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Are you sick of being downvoted for having a different opinion?

35 points by gaika ↗ HN
I'm. That's one of the primary reasons why I'm still working on my startup (personalized social news site) even though the odds are stacked againts it.

Please help us create a community where people can exchange stories and opinions freely while still maintaining the quality of personalized "front page".

50 comments

[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] thread
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biznickman
Can you downvote people on this site?
gaika
Here you can downvote comments if your karma is above 50.

We have sliders for people so you can adjust your preference for their posts.

Hexstream
"sliders"?... I must have missed something.
gaika
Sorry, I totally messed up this post, was too late to edit it. The link to the site in question is in my profile. Thanks.
gscott
Sliders is a tv show from a few years back.
babul
Sliders was a good show. Sliding through wormholes and visiting alternate realities.
mwerty
Karma needs to be greater than 25 or thereabouts.
Morieris
That seems like a good idea... I imagine it would keep out account farmers, or people using dupe accounts to vote many times.
breily
I'm sick of submissions about downvotes.
gaika
Great, there are no submissions about downvotes there, because unlike here it is not a problem.

Edit: whoever is downvoting this comment should check the definition of "irony"

xlnt
Maybe you were downvoted for being hard to understand? "there"?
gaika
English is not my first language.

I meant that on the social news site that I'm working on there are no posts about downvotes, because everybody is free to express their opinion with up and down votes as they wish and it doesn't hurt anybody.

xlnt
Oh. Maybe you are being downvoted for advertising your startup too much?
gaika
Maybe. I'm trying to advertise a solution to the problem. My startup is just one possible implementation of it.

Edit: Another solution would be to ask people to explain when they downvote. Please, what's wrong with THIS comment?

xlnt
You should probably ignore downvotes until at least -2. It could be just one random idiot and it doesn't mean anything.
rory096
His first comment is now -19 and his other two were -3 before I came in here. Why all the pile-on downvoting for no real reason, people? Are those comments really worth -19?
gaika
It is called karma bombing and it just proves the point.

Compare it to the solution where there's a recommendation system that helps everybody involved: the ones downvoting the posts will form one cluster, the ones upvoting them will be in another. People that like stories like that will see more, people that do not will be spared from them.

xlnt
Maybe it shouldn't be possible to vote anything below -5.

edit: i posted this in feature requests thread

greendestiny
It's a community response to your suggestion that we should leave Hacker News and go to Jaanix because of the evils of downvoting. Downvoting is communication, it's really not a fault of the system if you find it too painful to hear.
gaika
My communication skills must be terrible, but I'm not asking anybody to leave. Hacker News is great, but it covers only small subset of all the news out there.
swombat
Funnily enough, I (and I guess many people here) am only interested in a small subset of "all the news out there". More is less.
greendestiny
Pointing out what you (and others) see as a problem with this news site, and suggest it as a reason to go to your news site, only makes sense if you don't see them as independent.
natch
About your proposed solution of "clusters": Getting people to explore outside of their comfort zone, and letting them encounter ideas that challenge their faith-based views, is actually a good thing. Insular clusters do sound "safe" but I would not assume that is a net positive.
walterk
Unfortunately, you're the victim of some bad timing. Your submission's title makes it seem like yet another complaint about being downvoted, at a time when many of us are tired of seeing these things and will knee-jerkedly downvote the author / upvote sentiments against. The submission text is fairly vague and doesn't clearly dispel the notion that this is yet another complaint thread, rather than an advertisement for a startup.

A better title would have been, "Are you sick of being downvoted for having a different opinion? Try ______." Ideally, this would have been a direct link to your site. At a minimum, the URL for it should have been included in the submission text. Having us click through to your user profile == bad usability!

That said, the blame does not fall squarely on your shoulders. There's some definite mob mentality going on here that is embarrassing for a community supposedly composed of free-thinking hacker-entrepreneurs.

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rewind
I'm not sick of being downvoted (don't care), but I can't say the same about posts that are nothing more than advertisements for the poster's startup.
xlnt
i'm sick of imprecise posts. the above post is not "nothing more" than an advertisement, even if you're right that that is the primary motivation.
gaika
Thank you. You are right, that is not the primary motivation for the post. I liked slashdot back in the day. Had to move on to digg, then reddit, then hacker news, because the quality of discussions was degrading. I think hacker news has a chance to be free from trolls and have high signal / noise because of narrow focus, but these personal anonymous attacks on people with downvoting them for who they are and what they think started to happen here more and more often. I think there's a general solution and would be only happy if sites like Hacker News adopt it as well.
astine
I've always felt that the best tool for that job was active moderation. If moderators care about the quality of their 'community' they can maintain it by fairly enforcing a set of rules. I've seen cases where this worked very well.
greendestiny
I come here to read about startups, especially community member's startups. If this post was actually a link to, or discussion of, a startup that would be great. It's not.

If everyone who has something against downvotes would like to respond to this comment I'll upvote you and maybe we can get it out of our system.

[dead] fuckymcfuckfuck
Yeah I like totally don't get it...

/me smears monitor with excrement

ibsulon
I've managed to keep from being incessantly downvoted in my unpopular opinions by providing well documented arguments (logos, with an occasional appeal to ethos of sources), tying to personal credibility or experience (ethos), or providing personal experience developing an empathic response, then tying into into the main argument. (pathos -> logos, or just pathos.)

The problem isn't disagreement - it's not developing ethos, pathos, or logos into the appropriate argument. The more controversial the opinion, the more that one must work to develop these three qualities, rather than depending on just one.

I also work to expose the weaknesses of my own argument, admit them, but explain why they are superior to the more conventional alternative.

I find that when this fails for myself, it's often because my perspective is lacking, and I need to rethink my argument.

On reddit, I'll still usually find an unpopular opinion at 3 or 4 points. There's likely some downmodding done, but most people will leave it alone if it's a proper argument.

(Some arguments, of course, are out of bounds. The emotional appeal is too strong. Abortion in a pro-life forum, for example. I haven't had that problem in most major forums.)

gaika
This is a great strategy for comments.

How does it help when you want to post a story on reddit that you think is important but unfortunately is highly controversial? (Hacker News doesn't have downvote for stories for exactly this reason, thanks!)

How does it help when people are downvoting you not only for your opinion but for who you are?

Karma is a great tool to manage trolls and signal / noise. Unfortunately in real world it is also used to silence opponents. And it is pretty effective at that. I want to change that.

stcredzero
If you made downvotes more scarce, then people would only use them if they absolutely had to. Maybe they would prioritize trolls and noise? Somehow, I think we're not quite that wise.
ibsulon
I don't tend to post stories. :) If I were looking for posts, I would likely post it in a personal blog then write my own interpretation, using effective argumentation, re-presenting the arguments targeted to a more critical audience.

That is a lot of commitment, though. However, an argument can do more harm than good if it is not written for a general audience.

anewaccountname
Well thought out arguments don't matter; we are supposed to downvote anything we disagree with: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 (from pg himself).
rewind
Nice reference. I'll bet you most people (myself included) now assume that disagreeing with someone is not the point of downvoting them. Personally, I downvote when I think something is inappropriate or doesn't add to the discussion (i.e. "me too" responses). Considering that PG indicates that a downvote is okay for disagreement, but that his post is from about four months ago, I wonder if there even exists a "standard" for downvoting behavior now. I've been visiting the site for awhile but only created an account a few months ago, so I didn't pay too much attention to this before I joined; I haven't been actively participating long enough to know how downvoting behavior has changed over time. Is there a new or updated guideline for downvoting?

Either way, as I've mentioned before, guidelines are just that: you can't force someone to not downvote inappropriately. It's just the nature of this sort of community. I think if people focussed more on not posting things that are out of line that get hella-downvoted instead of worrying about whether they have hit four digits of positive karma, things might be a little more laid back and people wouldn't stress so much. Either way, as long as there is karma, people will bitch about it one way or another ;-)

(Note: not dissing four-digit karma. If you have that much, you've earned it. Just saying that maybe people worry a bit too much about getting positive karma instead of avoiding negative karma.)

stcredzero
Pathos, Logos, Ethos. The 3 Musketeers! All for One, and One for All!
mpk
I really don't care about being down or up voted.

I make a comment every now and again - if people want to vote on it, fair enough. Go ahead, that's what the system is for.

But please don't try to pretend this is anything other than an Internet forum. Semi-anonymous people hang out here and some of them are bound to be obnoxious. Down-votes for different opinions are par for the course. Get over it.

chrisbroadfoot
Dear god, not another personalised social news site.
edw519
...I'm still working on my startup...

Great. That's what we all should be doing. Let us know as soon as you have something to show us. I'm not sure why you're posting this before then.

gaika
It is working, sorry for misunderstanding, link in the profile.
edw519
Cool. I didn't see the link in the post, so I never thought of checking your profile. Edit your original post (if it's not too late) and add that link. Thanks.
lakeeffect
Your Site Has Down Votes, I looked at it, it does.
gaika
The downvotes on our site serve totally different purpose. They do not censor - they cluster. They let you find people that share your values. Same with upvotes, also there's no karma to gain or lose.
pohart
While I see the point of such a thing, I don't like the idea of only reading the posts of people sharing my values/ideas. I already have my values/ideas and reading them will reinforce, instead of expand, them.
mattmaroon
I just kinda got used to it. I essentially realized that karma has no real money value anyway, and my self-esteem isn't dependent on the approval of strangers. So I just kinda comment and whatever happens happens. I really don't pay much attention to it.

I have thicker skin than most though.

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