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Ask PG: Feature request, down/up vote history

4 points by ytinas ↗ HN
Hello,

I would like to request that a given post has not only the total score, but a link to show exactly who voted and how. I think this might help to bring back accountability for people who are misusing the voting system.

Thanks for your time, Ytinas

11 comments

[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 32.9 ms ] thread
niyazpk
I think this will give people more incentives to misuse the voting system. What if I start down-voting everyone who down-voted me? Of course then you can see that I down-voted you, but that would not help much other than further deteriorating the quality of the votes.

If you are worried about voting rings and such, I guess the admins should have tools for that and we should let them do the housekeeping.

ytinas
The issue is that since I came back to this site the voting feels like reddit. People just vote down if they disagree. They are totally safe to do this because there are enough people now that you can't tell who did it.

As far as revenge down votes, that also comes with a risk. People who don't know the history will just see your revenge down vote and assume you are the jerk.

niyazpk
As you know, in HN we all are trying to maximize the quality of the content without over-engineering the system itself. Once you add a system to monitor the votes, that will itself be a point of discussion. We want people to talk about the topic at hand and not go meta.

(Besides... big change requests like these are usually turned down by the HN admins.)

ytinas
Good points, but at some point the meta must be addressed. People abusing the system will either cause a ton of meta discussions (like this one) or people who don't fit the group think will simply leave.

A way has to be provided to keep accountability and/or defend one's self. On sites like reddit, at least new accounts have the ability to down vote. If you don't fit the group think here you wont even get that chance.

plinkplonk
"The issue is that since I came back to this site the voting feels like reddit."

And how long have you been on this site? Your score is 17 at the point of writing and your account was created 7 days ago.

So unless you had an earlier login id, (which is very possible, I am just asking) maybe you haven't been here long enough to make an informed judgment of how the voting system works? Just hang in there and use it for a while.

From the HN guidelines (at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) , "If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.) "

ytinas
I use to have an older account from several years ago (I think the site was less than a year old when I joined).
gojomo
I doubt deanonymizing per-comment up/down-votes will have the effect you intend; rather seeing names when 'stung' by a downvote will only lead to more negative feelings.

My hunch is that there are people who disagree, and have enough energy to express that via one click, but not enough energy to compose a reply. It's not incontrovertibly clear that the down-arrow isn't for disagreement -- "it's a vote, and I'm supposed to vote my opinion, right?" -- so it's an attractive nuisance, and some percentage of users will use it for lazy-disagreement as long as it's there.

I think the most effective remedy would be to provide another equally-easy one-click-disagree -- separate from karma-downvote -- that doesn't imply a community demotion/sanction. (I don't care if a thousand people disagree with me, but if one suggests I've transgressed the bounds of good behavior, I'm motivated to reply.)

gojomo
Separately, when only seeing the headline, without the detail (about naming names), I thought this suggestion might instead be:

(1) History of up/down votes like a sparkline. For example, ↓↓↑↓↑↑↑↓

(2) Show a person's outbound karma -- the total up, down, and net comment votes they've cast (rather than received). Who's more positive about others, or relentlessly negative? (This is more likely to discourage people from hair-trigger, anonymous negative votes.)

Mz
I think making it personal like that would cause a great many more problems than it would solve. For articles, I upvote them as a means to "save" them. I think that's a more objective means to measure value: I vote on articles to serve my own needs (because I value them), not to express an opinion or agreement/disagreement. I have no idea what could be done to the system of voting on individual comments which would more closely align to that rubric.

I would rather not know if some individual is routinely downvoting me. There is no way to determine if such a pattern arises out of personal dislike/spitefulness or just coincidence that they see the world very differently from me and therefore just happen to strongly disagree with many things I say. But the ability to check for/notice such patterns would likely begin negatively impacting discussions here as it would promote "feuds" which likely would not remain confined to voting patterns. I've seen a few comments that suggest that there are running battles here between specific individuals, but you get that everywhere and it seems less toxic and less obvious here than what I have witnessed elsewhere.

For that matter, it also might not be a good thing to know one person routinely upvotes someone in particular.

ytinas
>or just coincidence that they see the world very differently from me and therefore just happen to strongly disagree with many things I say

But they are not supposed to down vote for strongly disagreeing. Down vote means "this person is not contributing to the discussion". Down vote is supposed to discourage the person from doing what ever they did again. So what message does the current environment send? Think like everyone else or you're not welcome here? Seems like exactly the opposite of what a start up oriented site would want.

Mz
Regardless of what the intent is, you cannot control people and there are people here who have publicly stated they downvote people for reasons like "I was downvoted and I'm upset about it". Which is why I remarked on the fact that I upvote articles to meet my own needs -- to "save" them -- and I don't know how you would make the comment voting intrinsically related to what people value rather than just opinion, momentary bad moods, etc.

I raised two gifted-learning disabled sons and if there was a way to either misunderstand the rules or find some loophole, they would do so. I am a firm believer in designing the system so it does what it is supposed to do and not counting on people seeing the world the same way I do, having the same values I have, "agreeing" to a particular set of rules/ethics/social mores...etc. I don't know how to get there with the voting system on this site but I don't think making it public how people vote would be an improvement.

That's just my 2 cents, of course.