Why no downmod for links?
Didn't think I'd be the one to say this since my first reaction to Hacker News was that I was very turned off and offended by downvotes without motivations.
My rule is: * Upvote good posts that you agree with. * Comment on posts you disagree with or want to add something significant to. * Downvote only when people write racist stuff etc.
But lately the forum has been filled with links that are irrelevant, blog posts with very low quality etc and the only way I can disagree with them is to answer them but I don't want to because that brings attention to them in the form of many replies plus it makes me waste my time on them which is what I don't want to.
So why isn't there a downvote for OPs/links?
17 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 63.3 ms ] threadI think it would be great if user registration happened in seasons. I.e. every three months, there's a 48-hour period during which new people can sign up. The purpose of this would be to allow the site to retain a unique personality. If you constantly add new people, it's hard to know who's who and what we're doing here. Treat it more like a large and semi-exclusive collective, and give it a chance to center itself for a while before expanding again.
I'd be content with a maximum of one OP downvote per week, or something. If it's precious and rare, then I need to really mean it to use it. Of course, that means that a few downvotes ought to be enough to keep a story off the front page. I'd also be perfectly content with it having a karma requirement (if you do more than lurk or submit spam, it's impossible not to rack up reasonable karma in a short period of time, so that's a pretty low impact restriction on regular users).
Assuming this is the default behaviour of most users it shouldn't be a problem to comment on bad links.
If I see a new link with a couple of comments but only 1 point, I'll quickly read the comments to make sure it's worth clicking first.
That said, I think adding a small barrier to submitting links wouldn't be a bad thing. Even stopping anyone with 10 karma or less would mean that people have to have a small investment in the community already. Hopefully that would mean they would have a feel for what is appropriate material.
EDIT: I just want to credit ichverstehe for the karma to submit thing. My comment was a response to him
Try reading the top links on the "new" page. If you click on an article and it's no good, write a comment explaining why you think so. It'll be one of the first comments on the article, and will serve as a sort of mini-review for those of us who tend to skim comments before reading articles.
Incidentally, reading comments before articles is a great way to help filter out the stuff you won't like.
If you find a good, relevant link on the new page, upvote it! This is one of the most important things you can do. Lots of decent articles disappear from HN without ever getting their first upvote.
Oddly, despite having seen an untold number of complaints about the lack of downvoting, I can never remember the stated rationale for not having it. But I think it has to do with the ease with which gangs of people could organize to downvote articles out of existence.
(You might think that claques of upvoters would also be a problem, but it occurs to me that artificial upvoting is a problem that gets noticed very quickly -- everybody sees what makes it to the top -- and can then be fixed, whereas the swift, silent, and unfair disappearance of articles can be harder to detect and reverse. It's a much easier problem to detect bad links that accidentally hit the front page than it is to detect good links that accidentally get banished to the gigantic, spam-filled garbage heap.)
The problem is that there is potentially way more junk than good stuff. In a good stuff only site, there would simply be less stuff, and at times, big gaps for lack of good stuff. That is IMO better than filling in those gaps with junk.
Keeping the site positive does wonders for my perception of the articles, and quite honestly, the signal-to-noise seems much better here than most news sites, even with the occasional garbage link. I think it goes without saying that the "community" is certainly better.