Ask HN: Should we eliminate downvoting on HN?
With content moderation, there are a couple different signals that are both important, but that shouldn't be conflated.
1) The comment is on-toptic relevant, and adds value to the discussion (quality).
2) Whether a user personally agrees or disagrees with the content of a comment (content).
Downvotes are a negative signal. There isn't a clear way to distinguish between "this comment is low quality" (quality moderation) and "I disagree with it" (content feedback).
Downvoting has the aggregate effect of suppressing speech. In the case of low quality, this is a good thing. In the case of disagreement, it runs the risk of discouraging expression and diverse ideas.
Perhaps people have ideas they'd like to discuss, but don't want to risk "losing points" because the idea may be unpopular. I know that I have personally experienced this, and stopped myself from expressing an idea because I've been pretty sure it wouldn't be popular. Given the overall high quality of discussions on HN, this chilling effect is disturbing. Have others experienced it?
Upvotes are a positive signal, it seems to me that the risk of conflating positive signals is less than that of conflating negative signals, since it doesn't have a suppressive effect, it has an uplifting effect.
Would it make sense, and improve the community, to eliminate downvotes and to only have positive signals?
To be clear, I'm not suggesting getting rid of flagging a comment, just downvotes.
61 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadThis is a problem with your mindset, not the HN system. You should not place significant concern on collecting Internet karma. I currently have over 18,000 karma, and I happily and regularly have expressed thoughts and opinions that get me -4'd. (Basically, as low as you can go on a given comment.) Doing so has not hurt me in any meaningful capacity, or even, obviously, in a meaningless HN karma capacity. Post unpopular views.
I'm mostly aware that a certain crowd will downvote anytime I point out that Section 230 should be repealed, that we'd all be better off as a society if Google stopped existing as a website and corporate entity tomorrow, or that unlimited data is a bad thing for ISPs to offer, etc. Sometimes I am surprised when I make a comment I expect to be unpopular, and it ends up somewhat popular!
The problem you run into is that many people feel that a comment they disagree with is low quality. Encouraging flagging over downvotes would actually increase censorship: Instead of downvoting, users would flag a lot more comments, and they'd be more likely to be hidden by the site.
That very well may be true.
> Encouraging flagging over downvotes would actually increase censorship
That's a good point. Flagging seems a bit more objectively defined than downvoting though.
I think I get what you mean, but if you give people only one really strong negative signal, they'll be tempted to use it whenever they have negative feelings about something, thereby devaluating it. This may very well have been why downvotes were added in the first place.
IMO comment graying should only start after a comment hits -2, instead of graying after a single downvote.
It currently grays after 2 downvotes. You start at 1, one downvote puts you at 0, then another puts you at -1, and that's when you're grayed.
That doesn't fix the bandwagoning issue mentioned. Though, personally I don't think it matters in terms of points/karma, though it is annoying to have that bias other readers' opinion on one's comment. One starts off reading with the preconception that it's a bad comment, even if the downvotes are from a disagreement. It's also annoying to be silenced from a disagreement. Graying seems equivalent so responding to someone with a "shut up" which I think anyone would agree is rude.
Agree with the comment about somehow getting greater refinement in negative feedback. The idea should be to create a cultural norm that a downvote is about relevance, clarity, accuracy and not personal taste, political affiliation, cultish taboos. But much like the everpresent need to change someone’s copy, there should be a way to allow certain people to vent that irrepressible urge to say “You’re wrong!”, just in a different manner.
More interesting to me is the psychological impact of the downvote. Folks, especially the young, can take it much more seriously than it was meant to be. This might be their first “adult” conversation, so to speak, and the idea is not to squelch them but not to drag down the general tone of discussion either.
Most of the time, we can't know people's ages from their comments, so your apparent conclusion that this is age-related confuses me.
> This might be their first “adult” conversation, so to speak, and the idea is not to squelch them but not to drag down the general tone of discussion either.
In the adult conversations I've had, people generally show enough respect to give equal weight to all appropriate contributions to the conversation. Dismissively silencing a participant with no explanation is something more exclusively seen among children.
> the psychological impact of the downvote.
I wouldn't call it a psychological impact. It's just a surprise we all get over. The surprise comes because we seemingly are having a good conversation going as we might in real life. However, the casual graying out seems like a big disparity with etiquette in face-to-face conversations.
Personally, I understand it's just a difference that comes with the different medium.
The way I see it, flagging is for inapproriate comments like something containing porn, or indisputable hate speech, etc. Graying out is for comments that are not inappropriate but have low signal-to-noise ratio, like "That's cool!", or that go against the guidelines. Upvoting is for conversation subthreads one is interested in, to get them higher and hopefully with more participants.
Use of the upvote and downvote are not standardized though, so people use those buttons with different reasons. Same happens with StackExchange.
I think that strikes to the heart of why I question the value of keeping downvotes.
Without a clear guideline, it's a mixed signal.
Since that signal can be suppressive, it seems to me like in its current state, it detracts from open discussion.
I am against the use many people give it to silence people they disagree with, but the problem is, what's a good alternative UX?
I think keeping the functionality while presenting it as something different than the opposite of the upvote might do (maybe use an alternative counter, too?), but on the other hand it seems to just overcomplicate things.
The functionality as-is might not be perfect, but it might be better than any alternative I can come up with.
Sorting would be at sibling level.
I think it's useful for it to have an opposite action, but then that would mean we have votes for sorting and separate votes for graying out. That seems needlessly complicated, which is what I meant.
Upvotes may cause the post / comment to float up in relation to it's siblings, but that's about it, other than flagging.
I also think it would be interesting to have a separate agree/disagree signal that's independent of quality rating.
I can disagree strongly with a well thought out and quality comment, and vice versa. It would be nice to have independent signals, so I could conveniently communicate "I disagree with you, but value the discussion"
With the current state of the browser ecosystem and more importantly, the shift to mobile devices where it's nontrivial to apply CSS hacks, it's more on the website to make the relevant design changes for user happiness.
Some people down-vote when they simply disagree with whatever is being conveyed. This behavior is not conducive to a thoughtful, substantive conversation.
Beyond signaling a post/comment is of low quality or off-topic, I do not see any use for the down-vote; the 'flag' option exists for this purpose. I also believe the bar for the flagging privilege be set higher.
Happy New Year's, by the way.
Happy New Year. Helluva start.
I definitely did not say the mods/admins should be reviewing each and every post. That’s absurd.
(Imagine the opposite, if everyone who upvoted your comment had to reply "I agree" or something similarly useless.)
A system like that wouldn't add much overhead to voting on a submission, but would give an indication as to why the voting had gone that way.
In theory it should reduce the number of knee-jerk reactionary downvotes.
For all that we in the West love to criticise countries like China, Russia [and formerly the USSR], etc. for not allowing dissent, we have pretty much arrived at the same situation in the so-called free speech embracing west.
There are points of view and opinions which are effectively censored off the internet, or illegal to express. Now a lot of people in the west say [as you effectively did] "Yes. But that's different. We only ban hatred and bigotry" Well, the people running those regimes we love to feel superior to would express similar sentiments "We only suppress comment that threatens the country or causes social disharmony". They find that kind of thing just as nasty as we find our 'wrong speak'.
I don't think we can have it both ways. We either believe in free speech. In which case, with a few exceptions such as inciting violence, etc. people should be able to express, without censure, opinions others may find abhorrent. Or we believe in moderated speech. In which case we need to stop pretending we in the west are in some way superior in this regard, to countries like China, Russia, etc.
I'm scratching my head over it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
> How are stories ranked?
> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way.
> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
As for the topic, downvoting has been hashed and rehashed numerous times. You can search the archives (see the search link in the footer for previous discussions) to familiarize yourself with what's been discussed before.
It sort of supports my core concern when I see the use of flagging to suppress discussion, even when the subject is clearly on topic and doesn't violate any guidelines.
As evidenced by the fairly vibrant discussion here, it seems like far from a resolved issue.
Suppressing the post and removing other people's ability to contribute ideas, especially new users, seems like an abuse of the flagging system.
Many worthy discussions have been "rehashed" since the beginning of time. Does this mean we should suppress these conversations? Because we may be bored with it?
As the population of a group grows, the number of people who are dissatisfied with the situation is almost guaranteed to grow as well. That being the case, I'm not sure what resolved looks like. Yes, rules and behavior change over time, and need to as the population changes. And HN has changed over time. Those that aren't satisfied are the ones most likely to be vocal about it, which is why threads and posts like this come up again and again.
Some discussion is good. HN members also have to respect what HN is and what HN isn't. 'dang is charged with keeping HN in the spirit of what HN should be. (I'm purposefully not defining what that is because it's not up to me to decide that. And describing a community is a non-trivial thing I'm sure to get wrong ;)) Continued, repeated discussion of topics involving the rules is decidedly not what HN is supposed to be. It's uninteresting and actively drives away people who are otherwise interested in having discussions. Suppressing or censoring or moderating or curating or whatever term you choose to use is one of the ways HN (and really any community) keeps its character. HN can't be all things to all people, and while it may not be perfect, it can definitely be worse. It's been particularly remarkable that recently there have been a number of threads (and an entire post!) where people have expressed their appreciation for HN and in particular it's moderation. There's wide spectrum of people's feelings about HN, not at all surprising given the size of its population.
The reason I pointed you at the archives was so that you could learn about the arguments that have been made before, see what 'dang and other moderators and members have said in the past, and see if there is anything new or has changed. That would be one way that this wouldn't be a rehashing and could make a difference. And yes, having the same arguments again and again is boring, and more than that, it distracts from other interesting conversations.
The HN of today is the result of HN's history, which includes its moderation by both mods and members. I appreciate the desire to want to make it even better: I share that desire. I also want to respect what HN is, and its history, and how to affect improvements keeping those well in mind.
I hesitate to post this as I don't want to continue to add to the rehashing and you've already been in touch with 'dang, and his feedback is going to be much more on point than anything I can say. But I also don't want you to think that there aren't those who think about this as much as you do and come to different (I'm not saying correct, but different) conclusions.
Have a great weekend!
I don't have any doubt that people much smarter than I am have discussed this and thought about it at great length.
I would argue that if there wasn't interest in the discussion from the community, it wouldn't have gained so many points so quickly. Flagging was used to bury it as it was climbing up the front page.
This seems like an abuse of the flagging system to me. Apparently dang agreed, because the flag was removed, but the damage was done - it's aged out now.
I do think there has been a recent change that makes the topic relevant and worth discussing.
I've noticed a disturbing trend over the past 5-10 years of many folks wholly embracing the concept of limiting speech to only those things that they agree with.
It appears to me that this is an increasing trend, and I think our discussion tools need to adapt to meet the new challenge. That's the primary reason why I asked the question.
That being said, I do think your criticisms are good, but I just don't think those are reasons to get rid of downvoting here on HN.
I agree that downvotes are crude so instead of removing them you could improve them. How about when you downvote you have to choose a reason eg: 1. Comment is off-topic 2. Poor argument / source 3. Combatitive / abusive
Side note - there is no internet discourse more eye-rolling than whining about how you can't express an "unpopular" idea. Just say what you want to say - I swear you are significantly less edgy than you think.
Also, you're not allowed to downvote this comment. That would be suppressing my speech and such a chilling effect is disturbing.
I think it contributes, and I also happen to agree with a lot of your points, if not perhaps, the tone.
'claytongulick can't downvote the comment regardless: just as one can't downvote a reply to a comment, a submitter can't downvote top-level comments on their submission.
Upvotes are available to many more people than downvotes, so when a comment is downvoted and stays downvoted it means one person disagreed with it enough to downvote it, but many people read it and didn't think it deserved an upvote.
Once you give people a number, they'll start to game that number, leading to low quality karma-farming comments. When a measure (in the case of karma, of quality) becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.
But I do think there are, often, some very biased negative idealogues who vote down interesting & valuable opinions, regularly, & mercilessly, because they don't jive with the image of the world as the downvoter wants to believe it.
I think it's very frustrating. And unfortunate. And I think that usually it's the ungenerous zero-sum view of the world people that tend to be mass downvoters. There are other generally unpopular or unsupportable opinions that get down voted too, which I think is more in the cards, more regular, & especially in the contested/hot threads up top. My main concern is not this, not people getting blown out of the water in hot spots, but a lot of interesting voices getting chilled & sent down.
My ask is: more data. Show upvoted & downvoted separately when one hovers over the net points of a post. I also like the opinion that downvotes ought include a reason, a cause: off topic, bad content, bad whatever, slashdot style.
EDIT: flagging could e.g. increment a visible counter and serve as a trigger to the admin; assuming the admin is a neutral arbiter assessing the compliance of the post with HN and legal requirements he/she could remove the post or comment, and leave a rationale for his/her decision; that could prevent arbitrariness.
Instead of a downvote, add more muting functionality, ways to personally shut off speech not welcomed, but not in a way that prevents others from seeing it.
Personally, I believe all opinions should behave the opportunity to be heard, no matter how crazy, and should not be suppressed because a handful of people don’t like it.
This should stop the knee jerk downvotes and otoh also tell the OP the reason why the post got downvotes.
If somebody makes a downvote with a comment like "sgsgsgsfwfwg" the OP can flag it and the downvoter gets his downvote privileges revoked on 10 flags or something.
Just an idea.