Tell HN: A Recent Rise in Downvoting
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0622hpufe
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0042hpvac
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0d92hpw67
The first one is an okay, not great comment in the beginning, but then has an interesting note at the end. The second comment is gracious and friendly with some disagreement and stating his experience. The third is slightly stupid, but downvoted into oblivion stupid? I don't think so.
There was also a professor of computer science commenting that he was going to show this article to his students as part of why he thinks Android is going to be a big deal, and he was getting downvoted too.
I mean, these are unemotional comments about technology. This isn't politics or regulation or anything that makes people want to kick dirt around. I've noticed a couple of my civil, sourced, uncontroversial comments on normal topics sometimes get a quick down to 0 lately too before coming back up. I don't know what's prompting the change in behavior, but it seems different that this is happening in threads that are not really controversial at all. The screenshots I posted don't seem like the kind of thing that'd get hit in the past. Changing demographics of some sort?
103 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadIt would improve the conversation if people replied rather than just hitting the down vote button.
reddit is general purpose, you can collect points merely by posting pictures of kitties or nsfw.
I think that explains why some are members for 2 years, comfortable in reading the content on the site and contributing rather rarely when they have something insightful to say, while others are able to reach the threshold for down-voting in short periods of time without fully understanding the community or reading the guidelines.
I'm assuming you got down voted because it's just a flat karma value (I guess 200?) to allow down votes. They meant that your karma from submissions shouldn't count because it's trivially obtained.
Edit: Thanks for down voting this.
If karma comes only from useful comments then I'd posit that the user will be more invested in discusion and not as likely to down vote others.
My point is if you remove karma for submitted stories you only get people who earned the right to downvote via well thought out comments.
My hypothesis is that these are the type of people who are more likely to counter a point they disagree with, with a well thought out comment, rather than a downvote, as that's how they got the karma they have to begin with.
Perhaps stories that make the front page for X amount of time should earn a standard rate of karma for the submitter. Or even just a limit, say you can't get more then 10 karma on a submission.
Say HN gets an influx of new users who typically upvote inflammatory or LOL-evoking one-liners. If they all upvote each other, they all get karma, and the community starts to shift towards that behavior (because that's what earns you karma, and karma is supposed to be indicative of your contribution to the community).
I know I lurked here for about 6-8 months before creating an account and that time period allowed me to appreciate HN's community and what was and was not acceptable. Of course new members could still post comments and submit articles -- they just wouldn't have the ability to decide the community ethos.
Social conscience++
Most of the time I say something negative about Microsoft I append a "burn, karma, burn" to it because I know I'll take a beating.
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0042hpvac
http://awesomescreenshot.com/0d92hpw67
I would post something like "hey, you know f=ma" (a statement of fact in a non-hot-topic conversation that advanced the discussion) and see it get downvotes almost instantly. Then later the score would pop back up.
What can I tell you, Lionhearted? The board has gone to shit.
:)
I think the problem is that, in any group of people, 1% are probably not going to like you (for arbitrary reasons) or have some emtional hangup about any random piece of information. But most of the time it's a passive dislike. Only about 1% of that number would take any direct action against you (like downvoting an innocuous comment)
However when the daily numbers creep up past 40 or 50K, that 1% of 1% becomes a big enough number to start seeing some kindergarten voting games going on. Nothing much you can do about it -- simply a property of the numbers involved. We probably all do it, but because it's only a 1 in 10K experience, it's so extremely rare in ourselves that we don't even notice it.
In my opinion there was a time when Slashdot coped quite well with their randomly assigned mod points and metamoderation. Then their UI became unusable, so I cannot tell how it works now.
Meta-moderation was supposed to cure that, but it didn't make much difference. So, no, overall it did not work. Submissions were good, but discussions sucked.
Tends to keep out most of the usual Slashdot bullshit without requiring me to take Slashdot out of my RSS reader altogether.
My solution is to avoid iPhone-related threads or to not take them seriously, and to not comment in them (or if I must, to stress the iPhone positives explicitly). No, it's not a great solution.
EDIT as predicted, this post got a downvote.
/My personal experience/ from posting a comment with some again personal experience on linux laptops and why I though you didn't need a Mac to run linux got me downvoted to the negatives in a matter of minutes. I try and be fair, and I made myself clear that it was in fact an experience based opinion of mine, but alas.
Surely I'm "just grumpy about it", but I really feel people were being unnecessarily flamy. I invite anyone to click through my username and judge for themselves.
Lessons learned - there is a surprisingly large cultist segment on HN that will downvote opinions simply because they don't like them.
I never downvote because I think it is not the right way of expressing disagreement in a debate. I have words for that. Upvoting is sufficient as a tool for filtering large numbers of comments.
It is a little sad that no one of the downwoters had anything to say to correct my view.
But can you elaborate a little why do you find my comment stupid? It is genuine question.
edit: comment link added http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798461
No disrespect intended. I meant that this was a little over the top: "It looks like the game is over. The winner is Android." I upvoted you from -4 though to... well, it still shows as -4. But yeah, I don't think downvoting-to-oblivion was called for.
The main thing for me is that there is really big change at the doors. Fundamental one.
Market for devices below Apple price point is big enough to feed many companies and software vendors.
What game? Apple will not monopolise mobile computing. Phones, tablets, netbooks and other, not yet invented, products. The more solutions on the market the better for the consumer. You and me too.
This not so good for software vendors beacuse of market fragementation, but the cat is out of the bag.
Apple financial results are the least concern of mine. Yours too, I suppose. But Aplle financially will be fine, their marketing is outstanding.
So those devices don't exist yet, ok. Not sure how will you know the price points then, so far Android phones are not that much cheaper than iPhone.
> What game? Apple will not monopolise mobile computing
I was not aware that Apple was in the game of monopolizing mobile computing…
> But Aplle financially will be fine, their marketing is outstanding.
Their products are outstanding too. No marketing would help if your product is crap. And Apple does not have the biggest marketing budget, by the way. MS markegint budget for Vista was as large as Apple's for all products.
So many counterexamples to that, I don't even know where to start.
Update: I will downvote anyone with such stupidly patronizing and passive-aggressive attitude like "if you downvote me (or anyone else) then you are stupid or not worthy". Anyone is free to downvote my comments for any reason they like: be it disagreement, not liking the tone of it, or me being factually wrong. I'd appreciate the correcting comment in the latter case though, but by no means the lack of such I would consider an insult or "slap in the face". I don't think there is any problem with downvoting on HN, but I guess there are problems with some egos.
[Edit: You're right that I phrased my parent comment badly]
The way a comment is phrased is part of this. Coming off like a rude jerk isn't going to help your cause any. I don't downvote things I disagree with, but I will vote down people who aren't helping create a worthwhile discussion.
Should I respond to these? No, I don't think so. What am I going to say? "You're being a jerk, down vote!" doesn't add anything to the conversation either and would deserve a downvote as well.
You can disagree with this approach, but if you downvote someone and then respond, your saying one of two things:
Your comment instigated further discussion on my part, but I don't want other people to read it, so I will downvote simply because I disagree.
Or...
Your comment isn't helping to further the discussion of this topic, but I'm going to respond anyways by telling and as a result create a comment that also doesn't advance the discussion.
Voting should have nothing to do with whether you agree with a comment or not. It should be indicative of the value of the comment to the discussion of the topic at hand.
As your interaction and familiarity with the community changes, so does your perception of it, in particular of the flaws it has.
One thing that is great about HN compared to other social news sites is the high information content of the discussions, and I think this is maintained better by downvoting a comment you disagree with, especially if topic is one that has been discussed a million times here and elsewhere, like is the iPhone awesome or not. Maybe the downvoters just want to show they disagree without polluting the thread by rehashing all the same arguments again.
On HN, it's a given that every few months a new "Oh no! We're turning into Reddit!" thread cycle happens. Worrying about that is in HN's genes. After a couple years, though, I'd say the site's immune system has been reasonably successful.
There are some (many?) psychopaths here that literally live off cheating karma by posting BS that best fits crowd mentality at any particular moment.
There are more people around with 200+ karma than a year ago. If increase in number of comments do not match the increase in people with 200+ karma, there will be more downvotes.
And, we don't read comments random. They're displayed top to bottom with already upvoted ones on top, If people usually try to avoid disagreeing with the majority, mid to bottom comments (usually latecomer comments) will receive more and more downvotes.
Usually these people will go away again. On HN the only way they can express their negative attitude (once they've received enough upvotes for snarky comments) is by hitting the downvote button.
Normally the situation corrects itself, for the few cases where it doesn't the advice is to simply ignore it, most old hands will highlight a downvoted comment anyway just to see what it says. Come back in two weeks to the same comment and it will be sitting at '1' or higher.
Possibly it's time for PG to raise the downvote karma cap, make it a fraction of the alltime high for any comment so that the cap scales as the site grows without manual adjustment.
Nearly all comments with no karma, positive or negative, are just not very interesting or insightful. That’s not always true of comments with downvotes. It’s easy enough to sort out the lunatics and trolls and it’s just nice to vote a reasonable comment up that was downvoted for no good reason.
Better might be to base it on some function of votes. Maybe a fraction of the number of votes cast over the last n-months.
I assume people here generally wouldn't hack the algorithm to get a downvote arrow. If they do, it might be best to make it a function of not just the recent voting volume, but the average of the voter as well as the recency of the parent. At that point, the right cap might be +inf.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726192
Granted, it was a little bombastic and was written in a sarcastic way, but there was a good point in there and it was actually upvoted significantly before someone else made a response criticizing what I said.
I didn't understand why it was downvoted. As someone in the journalism field, I found it to be surprising that he could continue to make good points in articles about Facebook without using the service.
I think that we can agree that the larger the community, the more likely that we'll see random downvotes. However, any unfairly-downvoted comments will generally be fixed by the rest of the community over time. The question is whether the comment scores fairly represent the comment in the long-term. I think that a score of 1 is fair for the first two, and if you had upvoted, that's where they would be.
I don't think there's currently a downvoting issue; the community is handling it quite well, and unfair votes are corrected quickly. There are some edge cases where some comments with a low number of views (such as those in a story with few votes, or in a story with a large number of comments) might unfairly get stuck at 0 or -1, but it's somewhat rare. If 1-2% of comments are unfairly sitting at zero or -1, I don't think it's a big deal.
I disagree with you about the 3rd comment. The last pair of sentences is pure flamebait, which is why it's being downvoted.
No point in contaminating his 'evidence'.
Really, you're reading a lot in to very little.
Argue the case of the downvotes, not the man behind the criticism, of course he could have upvoted them, but he still can, can't he ?
In other words, it's not worth complaining about downvotes until good comments are getting stuck in negative territory and you can't do anything about it. When that happens, I think that this is a discussion worth having. I don't think we're there yet.
Argue the case of the downvotes
I did, in my 2nd and 3rd paragraphs (the majority of what I wrote).
I think that there's a "leaky abstraction" problem in up- and down-voting. The intent of voting (afaik) is to show meritorious comments, so other readers can find the most insightful writing. But it's also taken to indicating agreement or disagreement. Even the most insightful, well-researched comment may get down-voted by people who dislike its sentiment; while (less frequently) vapid comments that add nothing to the discussion get up-votes.
Did I waste your time and effort?
Did I make your time and effort worthwhile?
A contrary point of view is can be very valuable when presented well, even if you happen to disagree. On the other hand, if one regurgitates an already well known, and hence stale, point according to the opinion of the given reader, reading will be a waste of time and effort from their perspective. Of course, the next person to come along may not know the point is tired and stale, and their perspective is the opposite.
There is another important aspect of investment applicable to both the reader and the writer; you must sell your investment. If you bought an Apple product, and you found someone factually stating the mistakes Apple made in the NVRAM of a particular machine, you are naturally inclined to protect the value of your investment since you have an intrinsic need to justify your purchase, both to yourself and to everyone else. In more common terms, you're looking at "fanboyism" or even "advertisement," and it takes a very clear and careful mind to both know and disable your bias.
Equally, when writing you are attempting to sell your words as worthwhile to the reader by some means (insight, humor, expertise, shock, horror, ...). The more interesting question is why you even bothered to write? Did you do it for karma? Did you have some unknown internal need to refute a point of contention? Did you want "respect"? Were you trying to "help"? Were you looking for something more exciting to do? Were you frustrated? Were you fascinated?
Whether clearly admitted or not, there is a motive for every single post and submission on HN.
Knowingly or not, today you seem to be selling your lament on being down-voted --with the hope of it happening less-- by bringing it to the attention of HN readers. Why did you write it? Why do you care about a few bits in a database? Why do you believe down-votes are a bad thing?
Personally, I enjoy the feedback of getting down-voted. It's the only way I'll know that I wasted your time and mine.
I really hate saying so because I simply detest conspiracy theories.
The second should certainly not have been downvoted.
The third comes across as silly platform contention derived FUD and adds nothing to the debate.