out that white supremacist and other hate speech
| is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that
| responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
|
| To be fair, much of the overtly racist and bigoted
| content I've seen lately has gotten voted down and
| flagged, and I've seen Dan step in and stand against it
| on a few occasions. I don't know if this is the result of
| a shift in my perceptions or in the community, but to me
| it seems like things were far worse a few years ago, and
| now at least a few of the notorious bad accounts have
| been banned. It's certainly not a paradise, God knows any
| time race, religion or gender comes up this place often
| winds up validating its execrable reputation, but I do
| think the mods are trying. It's not their fault the tech
| community is being taken over by incels and neo-
| reactionary fascists.
| [deleted]
| snowflake_ptr wrote:
| Given your claims of "white supremacist and other hate
| speech is welcomed [...] extremely bigoted shit" being
| both _completely_ inconsistent with my experience, _and_
| the specific things that you are claiming are present, it
| seems far more likely that you 've been banned for the
| kinds of social authoritarianism (trying to control the
| speech and thoughts of others) that is particularly
| popular among a certain political faction lately than
| those things actually being prevalent and accepted.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're going to get downvoted and flagged to hell, but I
| mostly agree with your comment - there was a precipitous
| quality drop that came with the heavy moderation that
| people now think of as the identifying characteristic of
| HN. That being said, I think that after a few egregious
| missteps (such as the test ban on "politics"), the heavy
| moderation has been open and kind. I also suspect that
| there has been some mod meddling to keep my lefty-ass
| comments visible more than once.
|
| I would like to point out that this is a silicon
| valley/SF tech forum; considering the demo, to mod out
| all of the vile sexist/race-realist objectivist bleating
| would be crushing. Just argue back. The left-liberal
| addiction to manager-calling is ruining their ability to
| defend their positions, heavily moderated "safe spaces"
| really become places where people can repeat their
| beliefs by rote, free from challenges. The reason
| libertarians are wrong is because their philosophy is
| intellectually bankrupt, not because it's upsetting.
| Practice in putting them down refines your own beliefs.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > These days, that doesn't happen. The discussions are
| lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It's a
| pile of shit.
|
| The decline of open-mindedness is what I've noticed the
| most. The assumption of good intention on the part of
| someone with an opposing view. The willingness to at
| least entertain a thought or argument, even if you
| ultimately don't accept it. Much easier to just hit the
| down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that
| wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
|
| There are definitely points of view here, no matter how
| well articulated, that will be buried in low-contrast
| purgatory very quickly. And I'm not just talking about
| "white supremacy" type stuff.
| rocqua wrote:
| I think that decline of willingness happened in society
| at large. It's simply now reaching hackernews. There is
| very little that can be done to fix this at the level of
| HN. It will probably require a shift in broader society.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on,
| satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a
| nice -1.
|
| This is good, do this. The worst thing in threads IMO is
| endless subthreads attached to low-effort troll comments.
| Just downvote and move on. If the comment contains a
| factual misstatement, maybe post a quick note saying why
| it is incorrect, with a reference.
| type0 wrote:
| > The willingness to at least entertain a thought or
| argument, even if you ultimately don't accept it. Much
| easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied
| in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
|
| Yes, but at least unpleasant discussions usually just
| stop at that, unlike Reddit or even worse Twitter where
| you get a shitstorm of insults.
| fouric wrote:
| > Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for
| example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely
| bigoted shit.
|
| Citation needed - this claim is very far from my own
| experience. If you think you'll be banned, then email me
| with your evidence and I'll look at it.
| Debug_Overload wrote:
| I'm not sure about the companies but pg's stuff regularly
| gets criticized on here (even harshly sometimes, I
| think). Just a few days ago, there was one such story
| (highly upvoted) on the front page in response to one of
| pg's essays.
| baryphonic wrote:
| > If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg
| portfolio companies (even politely, with valid
| criticism), point out that white supremacist and other
| hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point
| out that responses to hate speech are _not_
| tolerated..... > > The community here used to be
| absolutely amazing. 10-15 years ago the discussions here
| were actionable, and I was able to make valuable
| professional connections in the the comments. > > These
| days, that doesn't happen. The discussions are lower
| value, less open minded, and more strident. It's a pile
| of shit. > > And candidly, that's why I'm logged into a
| banned account to post this. Uncomfortable truths can't
| be posted from IPs/cookies/users that you want to
| preserve. Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point
| out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes
| extremely bigoted shit.
|
| This entire comment is one of the most closed-minded,
| "lower value" comments I've seen on HN recently.
|
| Complaining about how comments aren't open-minded, and
| also that "hate speech" and "bigoted shit" is the norm is
| something of a contradiction. If one is open-minded, he
| should be tolerant even of "hate speech." He should also
| be open to the ideas that hate speech is both very real
| or not real at all. Censoriousness is inextricably
| closed-minded.
|
| I can't speak to PG portfolio criticism, but I think dang
| does yeoman's work in moderation. Only once have I seen a
| decision that I thought was harsh, and I think everyone
| is entitled to a bad day every now and then.
|
| If you walked into my house and started berating and
| insulting me, I'd probably have a dim view of you, too.
|
| Also, how are you posting from a banned account? That
| seems to go against the nature of being banned.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Hate speech is a priori not very reasonable so getting
| rid of it is not a matter a censorship but of getting rid
| of what stand in the way of thoughtful discussions.
|
| Also I don't think "in my house" metaphor has had much
| success. Which seems fair : Hacker News is not PG's
| house, although it is his baby, he handed moderation
| power over to the users, the algorithm and the
| moderators. Which is why we like it and trust it and use
| it. You can't just compare anything to one on one
| relationships, it does not work like that.
| vict7 wrote:
| As someone that just stopped lurking, it's clear
| downvoting is used primarily as a "disagree" button. Case
| in point, this comment I'm replying to. I believe they're
| making a meaningful contribution to this discussion. Yet
| the downvotes have already commenced.
| cassepipe wrote:
| No the problem is that he makes accusations that are not
| backed up by any data and this is contrary to the
| guidelines.
|
| I consider myself more of a leftist than your typical hn
| user and when I have been abnormally downvoted I never
| felt it was because of my opinion but rather because I
| was too hot headed or too ignorant about what I was
| talking about.
|
| So I am very concerned by those claims but without any
| data about presumed tolerance to bigotry stuff, they are
| of no value too anyone. Anybody could feel sore and angry
| about how some social online gathering is not as X as he
| wish he was. Heck, that's my life on Reddit. Gimme data,
| gimme sources, I'll vote you up.
| vict7 wrote:
| I can definitely confess to being hot headed at times. I
| agree with you about the lack of data and will do my best
| to consider this going forward.
| kodah wrote:
| Take a look at GP's previous comments and their contexts.
| klyrs wrote:
| The person you're replying to is shadowbanned, and their
| post actually got vouched for, but still (I think) starts
| off at a deficit.
|
| Looking at your comment history, it looks like you enjoy
| wading into political conversations with strongly-held
| opinions. Food for thought, I'd have downvoted some of
| your comments that I _agree with_ because they bring down
| the quality of the conversation.
| vict7 wrote:
| Hey I truly appreciate the honesty! I can't easily assess
| the exact reason why I got downvotes without comments
| like this. Thanks for filling me in!
| II2II wrote:
| I have come across flagged stories that looked like they
| would form the basis of an interesting conversation,
| noticed a string of problematic comments on the story, and
| agreed with the story being flagged.
|
| Sometimes the problem isn't with the story or disagreeable
| opinions. Rather, it is with the tone of responses.
| Tenoke wrote:
| Sometimes that's the case but frequently stories start
| getting flagged as soon as they reach the front page
| before anyone has even commented on them.
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| The moderation is tailored to facilitate very specific types
| of discussion, and for specifically allowable opinions to be
| expressed.
|
| My posting history started with me operating in very good
| faith, getting [dead] for politely expressing opinions that
| weren't acceptable, and now I just occasionally post pre-dead
| posts here, knowing that few will even see them.
|
| It's my small way of reminding users who actually look at
| everything that this place is an extremely authoritarian
| place that is meant to only showcase certain things; and it
| is purposefully unwelcoming to others.
| rozab wrote:
| It's gross how in the Reddit redesign comment threads longer
| than a couple levels deep are actually hidden, even if
| there's only a single thread on the post. Apparently deep
| discussion is something they now want to discourage.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| >Getting it wrong for 12 years now
|
| What do you think HN does get wrong?
|
| Phrasing it in a more positive way, what could you do to raise
| the quality of conversation on HN even higher?
| austincheney wrote:
| HN definitely moves in the proper direction on this one. The
| _ONLY_ purpose of down votes is to suppress conversation. If,
| contrarily, a user wished to provide a form of disagreement
| they would do so with a reply. Why? Because votes are a means
| of action to express an appeal to agreement /disagreement.
|
| I remember pointing this out once on Reddit, before I deleted
| my account there, and it temporarily changed peoples' behavior
| resulting in more replies to disagreeable comments in either
| r/javascript or r/programming (I don't remember which). Most of
| the justifications that arose from down voting without a reply,
| supposedly a silent and anonymous form of disagreement, all
| summarized down to excuses about how writing anything takes too
| much time or a user's an inability to write an original
| comment. But then, in those users defense, Reddit feels like
| such an echo chamber.
|
| https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...
| minimaxir wrote:
| > The ONLY purpose of down votes is to suppress conversation.
|
| This assumes all conversation is equal quality. That
| particular point has never been true in social media, and has
| actually become worse post-2016, with increased partisanship
| and bad faith arguing.
|
| It's impossible to run a high-quality discussion forum
| without _some_ sort of check on bad behavior. That said, it
| 's up for debate whether downvotes are the best answer to
| this problem.
| austincheney wrote:
| First, your point implies down votes are a check on bad
| behavior as opposed to a form of disagreement. I suspect
| many users use social media voting for a variety of
| different reasons.
|
| Secondly, there are two solutions to that problem:
|
| 1. If you believe the environment, group, or social body of
| a particular conversing venue is heavily biased, whether
| deliberate or not, you don't have to participate there.
| Simply leave.
|
| 2. If you believe a particular user is deliberately
| exercising some form of bad behavior or displays an
| inability to follow the conversation you don't have to
| reply to them. Simply let it die.
|
| For example: whether or not I ever liked or voted for
| President Trump I would never spend time on Reddit at
| r/theDonald because I know conversation there is biased
| like a form of cult worship. Why bother conversing where
| you are not allowed to disagree on any matter?
| tediousdemise wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of no downvote button, so much so in fact that I
| don't think users of any karma level should be able to do it.
|
| Why concentrate this power into the hands of a privileged few?
| It's a representative system where we vote certain users into
| high karma, but they needn't return any favors and can
| subsequently downvote things that are otherwise suitable for
| the platform. Privilege can, and will, be abused in full.
| josephg wrote:
| I feel like downvoting on HN is a way of saying "No. We don't
| behave like that here". It's one of our community's tools for
| preserving, teaching and enforcing our values with newcomers.
| Yes, it's open to abuse. But it fills an important social
| function. And from that perspective, of course it's limited
| to people who've been involved in the community awhile.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Personally I also use it for comments that are so absurd
| that they don't warrant a comment.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Most people just use it to signal disagreement. I just did
| so now.
| josephg wrote:
| Don't use downvotes to signal disagreement. It goes
| against the implicit and explicit guidelines of HN. And
| it drags HN closer to reddit.
|
| Even if you see other people using downvotes for
| disagreement, that doesn't make it ok for you to do the
| same.
|
| Downvotes are for when people violate the norms and
| values of our community without thoughtfulness or self
| awareness.
|
| The difference is subtle sometimes, but your comment is
| exactly the kind of thing I downvote. Low effort,
| dismissal / rejection of the community's norms without
| nuance or justification beyond "well other people do it
| too so that makes it ok".
| BrandonM wrote:
| I use downvotes to signal disagreement when, from my
| perspective, someone is giving bad advice, not accurately
| representing the truth, speculating in an unproductive
| way, distracting from the discussion with completely
| unfounded claims, etc.
|
| I personally think of "disagreement" as a continuum,
| where one end is pretty close to my own view, and the
| other is absolutely abhorrent or incoherent. Certainly
| part of that continuum warrants downvotes. "Don't use
| downvotes to signal disagreement," is meaningless in that
| context.
|
| More concretely, the HN guidelines say nothing about why
| to downvote. They only say, "Please don't comment about
| the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it
| makes boring reading."
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Actually, I think you completely misunderstood. I agree
| with you 110 percent that downvotes _shouldn 't_ be used
| to signal disagreement; I disagreed with you because that
| is, in fact, exactly how it is used most of the time. My
| downvote of you was ironic, illustrative of just how
| stupid down votes are. I was making a point. I think HN
| should remove down votes entirely, or make them costly,
| or required a tagged explanation.
| bhupy wrote:
| Isn't that what flagging is for?
| tremon wrote:
| Flagging is for spam, at least that what I use it for. I
| reserve my downvotes for conversational indecency: bad
| faith arguments, personal attacks, not
| acknowledging/engaging the parent post's points.
| bhupy wrote:
| I'm not sure why spam should be treated any differently
| than conversational indecency (personal attacks, bad
| faith arguing); in theory it could all fall under the
| bucket of "this doesn't belong here", right?
| tremon wrote:
| To me the difference is "this user doesn't belong here,
| go away" versus "this post doesn't belong here, try
| harder".
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Personally, I flag for blatant rule violations such as
| comments that are filled with personal attacks or spam.
|
| I will downvote comments that are simply low quality,
| like comments that merely say "^ This!". I don't usually
| downvote bad faith arguing because it's hard to prove
| when someone is arguing in bad faith versus just simply
| having bad arguments.
| [deleted]
| kodah wrote:
| I don't know if you meant to make this funny, but I laughed
| really hard.
| nix0n wrote:
| Stack Overflow is certainly one to talk about this.
|
| Last time I tried (a few years ago), voting in either direction
| required a minimum number of points there also.
|
| These days, I accept the votes on S.O. for what they are, and hit
| the "End" key to read the least-upvoted answer first.
| benlivengood wrote:
| I've been through several forum deaths. The cause is usually
| large growth from people with very different mindsets that
| downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging
| good discourse. This makes the best people leave in short order.
|
| In a sense there's no way to structure a forum to avoid this.
| Being outnumbered by people who don't value open communication is
| unpleasant with or without downvoting. Forums that are highly
| specific to a small audience can last a long time. Popularity is
| the death-knell.
| rurp wrote:
| This matches my experience as well.
|
| HN having a reasonably high karma threshold for downvoting was
| a great decision that guards against a lot of common problems.
| I think that feature, along with the community as a whole being
| very mindful about protecting the forum quality, plus Dang
| being an excellent moderator, have greatly contributed to
| keeping it strong for many years.
| ipband wrote:
| It's not just downvoting that makes HN strong, it's IP
| banning. Right now I'm commenting via a new user I created
| via my work VPN, because nothing on my home network is
| allowed to create new users on HN now or effectively comment,
| since I always did so using temporary accounts. I'm getting
| so much more done, so- thanks, HN!
| striking wrote:
| You can usually be un-IP-banned by going to a particular
| URL. It's usually not permanent.
|
| As for the thing you were banned for, do you feel like HN
| owes you the ability to make an account per comment?
| ipband wrote:
| I made the mistake of practicing free speech in a way
| that didn't meet the standards. Specifically, I called
| something out for being stupid in one comment with 1-2
| expletives and in another comment I shared a paranoid
| experience I had with my vaccine, stating clearly it was
| probably paranoid. If those two things aren't a reason to
| take away my free speech, I don't know what would be. Go,
| HN! Up with the valley!
| ascar wrote:
| Are static ips a common thing in the US? Here in Germany
| getting a fresh ip is as easy as restarting the router
| unless you explicitly pay for a static ip.
| jpindar wrote:
| Static ips are not common, but ips that are technically
| dynamic but in fact rarely change are.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Depends on the ISP.
|
| For some people, simply rebooting their router gets a new
| IP. Others have to explicitly tell it to release the IP
| and then renew it. Others have to change their router's
| MAC address.
|
| I know that personally, if I release it and renew it,
| I'll get assigned the same IP. Though my IP is
| technically dynamic, it hasn't changed in the 5 years
| I've been in this house. I haven't tried changing my MAC
| address, but with a previous ISP, I had changed my
| router's MAC and it wouldn't even get an IP at all until
| I changed it back. Makes me wonder what would happen if I
| had changed it to the MAC of a router being used by
| another customer...
| ipband wrote:
| I'm not using a static IP, but heck they did it anyway.
| They might have even banned my device IDs (MAC IDs) or
| thing associated with my route. I don't like VPNs.
| They're a false sense of security, like Tor, and babies.
| I never trusted babies...
| ipband wrote:
| Just kidding about the babies, folks! They're no more a
| false sense of security than adults or adolescents!
| joering2 wrote:
| Would actually like to see a list of largest karma-wise HN
| members who left.
|
| By leaving I would say over 180 days inactive. Dang can you
| post the result please:
|
| _SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE
| TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY
| hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100_
| krapp wrote:
| >SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE
| TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY
| hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100
|
| Ah, Hacker News is too cool to use something as pedestrian as
| a database ;)
|
| But there is a Google BigQuery dataset[0,1]. I don't know how
| up to date it is.
|
| [0]https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-
| public-...
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502
| downandout wrote:
| I used to be incredibly active on here, and then I started
| getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for
| political reasons. I have all but stopped commenting compared
| to my previous activity. It just stopped being fun. Even
| posts I make that have nothing to do with politics, that only
| point out provable, factual information, get downvoted. I
| have over 13K karma, even after losing a few thousand points
| over the last 18 months or so. So the things that I have to
| say weren't always unpopular. I didn't change - the community
| did. It became a hostile, vindictive place.
|
| I still visit daily because HN does a good job of surfacing
| interesting articles, but I used to find the comments more
| interesting than the stories themselves. That has changed in
| the last few years, as identity politics have taken hold.
| It's sad to see.
| 0xEFF wrote:
| Down voted you because of your about me.
| downandout wrote:
| I believe it's an honest assessment of the current state
| of HN.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| It's a bit passive aggressive, don't you think, to do
| drive-by insults of random strangers?
| downandout wrote:
| When I first put that up, I actually ended it by saying
| "Be part of the solution" or something along those lines.
| Then, as the downvotes kept coming, I came to realize
| that most of the people checking my profile had just
| downvoted one of my comments, and were there looking for
| additional comments to downvote. That's why it has a
| pretty negative tone.
| type0 wrote:
| If you stop making comments with negative tone maybe you
| will stop getting downvotes.
| benlivengood wrote:
| I think you're using an overly broad brush. For example,
| you still feel it's worthwhile to comment sometimes which
| implies that there are bastions of useful content, which
| you don't list. I'm sure we disagree on things, which
| limits the extent of groupthink.
|
| Beyond that, there's the relative difference between HN
| and places like 4chan. Nuance is helpful.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I have briefly perused your comments and most of them
| seem to be interesting contributions. Some of them were
| definitely downvoted for no real reason AFAICT other than
| offering up unpopular opinions, and still others appeared
| to be downvoted for being what I think is a combative
| tone. You do, in general I think, come across as a bit
| combative. You have interesting, relevant, and/or factual
| things to say, maybe consider how what you are saying
| comes across.
| ascar wrote:
| I remember you because of the about me.
|
| I was reading a somewhat controversial comment from you
| and then visited your account page probably to check for
| sibling comments in the same post. Your about me
| definitely changed how I feel about your comments and
| probably the source of your recent experience.
| downandout wrote:
| My about me is based upon my experience here over the
| last few years. I updated it at some point in the last 6
| months, long after all this started. So it is a symptom
| of my experience here, not a cause.
| burnished wrote:
| What are some of your views that you think have become
| unpopular over time?
| downandout wrote:
| I don't actually know. I am who I am, and have been
| responding to things in the same way since I arrived on
| the site. I took a lot of flack for criticizing GDPR,
| which I agree with in principle but believe was very
| poorly implemented. Also people seem to have confused me
| for a Trump supporter, even though I am middle-of-the-
| road politically - which is why I suspect that I get many
| automatic downvotes regardless of the content of my
| comments. I try to call things as I see them, and any
| criticism of left-leaning principles/programs/policies on
| here - even the most misguided ones - tends to meet with
| instant, harsh rebuke.
| benlivengood wrote:
| > I try to call things as I see them, and any criticism
| of left-leaning principles/programs/policies on here -
| even the most misguided ones - tends to meet with
| instant, harsh rebuke.
|
| Something to consider; is it a harsh rebuke or just other
| people calling it as they see it?
| type0 wrote:
| Have you considered changing your account from 'downandout'
| to 'downvoteme'? It probably would do the trick.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I agree it's a good place to find interesting articles.
|
| I also think reading the comments is rarely a good use of
| time. Just feels like the median discussion site in that
| regard.
| [deleted]
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| Be the change that you want to see in the universe. HN has a
| super easy to use API and I have downloaded the entire
| history of the site before for a past project. If you don't
| want to do the leg work yourself I am positive that the data
| set is out there for download somewhere if you google around.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Data analysis note: the public datasets only have
| submissions and comments, and just because a HN user has
| stopped submitting/commenting doesn't mean they _quit_ HN.
| Lurking is fun.
| brewdad wrote:
| And now, by commenting, you've reset your activity clock.
| Time to lurk for the next 6 months so you look inactive.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Some people have simply changed their handle and that
| likely wouldn't be obvious from the public data set
| either.
|
| My old handle has 25k. It has been inactive since I moved
| to this one.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Curious, why did you create a new account?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| My old handle unfortunately and innocently looks like
| "I'm just here to start shit!" It did not occur to me it
| might be misinterpreted a certain way until six weeks
| after I started it and I didn't think it important at
| that point. As I gained more karma, I did a blog post at
| some point explaining the completely innocent origin
| story for it (typo and all). After I hit the leaderboard,
| I decided, basically, "Oh, brother. This is so not worth
| the hassle involved. Yeesh." And changed to my actual
| first and middle names.
| robocat wrote:
| That would give no information about the reason someone left:
| there are a lot of reasons to stop interacting with hn that
| have nothing to do with the "best people leave in short
| order" theory.
| type0 wrote:
| I know some people just switched to a different account and
| you would think they left.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Exactly! I change my HN username every now and then.
| frongpik wrote:
| The broken concept is downvoting for others. Instead, it should
| be downvoting for yourself. If somebody downvotes of flags
| something, I don't want that something to be hidden from my
| view, unless I've upvoted the downvoter in past. The "global
| downvoting" model feeds the wannabe censors who feel entitled
| to impose their opinion on others.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| >The cause is usually large growth from people with very
| different mindsets that downvote for essentially political
| reasons instead of encouraging good discourse.
|
| You've quite well described my latest experienced with
| StackExchange sites that are very popular (like Stack
| Overflow). The downvotes rain for any question without
| feedback. A comment provides an answer, but not an "Answer"
| that can be pinned. Vague "Opinion based" flags are sometimes
| levied, but similar questions for different regimes are upvoted
| and given quality answers.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I've had similar experiences on ServerFault _part of
| StachExchange_. If I simply answer a question with the
| correct technical answer, my answer is basically ignored. If
| I take that exact same answer and add a bold title, some cute
| paragraph formatting, some no-format text boxes, add some
| flowery wording like I am giving a Ted Talk, then people love
| my answers. So that is what I do and why I rarely answer
| questions any more. They also try to encourage me to edit
| other peoples posts, but I already have a day job.
| rhizome wrote:
| I feel like a _lot_ more people qualify to do
| metamoderation in the SO network than ever do it. This is
| essentially sabotage in the form of benign neglect.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Very true and it gets even more complicated when there
| are small circles of full time editors that invoke
| elitism around document writing styles as well as chiming
| in on highly subjective answers and invoking dogmatic
| principals. In Unix/Linux, there are millions of ways to
| solve a problem, but the solution must fit into their
| perceived _right way_. Before long, people not in those
| elite circles or who do not get the hint are discouraged
| from editing or answering anything.
| CDRdude wrote:
| I think slashdot's voting system was well equipped to avoid
| that problem, but they faded anyway. Maybe it was the redesign?
| I think many of their innovations in 1999 would go a long way
| to resolve political downvoting today---new accounts were
| unable to vote on comments, you were unable to vote and comment
| in the same posts, metamoderation to ensure fairness, and up or
| downvotes having to fit categories like 'insightful' or
| 'offtopic'.
| klyrs wrote:
| I dunno about everybody else, but there were about 15 years
| where every single story had several trolls commenting purely
| for the purpose of dropping a racial slur. Meta-moderate for
| long enough, and you could occasionally earn 5 karma, which
| could easily get blown on downvoting stupid shit from a
| single story. It was a cesspool, and I think a lot of people
| left because of that.
|
| They started a really good thing with the user moderation, I
| think meta-moderation and the vote-category dropdown are very
| smart, but they locked it down too hard and moderation was
| largely ineffective.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Slashdot is where I learned about bitcoin mining in 2011 or
| so and then I woke up and a) started applying the time value
| of money to a lot of things and b) stopped having
| intellectual discussions on the open internet.
|
| That is very real truth that according to the current
| narrative taking place in the comments here, many of you will
| downvote what I am saying because you don't like... whatever
| it is you don't like.
|
| I have had children and paid off two mortgages since then.
| Explaining my point of view to the mob no longer has value to
| me.
| Cd00d wrote:
| Personally, I left slashdot when I felt the community
| changed. It started to feel less like excitement, and more
| like cranky libertarians complaining. I remember CmdrTaco
| leaving the helm, so maybe it was his steering that kept it
| good to me? No idea.
|
| When I gave up on slashdot I put a call out to my social
| circle for a replacement, and that's how I learned about HN!
| That was nearly a decade ago, and I'm still grateful!
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| A lot of people were pretty upset about the redesign. They
| also sold to Conde Nast and started adopting a different
| (more intrusive) model of advertising. I can't remember
| details but the site started feeling more.... slimey over
| time.
|
| Slashdot's commenting/moderation system was exceptional.
|
| Grateful to HN for the excellence of theirs.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Slashdot got popular and the insightful comments got drowned
| out by Funny+5 because it's low effort karma building that
| feels like being popular.
|
| I learned my lesson and try to only inject humor into
| otherwise useful comments on HN.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| This is one of those things that I did not realize kills
| discourse until I experienced a community that mainly posts
| serious content and discussion. Reddit now is particularly
| bad as each thread is sea of quips, one-liners, and
| trashtalk which pretty much floods out the pond of
| interesting discussion. "Funny" can be a great thing, but
| if that's all anyone ever tries to offer, it becomes very
| tiresome.
| anaerobicover wrote:
| I agree. Cheap/stupid jokes mostly get downvoted here,
| and it's one of the things I like about HN!
| TheManInThePub wrote:
| Frankly, I couldn't agree with this more.
|
| I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted
| simply because they went against the status-quo. If this is
| allowed to go on, people will be afraid of making
| controversial (but intelligent) posts, and this place will
| become another reddit.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've noticed that when I comment against the status quo, my
| comments quickly dip to -2 or lower from rapid fire
| downvotes, then slowly tick upward into positive territory
| over time as the more patient readers come through.
|
| It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes
| somehow could improve the signal. Maybe give less weight to
| someone who rapid-fire downvotes comments faster than they
| could possibly read them?
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the
| votes somehow could improve the signal.
|
| Perversely, downvotes aren't available on comments older
| than 24 hours, but upvotes are, so comments that attract
| a mixture of up- and down-votes get a strong upward bias
| on votes they attract after a day (since the upvotes
| happen and the downvotes don't).
|
| Not sure how relevant that effect is to more short-term
| issues, though.
| type0 wrote:
| It does make the downvotes irrelevant in a way, it only
| signals strong disagreement which I think it's good to
| know. But it's not good to interpret the downvotes as
| correction method for yourself because it only leads to
| more echochamber.
| joseluisq wrote:
| Agree. And yes, privilege just uncontroversial standpoints
| or promote indirect pressure over the members will result
| in community fragmentation. Therefore HN could turn into
| "one of many" monotone sites to just pass around.
| II2II wrote:
| I suspect that events outside of HN would have more of a
| chilling effect than the environment of HN itself. I know
| there are times when I felt like presenting a contrary view
| on a story but did not. I suspect that a fair number of HN
| members may even accept those points of view. Yet I have
| also seen enough of those "conversations" to know that they
| rapidly go downhill.
| ROARosen wrote:
| > I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted
| simply because they went against the status-quo.
|
| It is not possible to download posts on HackerNews, no
| matter how many karma you have. Did you mean comments?
| Because I think that actually one of the strongests points
| of HN that all posts will get equal footing. (they can be
| flagged though)
| ascar wrote:
| > I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted
| simply because they went against the status-quo
|
| The best thing to do here is for the community to step in
| and actively up-vote unfairly downvoted comments.
| FooHentai wrote:
| I try and do that but often the comment is full dead and
| can't be upvoted.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Isn't there supposed to be a vouch system? I've seen
| comments that were flagged to death that shouldn't have
| been (and a lot more vice versa) but I never seem to see
| the vouch link whether I have showdead on or not.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Not sure if it matches your problem, but FWIW, vouch only
| seems to show up for comments that already dead (not just
| flagged and downvoted).
| bscphil wrote:
| I see the vouch link, but only when I click on the
| permalink to the comment.
| robocat wrote:
| > down voted simply because they went against the status-
| quo.
|
| Every tool will be abused sometimes.
|
| I think the voting system mostly works extremely well - the
| system needs to be viewed as a whole with all the
| compromises that includes, rather than drill down on one
| particular failure.
|
| Sometimes people use voting for bad reasons -- I know I
| have (though I am quite conscientious to try and learn to
| vote more carefully).
| renewiltord wrote:
| I like the idea of paying to downvote, but also an interesting
| effect of downvotes is that they skew views of a position.
|
| Having one upvote and 100 downvotes is the same as having 401
| upvotes and 500 downvotes. Isn't that odd? One is a comment
| everyone hates and the other is a comment almost half of all
| people like.
| clairity wrote:
| what you're getting at is that both the mean and the variance
| have information (they're independent variables), which is good
| to keep in mind. on hn, both of your examples would be at -4
| (dead) with no way of differentiating the two.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >I can't recall ever seeing a single negative voted comment in
| all the times I've visited Hacker News
|
| That's interesting. I wonder how that could be the case.
| Macha wrote:
| While the treshold for downvoting has increased since 2009, the
| threshold hasn't increased to the same level that the number of
| active users (and therefore votes) have, so I would guess
| proportionally way more of the community has access to
| downvotes today than in 2009.
|
| Also, I think in those days you did see vote numbers, but you
| didn't see the big obvious greying out of downvoted comments
| that exists today.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I don't know if these are popular opinions or not:
|
| 1: I really wish I could downvote Hacker News articles.
|
| 2: I really wish there was some friction to downvoting. Perhaps
| something like choosing among: disagree, factually wrong, mean,
| incoherent
|
| Regarding the downvoting of articles: For awhile I used to see a
| regular pattern of weird articles on the front page. The
| discussion would then predictably involve a mod defending the
| article. IMO, I think downvoting an article would help in this
| situation.
| latortuga wrote:
| Didn't slashdot have a feature kind of like this? Reasons why
| something was upvoted or downvoted alongside their score.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Correct. SoylentNews goes one step further, and adds _+0
| agree_ and _-0 disagree_. I 'm not sure if such votes have
| any real effect.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I love the idea of +0 for Agree and -0 for Disagree. A
| comment's score should be about how high quality it is, not
| how popular it is or how many people agree with it. Keep a
| separate agree/disagree count for users who are curious.
| Leave actual negative scores for low quality things like
| spam, flamebait and harassment.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Reduce the bandwagon effect. People see a slightly gray (0
| points) comment and pile up on it without thinking. It affects
| their view and introduces a subconcious bias.
|
| Just don't grey out comments for 2 hours or so to allow people
| to vote. It's fine to greyout comments after that.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I rather really wish there was no way at all to vote on
| comments. -- what purpose does it serve?
|
| I very often see the top comment on the page to be a
| thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong
| nor easily disagreed with, and thus incurring the most upvotes
| from simply being quick to read.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I rather really wish there was no way at all to vote on
| comments. -- what purpose does it serve?
|
| It serves both to manage the S/N ratio and to provide
| feedback to commenters on what the community sees as signal
| vs. noise.
|
| > I very often see the top comment on the page to be a
| thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong
|
| I don't see that often on threads with substantial
| discussion. I suppose if that was a real problem, weighting
| upvotes by some measure of how relatively unfavorable the
| comment's position is at the time upvoted would mitigate it.
| Scottopherson wrote:
| I don't have the ability to downvote. Is it possible to undo an
| upvote? I sometimes upvote a comment by accident when viewing HN
| on mobile.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Downvoting is enabled when your karma reaches a threshold
| (500?). You can undo votes in either direction via the "unvote"
| or "undown" links that appear after voting. I think this is
| only possible for a short period of time after your original
| vote.
| oehpr wrote:
| Accidental upvotes used to be a problem, but that's been fixed
| for a while now. You should see the word "unvote" appear
| https://i.imgur.com/jaNanv9.png
| blackshaw wrote:
| Yes - after you upvote, a link that says "unvote" will appear
| above the comment. E.g. the following text currently appears to
| me above your comment:
|
| Scottopherson 5 minutes ago | unvote | parent | flag | favorite
| | on: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets ...
|
| Don't feel bad that you didn't notice - I was reading HN for a
| _long_ time before I realised that un-upvoting was possible.
| not_knuth wrote:
| There should be a clickable "unvote" above the comment if you
| wish to do so.
|
| Regarding anything else about how Hacker News works, I found
| this quite useful:
|
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
| kergonath wrote:
| The UX is subpar on mobile. Too many tiny links too close to
| each other.
| gweinberg wrote:
| Personally I'd prefer if comments displayed upvotes and downvotes
| as separate tallies instead of a total. It means something very
| different if a post as a lot of up and down votes that sum to
| about zero or if it has no votes at all.
| cheschire wrote:
| Imgur is a great example of this at work.
| batch12 wrote:
| I would like the ability to see my ratio of upvotes to downvotes.
| I think it would help show me if I was applying the same zeal to
| promote ideas as I use to demote them.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Is there a reason to think that equality is important here?
| Could it be that promotion zeal should be e.g. 62% of demotion
| zeal?
| batch12 wrote:
| It would be interesting to know if I am quicker to reward a
| good idea vs punish a bad one. No target in mind.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| One thing I noticed recently about HN voting is that it seems
| like you can upvote but cannot downvote immediate replies to your
| own comments. Other users can still downvote the comments. When I
| noticed that it struck me as very clever and something reddit
| should immediately poach. It's like a built-in cooling off
| period.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| Kind of ironic because HN still remains one of the most
| interesting and engaging communities whereas StackOverflow has
| become pretty insignificant, outdated, stale and very hostile and
| unfriendly to new posters.
| elhudy wrote:
| The glaring issue in this article (which I couldn't bring myself
| to finish) is that he equates downvoting to "evil or incorrect
| post(s)". Which would be true in an ideal world, but the reality
| becomes downvotes are equivalent to "I disagree with you".
|
| If plentiful downvoting is allowed, discourse becomes a
| popularity contest. Fortunately most of the experienced users
| here seem to understand this and reserve their downvotes for
| appropriate situations.
| noxToken wrote:
| Downvoting can also have a snowball effect. If someone
| disagrees with you, especially in a contested topic where it's
| opinion or unclear who is correct, downvotes signal other
| people to also downvote. You can see the effect on Reddit.
|
| Comments that hit -1 can still recover. Comments rarely recover
| after -3 or so. The only counter is for the commenter to edit
| and call out readers for frivolous downvoting.
| robocat wrote:
| > The only counter is for the commenter to edit and call out
| readers for frivolous downvoting.
|
| That usually earns a downvote from me. People commenting on
| downvotes is boring and usually shows a lack of insight, for
| example obviously making zero effort to understand why their
| comment is poorly received, or blaming a conspiracy, or
| blaming groupthink. I have occasionally answered "why the
| downvotes" questions, but it usually feels like a waste of my
| time to do so.
| bena wrote:
| I have a comment on reddit that was both downvoted to nearly
| -100 and was given gold. I was given the award because the
| actual information I gave was correct. Which someone
| mentioned in a reply. It was downvoted because no one liked
| the answer.
| listenallyall wrote:
| There is definitely a phenomenon where truthful/factual but
| "inconvenient" comments are much more vigorously downvoted
| than false, inaccurate or incorrect ones.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Well, you have my respect. Standing on a thing you know to
| be correct that gets that much open dislike is not an easy
| thing to do. Most people likely would have deleted the
| correct but hated answer long before it accumulated that
| many downvotes.
| bena wrote:
| The only posts I delete are when the site goes weird and
| it double or triple posts.
|
| I never delete posts simply because they are unpopular.
| In my personal view, that's a coward's move. It tells me
| that the user doesn't really have any actual conviction,
| doesn't really believe in what they're saying. If being
| popular is more important to that person than being
| correct, then I find their opinion worthless. Because
| apparently it can be dictated by popular opinion. And I
| mean actually correct, not just "winning the argument".
|
| I also dislike people who double reply or who use the
| edit feature to essentially pull an "and another thing".
| Living out the l'esprit d'escalier fantasy essentially.
|
| Also people who proclaim they won't be responding or tell
| others not to respond. It's a poor rhetorical tactic to
| silence opposition because you don't have a good
| response.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Some people are more vulnerable than others or have
| reasons other than the downvotes per se for a deletion.
| For example, r/homeless seems to see a lot of deletions
| due to the extreme vulnerability of the population.
|
| Still, kudos for standing by an unpopular but correct
| statement in that instance. And kudos to the person who
| gave you gold for it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| pg once said that since upvotes are used to agree, using
| downvotes to disagree isn't bad. I am often downvoted even when
| making civil comments that people disagree with and I'm fine
| with it. That's how this forum operates. So be it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I'd love to create a new voting system that looks like an
| orange sliced in half. The top 4 options are positives, the
| bottom 4 negatives. Everyone gets 2 votes per post. Two of
| the options are 'I agree' and the other is 'I disagree with
| this post'
| notafraudster wrote:
| I tend to downvote at the nexus of stuff I disagree with +
| expressed in an unproductive, rude, spammy, abusive, or flip
| manner. It's certainly true that when a flippant post is
| something I agree with I'm more likely to elide on by it. I
| assume most people do the same thing.
| robbyking wrote:
| I moderate a reddit community with ~200k subscribers, and I
| really wish I could disable downvoting. Automod takes care of
| most posts that violate our community rules, and I usually
| catch the ones that slip past within an hour or so.
|
| On the opposite end of the spectrum, quality posts are almost
| always downvoted immediately. (I assume it's by self-promoters
| hoping that it will cause their content to rise in the
| rankings.)
|
| Hiding posts scores has helped with bandwagoning, but I wish
| the two options were "upvote" and "report to mods."
| FpUser wrote:
| >"...upvote and report to mods."
|
| This to me seems like the best approach.
| mjevans wrote:
| Further:
|
| A) It would be nice if the mods had a way to flag the post to
| make it require additional work to see on most / default
| clients.
|
| B) If multiple mods sign off on a given post being a poor
| match for constructive discourse that is when most clients
| wouldn't even display the existence without a special viewing
| mode or preference. (This assumes an append / write-only
| forum.)
|
| C) For all USERS, it would be nice if a special type of reply
| allowed for a post to be a "contrasting viewpoint", which
| might get displayed at the same node-level as the post being
| replied to, as part of a package of tightly related views on
| a topic.
| jasode wrote:
| I think a critical missing context of reposting an old 2009
| article is that a _newer post in 2011_ makes downvotes _free_
| instead of costing reputation:
|
| >Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- _" Downvotes on
| questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they
| are effectively "free". [...] So, it's imperative the question
| list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty
| for those users who do take the time to read a question and later
| find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to
| that."_ -- excerpt from :
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
|
| Why? He saw that users were _too hesitant in downvoting_ which
| allowed bad content to grow and further degraded the site.
| Changing the downvoting mechanics fixed that.
|
| (I don't know if there's been an update since 2011 to the
| downvoting system and incentives.)
| blargpls wrote:
| Downvotes on questions are free, downvotes on answers cost 1
| reputation (see
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-
| reput...).
| type0 wrote:
| Ah, this explains why it gets more and more outdated.
| deeg wrote:
| I assume that Jeff has changed his mind on this because Discourse
| does not have down-votes (with the caveat that Discourse has a
| different audience from HN). I wonder what made the difference?
| uniqueid wrote:
| He and Joel had this bullet-proof theory that, since quality
| answers are more valuable on SO than questions, the site should
| encourage users to criticize their peers.
|
| So what presumably happened is that he noticed that philosophy,
| sound as it may be on paper, created a miserable atmosphere.
| jcims wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if the simplicity of the upvote/downvote
| exposes it to the limbic decisioning, where some portion of the
| signal is pure lizard brain reaction vs a thoughtful act to help
| moderate the community.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good system.
| Though downvotes seem to work pretty well as-is for HN, I rarely
| see dead comments that were killed by downvotes rather than anti-
| spam features.
|
| If we take HN as reddit 2.0, what would be HN 2.0 I wonder? If I
| were the one to make it I'd create a system to promote the
| comments of people with professional expertise on the subject
| being discussed. HN has mostly solved the politeness and flamewar
| issues but IMO one its major flaws is that people speak
| authoritatively about things they don't know about.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| >making downvotes costly seems like a good system
|
| Habr.com makes both up and downvotes costly, and they have an
| evolved system checks and balances. The best I've seen. They
| can even fight off Kremlin bots successfully, this is major
| feat in their region/language of choice.
| jjk166 wrote:
| While not a perfect solution, perhaps you could tag various
| conversations by subject and keeping track of which topics a
| user tends to discuss. If a user mostly talks about a few
| subjects, have their comments in conversations with those tags
| be prioritized by the ranking algorithm and deprioritized
| outside of it. Obviously just because you spend a lot of time
| talking about something doesn't mean you actually know much
| about it, but it's a start. Perhaps you could improve further
| by keeping track of users' karma within a topic (presumably
| those speaking from ignorance will be less upvoted), but this
| runs the risk of promoting views that are popular instead of
| informed.
| threatofrain wrote:
| I think if people want the next level of quality on technical
| discussion, there needs to be a gatekeeping mechanism which is
| concerned with technical competency.
|
| I would also expect such a place to have a magnitude or two
| fewer people.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I've tried that in my own community but it's a real struggle
| because in my experience newbies drive the conversation much
| more than pros so in my case gatekeeping was creating a
| silent community of highly skilled lurkers.
|
| With no gatekeeping, there's lots of activity and pros feel
| like participating once in a while with deep discussions
| sparked from seemingly simple questions, but on the other
| hand a lot of pros feel alienated and leave if the average
| level of competency is too low.
|
| I've been toying with the idea of pro:newbie ratios but
| haven't implemented anything yet.
| willyt wrote:
| You would need to provide professional indemnity insurance
| cover. Most policies likely don't cover advising the whole
| internet.
| lordnacho wrote:
| SO and HN are a bit different though. When you go to SO, you
| want to know what is right. For HN, you want to read something
| interesting.
| polytely wrote:
| Maybe downvotes should cost some karma? might be a trigger to
| think before downvoting
| Aisen8010 wrote:
| They are doing a pretty good keeping the spammers away,
| considering how easy it is to create a new account.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| "Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good
| system."
|
| Say, I like the idea. No doubt people have discussed this to
| death elsewhere. You can definitely see downvotes used as
| simple disagreement or for punishing unpopular speech (rather
| than being wrong, let's say). That's a bummer but is a side
| effect of modern times.
|
| Let's say that a issuing a downvote resulted in a 15 minute
| break from posting or voting. You gotta want to do it.
|
| " people speak authoritatively about things they don't know
| about."
|
| I'm afraid that's baked deeply into the DNA of computer
| programmers.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| "one its major flaws is that people speak authoritatively about
| things they don't know about"
|
| See: any thread about aeronautics, education, or (historical)
| warfare.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| ... and machine learning and medical research and ...
| zentiggr wrote:
| ... and ... and ... and ...
| teach wrote:
| I personally notice this most frequently on the topic of
| human nutrition. Most days I don't bother to read the
| comments on ANY nutrition article because they're too
| depressingly wrong.
| pvg wrote:
| HN comments can't be killed by downvotes and the karma loss on
| the commenter is capped at -4. As forums-with-downvoting go,
| HN's version is fairly benign.
| philipkglass wrote:
| It's easier to write a bad comment than a good one, so I don't
| think that downvoting bad comments should be more difficult
| than it is now. HN software already has little nudges that make
| it easier to gain karma than to lose it:
|
| - You can earn points but never lose them by submitting URLs
| for discussion.
|
| - You can't lose more than 4 points per post, no matter how
| many times it is downvoted. There is no upper limit to points
| gained from a single upvoted comment.
|
| - There is only a 24 hour time window in which comments can be
| downvoted, but they can still be upvoted even months later.
|
| The expertise problem is harder. Sometimes I see a post that
| has more misconceptions than sentences, but is grammatically
| correct and written in a confident tone. Only people who
| actually understand the subject matter will spot the problems
| quickly. It's tedious to write introductory level corrections
| for commonly repeated mistakes. For some of them I have
| considered keeping a mini-FAQ locally and pasting standard
| responses to standard misconceptions, but HN also discourages
| repeating identical posts.
|
| If I downvote a misinformed post the original poster won't know
| where they went wrong, and people who see a grayed post won't
| necessarily understand what's wrong with it either. The saving
| grace of the downvote is that it affects comment sorting order,
| so at least misconception-heavy posts that are downvoted won't
| dominate the upper reaches of the discussion page.
| winstonchecksin wrote:
| What's the criteria for a "bad comment"? And how do you
| objectively evaluate it?
|
| I lurk and post once in a while. What I've noticed is that
| rarely is something downvoted for being factually incorrect
| (relatively speaking). You just have to offer a perspective
| that doesn't conform with the hive mind and the downvoting
| essentially amounts to censorship of opinions.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| It also depends on time hours.
|
| I once made a post that criticized the Anglocentric
| perspective of an article. -- it was initially upvoted, but
| then became downvoted when UTC+2 went to sleep, and then
| upvoted again when UTC+2 woke up. -- one can take a
| particular guess as to why.
| philipkglass wrote:
| Most of the comments I downvote the official comment
| guidelines in the section "In Comments" here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| When I see heated back-and-forth discussion chains I'll
| often find myself downvoting several comments and upvoting
| none of them, because sarcastic quippy retorts to bad
| comments are _also_ bad comments.
|
| I'll also downvote comments for factual inaccuracy,
| particularly if I don't have the time to patiently correct
| them. This only partially mitigates the damage and doesn't
| really help the original author to learn. When someone
| writes a comment with just a single big mistake, and they
| don't seem to have a history of willfully repeating it,
| that's when I am most likely to write a lengthy reply with
| explanation and citations.
| jjnoakes wrote:
| I'd appreciate some examples. I'm not saying it doesn't
| happen, but in my experience downvoted comments tend to
| have something beyond a counterpoint or difference of
| opinion; their content is usually irrelevant or
| unnecessarily snarky or somehow hostile.
| hn8788 wrote:
| I don't really have the time to go digging around for
| examples, but it's common enough that one of the site
| rules is to not complain about downvotes because it
| frequently happens for no reason.
| scpedicini wrote:
| Anything which is Reddit level of quality in terms of
| contributing value. For example, low hanging puns that add
| no actual substantial information.
| clairity wrote:
| > "If I downvote a misinformed post the original poster won't
| know where they went wrong, and people who see a grayed post
| won't necessarily understand what's wrong with it either."
|
| that's ok, the onus is on the downvoted poster to figure it
| out for themselves. usually that requires seeing a pattern
| over the course of a few downvoted posts rather than
| pinpointing it exactly from a given post.
|
| most downvoted posts break one or more hn rules, but a few
| are downvoted ideologically, so a little resilience is
| required. strictly unpopular opinions can often be more
| tactfully rephrased and at least be accepted for discussion,
| if not agreement. this is a pretty good life skill to develop
| generally anyways.
| teach wrote:
| I find it sort-of ironic that at the time I am writing this
| reply, _your_ comment has been downvoted and I'm not sure
| why.
|
| Presumably the onus is on you to figure that out, but good
| luck, since I'm not sure either and usually I can tell.
| clairity wrote:
| yes, sometimes the reason is truly inscrutible. that's
| where the resilience part comes in. =)
| causality0 wrote:
| Not everything on HN is user-facing. For example, one comment
| can only sink to -4 points, but further downvotes on that
| comment still contribute to the user being muted. I've
| experienced that myself.
| simias wrote:
| I think downvoting is an anti-pattern because it's a negative
| interaction, and I think negative interactions shouldn't be
| encouraged if we value high quality discourse.
|
| If downvoting bad comments (for any definition of bad) was
| harder or even outright impossible you'd still have an
| alternative: upvote an other, better comment to have it
| shadow what you consider a less valuable contribution. And
| that's a positive interaction.
|
| Whenever I find a comment that I think is on-topic and
| somewhat constructive, but I still fundamentally disagree
| with the take, I generally go hunting for a comment that
| embraces my point of view (or write one myself) and upvote
| that.
|
| I very rarely downvote comments on this site, and generally
| only do it for comments that I consider to be completely off
| topic, flamebait or stupid "meme" references. That being said
| I do comment quite a bit and I admit that I'm always a bit
| frustrated when I take the time to write what I consider to
| be a constructive (if sometimes controversial) comment and I
| get downvoted reddit-style. It feels disrespectful, almost. I
| probably care too much about that stuff, I acknowledge that.
| btilly wrote:
| The title should say that this was 2009.
|
| And I think that HN has held up pretty well over the years.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| I noticed the pub date when the author says that maybe HN gets
| away without downvotes because HN is young, founded in 2007. I
| am glad the author turned out to be wrong.
| williesleg wrote:
| Reminds me of all those yes people.
| motohagiography wrote:
| > The advantage of this system is that nobody gets downvoted, but
| at a steep cost: we've lost half the potential information.
|
| A Mr. Claude Shannon would like a word. I joke, but when you have
| controls on voting rings and co-ordination, downvotes are
| necessarily noisier. An upvote is effectively neutral engagement
| with the content, where a downvote actively reduces engagement.
| From the perspective of wanting to mine the constructive
| engagement out of the collective minds of the audience, downvotes
| are about as meaningful and information dense as a fire alarm.
| massung wrote:
| No system will be free of problems or gaming.
|
| But, doesn't hacker news actually have implicit down voting by
| way of time? HN isn't designed to be a searchable Q&A or forum.
| It's a "what's a currently popular" site. If something isn't
| good, it just disappears faster than the opposite.
|
| Have I wished I could down vote things sometimes? Sure. But then
| I just wait 5 minutes, refresh, and it's gone.
| type0 wrote:
| Actually instead of counting down-votes HN software could just
| count how often a post was up-voted and then that vote
| regretted (reversed) and adjust the visibility to boost or
| silence. But that is still susceptible to misuse so there
| should be a limit on how often that would count.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I just wish you could remove the number next to your name
| natively in HN. It can't seriously take more than 5 minutes to
| implement this. There's no excuse IMHO. I want to interact with
| the site without seeing the number change and wondering why it
| did.
| oehpr wrote:
| I can sympathize. I used to have a filter for reddit to
| eliminate the tally because I didn't like the effect it had on
| me.
|
| I think the thing is though, HN and reddit don't give you
| options to remove these numbers because they have an effect.
| It's the nudge they give to people to adjust their
| contributions to be something the community actually wants. No
| shock these services are not offering options to turn that
| nudge off.
|
| It might be nice of them to give the tally as class to make it
| easy to filter with a userstyle, though.
| ericmay wrote:
| I really like downvoting where you lose one of your past upvotes
| in order to downvote. It's a nice little filter that people who
| care about how many upvotes they have won't use, and puts an end
| to some amount of frivolous downvoting.
|
| In a meta way, you kind of have to use a little bit of your own
| point capital to downvote something, so if you're highly upvoted
| by the community then calling BS on something is easier for you
| and the risk taking for doing so makes more sense, versus someone
| who just signed up.
|
| I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of
| even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I like the idea of only showing the number of up boats and when
| her user is negative, and possibly taking action at some point.
|
| And avoid users speaking to the audience opposed to directly
| addressing the parent comment
|
| Hacker news gates some functionality based on accumulated
| Votes, so maybe once you hit the necessary threshold it is
| hidden
| kergonath wrote:
| I am not sure adding a cost to downvotes would promote
| diversity so much. It is easy to game the system and post
| popular opinions to farm upvotes. If you do what you say, you
| give more power to the people already playing the reputation
| game.
|
| You also let garbage fester because nobody will use points to
| downvote a stupid, agressive one-liner.
|
| My experience is that:
|
| - voting on HN works well for its intended purpose, which is
| surfacing the interesting conversations
|
| - dead comments really deserve to die (I can't remember a
| counter-example)
|
| - greyed out comments tend to be right but unpopular, or right
| but rude, or wrong, or just stupid. Of these, the problematic
| cases are "right but unpopular", which is not that frequent.
| And when it happens that's fine, they are still readable.
|
| > I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point
| of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?
|
| I assume it promotes engaging in the comments. It's true that
| popularity contests should not be encouraged too much, but at
| the same time I can see how having a number that can go down
| would make some people think twice before knee-jerk posting or
| casual trolling.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I love the analogy that capping downvote values is like an ELU
| activation function in machine learning. Whereas Reddit uses
| TanH.
| kjrose wrote:
| Except, of course, you can downvote comments.
|
| So umm. Kinda missing the mark eh?
| Koshkin wrote:
| _Ars Technica_ got this right.
| ggggtez wrote:
| This is a very confusing post after you take into account that
| the author misunderstood that actually you _can_ downvote
| comments.
| ameister14 wrote:
| I think one obvious problem with downvoting where downvotes
| automatically hide content is that it creates echo chambers. The
| downvote button is definitely a 'disagree' button here and I
| think it's not really conducive to great discussions.
|
| Then again, this isn't really a forum - it's transitory comments
| about the news of the day. Perhaps the argument is that there
| shouldn't be substantive discussion here in the first place.
| You're clearly meant to respond to the article more than the
| individual comment - the tree style commenting system and
| automatically hidden nature of comments down the chain both speak
| to that.
| wincy wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. I tend to say things that are somewhat
| controversial on HN, and if I said them in San Francisco I'd be
| liable to be tarred and feathered, being a Libertarian from
| Kansas, but I try to be diplomatic and haven't yet had a
| comment that's gotten hidden. I think people are fairly
| charitable as long as you're presenting a cogent argument.
|
| I always show dead comments and honestly, people aren't missing
| out on much. To get your comment dead in my experience you have
| to either be extremely inflammatory or just spout absolute
| nonsense.
| ameister14 wrote:
| I think HN does it better than reddit, where the comments are
| hidden quickly once negative, but I've seen a lot of comments
| edited based on downvotes as people wonder what, exactly,
| other users are disagreeing with. Doesn't exactly contribute
| other than to say 'your opinion is wrong.'
| asimjalis wrote:
| I feel like Hacker News leaderboard was a lot more interesting in
| the 2000s than it is now. Can anyone put their finger on why this
| is?
| NobodyNada wrote:
| (2009), by Jeff Atwood. I would have been _very_ surprised to
| hear today 's Stack Overflow staff talking about the value of
| downvoting.
|
| Atwood's experience with downvoting on Hacker News is definitely
| a bit dated as well:
|
| > (update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which
| I never realized. It is buried in the faq)
|
| > (I apologize for my misunderstanding, but there's no visible UI
| for downvoting, and I can't recall ever seeing a single negative
| voted comment in all the times I've visited Hacker News! Also, I
| put these comments in parens to make them extra-LISPy so Paul
| Graham would see my corrections.)
| Macha wrote:
| You might be surprised:
| https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...
|
| There's been a couple of blog posts from the SE staff trying to
| move the needle on how close/downvote happy the community is.
| NobodyNada wrote:
| Sorry for the confusion, I was referencing how it would be
| unusual to hear SE staff today talking about why downvoting
| is an important quality-control feature and how it can be
| made more useful and more helpful for new users, rather than
| just condemning downvotes as hostile. In fact, the blog post
| you linked was at the forefront of my mind as an example of
| SE staff not "getting it."
|
| Stack Overflow's moderation system has not scaled very well;
| it's unhelpful for new users, and frustrating for power users
| and volunteer moderators. The company has largely refused to
| address these issues since about ~2015, when they promised a
| series of grandiose moderation overhauls and...never
| implemented any of it.
|
| Since then, their usual strategy for dealing with moderation
| failures is to throw the community under the bus. The article
| you linked caused a lot of drama within the community,
| because it accused _volunteers_ of "judging users for not
| knowing things" for performing basic moderation tasks like
| marking questions as duplicates -- a feature that's supposed
| to _help_ users by pointing them to an authoritative answer.
| The duplicate feature has a lot of warts; it does not
| adequately explain how users can nominate their question for
| reopening by clarifying why it 's not a duplicate, and even
| if it was discoverable the reopen process is horribly broken
| anyway. But instead of addressing the obvious issues with the
| moderation system, they just wrote a blog post about how
| hostile their volunteers are.
|
| A longtime SE power user explained it better than I could:
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777
|
| > For years, you have been working on cleaning up an oil drip
| out of a beautiful lake with a spoon, but the small spoon you
| have is actually a fork. You've spent years asking for at
| least a spoon to work with, but have gotten nothing. For some
| reason, though, you keep at it with the fork, for different
| reasons - some are the people next to you also working with
| forks, some are the occasional diamond that you can clean and
| set and make nice - all for free and out of your own time.
|
| > Then, one day [...] the lake starts shouting at you about
| how the fork you're using is being unfair to the oil - that
| you're being too unwelcoming to the oil and not treating it
| properly, completely ignoring the fact that you've been using
| a fork and have been asking for better tools for _years_. The
| lake slaps you anyway.
|
| In fairness: within the last year or two they finally seem to
| have hired some staff members who finally get it and are
| taking steps towards actually _fixing_ the site 's moderation
| problems. However, I haven't been on the site for a while and
| so I couldn't tell you whether they are actually having a
| meaningful impact or just making more empty promises.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _In fairness: within the last year or two they finally
| seem to have hired some staff members who finally get it
| and are taking steps towards actually fixing the site 's
| moderation problems._"
|
| That is such a time frame to choose; right in the middle of
| it, 1 year 6 months ago, the Monica incident happened[1].
| Do you mean before that or after that?
|
| In summary, StackOverflow said they were discussing a code
| of conduct that would mandate volunteer moderators use
| someone's preferred pronouns. Monica, a widely respected
| moderator, asked if she could continue using gender-neutral
| language under the proposed code of conduct. They kicked
| her out alledging (incorrectly) that this was a statement
| of intent to break the rules they hadn't brought in yet.
| Then 50+ other moderators stood down in protest[2]. Then
| the company doubled down on their decision and their
| following silences. This unravelled into a lot of people
| voicing their discontent with the way the StackExchange
| company interacts with the volunteer mods and the
| community, and builds on the back of the ~2019 one-sided
| changes to try and make the community more welcoming to new
| users by being harder on the people who are already the
| community, and how badly that went down, and company
| employee leaks saying the company is not engaging with the
| community, and an apparent increase in pushing for money to
| return to investors rather than any other mission.
|
| Right about the same time, they retrospectively relicensed
| all questions, answers and comments ever submitted,
| possibly illegally, and then refused for a long time to
| comment on it.[3]
|
| [1] https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/s
| tack-... and a related post covering other things the
| company has done fairly badly ~1 year ago -
| https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/342950/
|
| [2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-
| mods-...
|
| [3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-
| exchan...
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > there's no visible UI for downvoting
|
| For you. I see two arrows - one for upvoting and one for
| downvoting - next to every comment in this thread.
|
| [edit] Haha, somehow missed that this was a quote from the
| article, sorry :D
| zests wrote:
| Except this one :)
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > We've lost half the potential information. If a post has zero
| upvotes, does that mean it's bad? incorrect? uninteresting?
| mediocre? There's no way to tell, because zero has multiple
| meanings.
|
| Having downvotes doesn't fix this problem. You still loose
| information. If a post has zero upvotes, does that mean nobody
| cares, or a lot of people love it, and the same number hate it?
| The only site that gets this right is youtube: It shows both
| likes and dislikes.
| wmichelin wrote:
| I believe they're playing around with removing dislikes
|
| Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358992/youtube-
| hiding-d...
| elboru wrote:
| > The only site that gets this right is youtube: It shows both
| likes and dislikes.
|
| That might change soon:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/YouTube/status/137694248659415040...
| amelius wrote:
| Speaking of shortcomings, how do people remove their account
| including all of their comments?
|
| (Not saying that I want to remove my account of course, but
| perhaps one day I might)
|
| EDIT: some discussion on this topic appeared here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898422
| jerrac wrote:
| I initially loved the idea of voting posts up and down. Thanks to
| seeing how it actually works on SO and here, well, I am not much
| of a fan anymore.
|
| At the very least, if I ever implemented it myself, I'd require
| that people explain why they are voting up, or voting down,
| before they could vote. And I'd not limit users from being able
| to vote until they magically get to the right amount of "karma".
|
| Without requiring an explanation, votes are more akin to boos and
| cheers than anything useful. Not a very good way to encourage a
| diverse culture.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Comment and explain your downvote, you'll likely be downvoted
| for doing so, or be accused of trying to be a mod, or waste
| your time explaining yourself to someone who wasn't even
| interested enough to post a substantial comment in the first
| place. The main reason I downvote is "low quality comment"
| which is subjective and I don't want to enter into a debate
| about arguing that it is against the author arguing that it
| isn't; it's a _voting_ system, I vote, you vote, we all vote,
| and a consensus comes from that. I don 't want it to be "my
| judgement is better than everyone elses", I want it to be my
| vote among many.
|
| (Or rather, I _do_ want it to be "my judgement is better than
| everyone elses, and I want to be able to delete other people's
| comments", and I recognise that's bad, and that a vote system
| limits the maximum damage I can do to one vote per comment).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yeah, I _really_ wish that HN required you to comment in order
| to downvote. Or even just required that a comment had replies
| before it could be downvoted; I don 't care so much that every
| single person justifies their downvote as that the person
| getting downvoted gets an explanation.
| whymauri wrote:
| I like that a comment requires at least one comment before a
| downvote. Maybe not a comment for each downvote, since that
| might encourage dogpiling. Imagine a new user makes a social
| faux pas and suddenly receives ~4 relatively negative
| comments.
| genericone wrote:
| That only incentivizes people who have all the time in the
| world to disagree on the internet. Most users with expertise
| just don't have that kind of mental-bandwidth to spare. Just
| as it is not worth your time to get into a verbal argument
| with flat-earthers, its not worth your time to comment on
| most posts that you disagree with.
| CSSer wrote:
| I initially really liked this idea. I think the only problem
| is that it could lead to requiring more moderation. It's very
| hard to enforce quality. Right now I'm imagining a bandwagon
| chain of "You suck!" or other low quality comments just for
| the price of downvoting. I guess you could impose a minimum
| character requirement. At any rate, the idea of it being
| visible only to the user being downvoted is somewhat novel as
| well.
| jerrac wrote:
| Having to work harder at moderation seems acceptable to me.
| And it'd be fairly simple to implement a "You can't just
| say 'you suck' when downvoting. If you do, you lose your
| downvoting privileges permanently." policy.
| mjevans wrote:
| Removing content from a discussion IS moderation. That's
| why the idea is tying a 'reason for moderation' (the reply,
| or any reply existing at all at least) to the moderation
| action.
|
| Such a moderation comment might be anything, but the more
| egregious examples:
|
| Illegal content (of some sort); A threat upon persons or
| property (E.G.); Hate Speech; other things that a
| reasonable person would agree do not belong with a
| discussion; or just being Wildly off-topic.
| jointpdf wrote:
| I think this could backfire. Toxic/trolling comments do not
| need to be dignified with a response, and requiring one may
| increase the incentive to write inflammatory posts (assuming
| that at least some people do this--consciously or not--to
| instigate reactions).
|
| For well-intentioned posts that are factually incorrect, it
| seems that there are usually replies that explain the reason
| for the downvote. When a comment is wrongfully banished to
| the grey nothingness, oftentimes others step up and defend
| it. The community immune system functions well as is.
|
| Also, I adore the fade-to-grey side effect of the downvotes.
| It's like spritzing a cat with water for scrounging on the
| counters--an ultimately harmless but _super effective_
| reprimand.
| jerrac wrote:
| Posts like that should be flagged for moderation, not voted
| on. A community site should have guidelines that everyone
| can reference, and if something is in violation, there
| should be a way to flag that post.
| Miraste wrote:
| > Not a very good way to encourage a diverse culture
|
| I'd guess that's the point - giving power over visibility to
| users who've proved themselves in line with the forum zeitgeist
| helps maintain a site's culture as-is and prevent it
| "diversifying" into Smaller Facebook #50691.
| jerrac wrote:
| To expand on my thoughts a bit, my goal with voting would be to
| get people to actually engage with each other. That's the whole
| point of a community site. Adding "points" is just a way to
| encourage more engagement.
|
| With that in mind, I'd likely just not have downvotes period.
| If something is low quality enough to deserve a downvote, then
| it should be in violation of my community standards. Downvotes
| are designed to stop engagement. That's not the kind of thing
| I'd want unless it's something bad.
|
| Then maybe do something a little different with upvotes. Say
| after you upvote with a comment a certain number of times, you
| get access to a quick upvote option. Or canned upvote comments.
|
| And maybe general comments would count as an upvote unless you
| uncheck the box. That way we could keep generic upvote comments
| like "well thought out argument" or "he used good references"
| in their own little section without stifling good interactions.
| ddevault wrote:
| Hacker News gets it most wrong with the flagging system, which is
| ripe for abuse (and is constantly abused). I sent this to dang
| some time ago, and was met with a muted response:
|
| I realized something interesting the other day - users gain
| access to downvote comments once they reach 501 karma. I've
| always inferred that this is to make it so that users cannot
| downvote until they have demonstrated some understanding of the
| community and an ability to fit in with its norms.
|
| However... users get access to flagging at 31 karma. A flag is
| basically a super downvote in several respects:
|
| - It works on comments and posts
|
| - It works on direct replies to your own comments
|
| - Just a few flags is enough to remove content entirely
|
| - A flagged post cannot be vouched for until after it's been
| removed, whereas a post can be upvoted before it's downvoted.
|
| It's a bit weird to me that the OP version of downvotes is
| available to users 16 times sooner than the neutered version. I
| feel like HN has a problem with flagging being abused for
| censorship - this might provide an explanation.
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