I noticed the pub date when the author says that maybe HN gets away without downvotes because HN is young, founded in 2007. I am glad the author turned out to be wrong.
(2009), by Jeff Atwood. I would have been very surprised to hear today's Stack Overflow staff talking about the value of downvoting.
Atwood's experience with downvoting on Hacker News is definitely a bit dated as well:
> (update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized. It is buried in the faq)
> (I apologize for my misunderstanding, but there’s no visible UI for downvoting, and I can’t recall ever seeing a single negative voted comment in all the times I’ve visited Hacker News! Also, I put these comments in parens to make them extra-LISPy so Paul Graham would see my corrections.)
Sorry for the confusion, I was referencing how it would be unusual to hear SE staff today talking about why downvoting is an important quality-control feature and how it can be made more useful and more helpful for new users, rather than just condemning downvotes as hostile. In fact, the blog post you linked was at the forefront of my mind as an example of SE staff not "getting it."
Stack Overflow's moderation system has not scaled very well; it's unhelpful for new users, and frustrating for power users and volunteer moderators. The company has largely refused to address these issues since about ~2015, when they promised a series of grandiose moderation overhauls and...never implemented any of it.
Since then, their usual strategy for dealing with moderation failures is to throw the community under the bus. The article you linked caused a lot of drama within the community, because it accused volunteers of "judging users for not knowing things" for performing basic moderation tasks like marking questions as duplicates -- a feature that's supposed to help users by pointing them to an authoritative answer. The duplicate feature has a lot of warts; it does not adequately explain how users can nominate their question for reopening by clarifying why it's not a duplicate, and even if it was discoverable the reopen process is horribly broken anyway. But instead of addressing the obvious issues with the moderation system, they just wrote a blog post about how hostile their volunteers are.
> For years, you have been working on cleaning up an oil drip out of a beautiful lake with a spoon, but the small spoon you have is actually a fork. You've spent years asking for at least a spoon to work with, but have gotten nothing. For some reason, though, you keep at it with the fork, for different reasons - some are the people next to you also working with forks, some are the occasional diamond that you can clean and set and make nice - all for free and out of your own time.
> Then, one day [...] the lake starts shouting at you about how the fork you're using is being unfair to the oil - that you're being too unwelcoming to the oil and not treating it properly, completely ignoring the fact that you've been using a fork and have been asking for better tools for years. The lake slaps you anyway.
In fairness: within the last year or two they finally seem to have hired some staff members who finally get it and are taking steps towards actually fixing the site's moderation problems. However, I haven't been on the site for a while and so I couldn't tell you whether they are actually having a meaningful impact or just making more empty promises.
> "In fairness: within the last year or two they finally seem to have hired some staff members who finally get it and are taking steps towards actually fixing the site's moderation problems."
That is such a time frame to choose; right in the middle of it, 1 year 6 months ago, the Monica incident happened[1]. Do you mean before that or after that?
In summary, StackOverflow said they were discussing a code of conduct that would mandate volunteer moderators use someone's preferred pronouns. Monica, a widely respected moderator, asked if she could continue using gender-neutral language under the proposed code of conduct. They kicked her out alledging (incorrectly) that this was a statement of intent to break the rules they hadn't brought in yet. Then 50+ other moderators stood down in protest[2]. Then the company doubled down on their decision and their following silences. This unravelled into a lot of people voicing their discontent with the way the StackExchange company interacts with the volunteer mods and the community, and builds on the back of the ~2019 one-sided changes to try and make the community more welcoming to new users by being harder on the people who are already the community, and how badly that went down, and company employee leaks saying the company is not engaging with the community, and an apparent increase in pushing for money to return to investors rather than any other mission.
Right about the same time, they retrospectively relicensed all questions, answers and comments ever submitted, possibly illegally, and then refused for a long time to comment on it.[3]
Yeah, I’m referring to after all of that. 2020 felt so much longer than a year, so my time interval was way off.
I was referencing stuff like the closure changes [1], review queue redesign [2], and the updates to the “ask” page [3]. Again, I haven’t been on SO much lately so I don’t now how well that’s been working out or how receptive they’ve been to Meta feedback, but it’s reassuring to see they’re finally focusing on parts of the site that have needed it desperately for so many years. Additionally, they seem to be doing better about listening to Meta (at least compared to the “0.015%” reign of terror).
>It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous.
I have no opinion on New York and its implementation of the theory but I think it's indeed very clear that the theory applies to community management.
I manage an instant messaging community of about 10000 stem professionals and you can see negative community feedback loops develop or die down in real time depending on how you act on them. It's evident new members take in the vibe when they arrive and act to reinforce good or bad trends. If you let people make crass jokes, soon they're posting rude comments then insulting each others. If you let people post memes about technical topics, soon it's random tiktok videos, then it's porn. If you let a regular member go off on a newbie who asks a bad question, the next thing you know people are bullying newcomers left and right.
All I wanted was to build a nice virtual gathering spot and meet cool people but now I have to play fascist because the feedback effect is so strong.
While the treshold for downvoting has increased since 2009, the threshold hasn't increased to the same level that the number of active users (and therefore votes) have, so I would guess proportionally way more of the community has access to downvotes today than in 2009.
Also, I think in those days you did see vote numbers, but you didn't see the big obvious greying out of downvoted comments that exists today.
The glaring issue in this article (which I couldn't bring myself to finish) is that he equates downvoting to "evil or incorrect post(s)". Which would be true in an ideal world, but the reality becomes downvotes are equivalent to "I disagree with you".
If plentiful downvoting is allowed, discourse becomes a popularity contest. Fortunately most of the experienced users here seem to understand this and reserve their downvotes for appropriate situations.
I moderate a reddit community with ~200k subscribers, and I really wish I could disable downvoting. Automod takes care of most posts that violate our community rules, and I usually catch the ones that slip past within an hour or so.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, quality posts are almost always downvoted immediately. (I assume it's by self-promoters hoping that it will cause their content to rise in the rankings.)
Hiding posts scores has helped with bandwagoning, but I wish the two options were "upvote" and "report to mods."
A) It would be nice if the mods had a way to flag the post to make it require additional work to see on most / default clients.
B) If multiple mods sign off on a given post being a poor match for constructive discourse that is when most clients wouldn't even display the existence without a special viewing mode or preference. (This assumes an append / write-only forum.)
C) For all USERS, it would be nice if a special type of reply allowed for a post to be a "contrasting viewpoint", which might get displayed at the same node-level as the post being replied to, as part of a package of tightly related views on a topic.
I tend to downvote at the nexus of stuff I disagree with + expressed in an unproductive, rude, spammy, abusive, or flip manner. It's certainly true that when a flippant post is something I agree with I'm more likely to elide on by it. I assume most people do the same thing.
Downvoting can also have a snowball effect. If someone disagrees with you, especially in a contested topic where it's opinion or unclear who is correct, downvotes signal other people to also downvote. You can see the effect on Reddit.
Comments that hit -1 can still recover. Comments rarely recover after -3 or so. The only counter is for the commenter to edit and call out readers for frivolous downvoting.
I have a comment on reddit that was both downvoted to nearly -100 and was given gold. I was given the award because the actual information I gave was correct. Which someone mentioned in a reply. It was downvoted because no one liked the answer.
Well, you have my respect. Standing on a thing you know to be correct that gets that much open dislike is not an easy thing to do. Most people likely would have deleted the correct but hated answer long before it accumulated that many downvotes.
The only posts I delete are when the site goes weird and it double or triple posts.
I never delete posts simply because they are unpopular. In my personal view, that's a coward's move. It tells me that the user doesn't really have any actual conviction, doesn't really believe in what they're saying. If being popular is more important to that person than being correct, then I find their opinion worthless. Because apparently it can be dictated by popular opinion. And I mean actually correct, not just "winning the argument".
I also dislike people who double reply or who use the edit feature to essentially pull an "and another thing". Living out the l'esprit d'escalier fantasy essentially.
Also people who proclaim they won't be responding or tell others not to respond. It's a poor rhetorical tactic to silence opposition because you don't have a good response.
Some people are more vulnerable than others or have reasons other than the downvotes per se for a deletion. For example, r/homeless seems to see a lot of deletions due to the extreme vulnerability of the population.
Still, kudos for standing by an unpopular but correct statement in that instance. And kudos to the person who gave you gold for it.
There is definitely a phenomenon where truthful/factual but "inconvenient" comments are much more vigorously downvoted than false, inaccurate or incorrect ones.
> The only counter is for the commenter to edit and call out readers for frivolous downvoting.
That usually earns a downvote from me. People commenting on downvotes is boring and usually shows a lack of insight, for example obviously making zero effort to understand why their comment is poorly received, or blaming a conspiracy, or blaming groupthink. I have occasionally answered “why the downvotes” questions, but it usually feels like a waste of my time to do so.
pg once said that since upvotes are used to agree, using downvotes to disagree isn't bad. I am often downvoted even when making civil comments that people disagree with and I'm fine with it. That's how this forum operates. So be it.
I'd love to create a new voting system that looks like an orange sliced in half. The top 4 options are positives, the bottom 4 negatives. Everyone gets 2 votes per post. Two of the options are 'I agree' and the other is 'I disagree with this post'
Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good system. Though downvotes seem to work pretty well as-is for HN, I rarely see dead comments that were killed by downvotes rather than anti-spam features.
If we take HN as reddit 2.0, what would be HN 2.0 I wonder? If I were the one to make it I'd create a system to promote the comments of people with professional expertise on the subject being discussed. HN has mostly solved the politeness and flamewar issues but IMO one its major flaws is that people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about.
I personally notice this most frequently on the topic of human nutrition. Most days I don't bother to read the comments on ANY nutrition article because they're too depressingly wrong.
I think if people want the next level of quality on technical discussion, there needs to be a gatekeeping mechanism which is concerned with technical competency.
I would also expect such a place to have a magnitude or two fewer people.
I've tried that in my own community but it's a real struggle because in my experience newbies drive the conversation much more than pros so in my case gatekeeping was creating a silent community of highly skilled lurkers.
With no gatekeeping, there's lots of activity and pros feel like participating once in a while with deep discussions sparked from seemingly simple questions, but on the other hand a lot of pros feel alienated and leave if the average level of competency is too low.
I've been toying with the idea of pro:newbie ratios but haven't implemented anything yet.
An approach I think is good is for pros to help visitors solve problems, using messages of interest to other pros who can also participate and it can really brainstorm in unforseen ways.
Pros learn by watching other people's problems get addressed, and contribute when it falls under their domain expertise. They interact in a positive way to form the personality of the messageboard. Which should be a reference point for an actual newbie who wants to participate long-term, but it should be expected that most visitors will not return after their problem is solved. The message board becomes a curated/community archive for solutions.
Where the subject matter and the discussion are contained within the board.
That's for a problem-solving message board.
Now HN is a tech news aggregator with comments which make it a board of a different kind, with way more diverse comments to deal with than any one news site.
And very many news sites individually are challenged to adjust to the recognized lower quality of comments the last few years by trying experimental approaches or no longer accepting comments at all.
The news is always elsewhere, only the comments are here and that makes it debatable.
Maybe there's such a thing as a problem-creating message board?
Habr.com makes both up and downvotes costly, and they have an evolved system checks and balances. The best I´ve seen. They can even fight off Kremlin bots successfully, this is major feat in their region/language of choice.
It's easier to write a bad comment than a good one, so I don't think that downvoting bad comments should be more difficult than it is now. HN software already has little nudges that make it easier to gain karma than to lose it:
- You can earn points but never lose them by submitting URLs for discussion.
- You can't lose more than 4 points per post, no matter how many times it is downvoted. There is no upper limit to points gained from a single upvoted comment.
- There is only a 24 hour time window in which comments can be downvoted, but they can still be upvoted even months later.
The expertise problem is harder. Sometimes I see a post that has more misconceptions than sentences, but is grammatically correct and written in a confident tone. Only people who actually understand the subject matter will spot the problems quickly. It's tedious to write introductory level corrections for commonly repeated mistakes. For some of them I have considered keeping a mini-FAQ locally and pasting standard responses to standard misconceptions, but HN also discourages repeating identical posts.
If I downvote a misinformed post the original poster won't know where they went wrong, and people who see a grayed post won't necessarily understand what's wrong with it either. The saving grace of the downvote is that it affects comment sorting order, so at least misconception-heavy posts that are downvoted won't dominate the upper reaches of the discussion page.
What’s the criteria for a “bad comment”? And how do you objectively evaluate it?
I lurk and post once in a while. What I’ve noticed is that rarely is something downvoted for being factually incorrect (relatively speaking). You just have to offer a perspective that doesn’t conform with the hive mind and the downvoting essentially amounts to censorship of opinions.
When I see heated back-and-forth discussion chains I'll often find myself downvoting several comments and upvoting none of them, because sarcastic quippy retorts to bad comments are also bad comments.
I'll also downvote comments for factual inaccuracy, particularly if I don't have the time to patiently correct them. This only partially mitigates the damage and doesn't really help the original author to learn. When someone writes a comment with just a single big mistake, and they don't seem to have a history of willfully repeating it, that's when I am most likely to write a lengthy reply with explanation and citations.
I'd appreciate some examples. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but in my experience downvoted comments tend to have something beyond a counterpoint or difference of opinion; their content is usually irrelevant or unnecessarily snarky or somehow hostile.
I don't really have the time to go digging around for examples, but it's common enough that one of the site rules is to not complain about downvotes because it frequently happens for no reason.
The comment author may think there was no reason but almost every time I see a comment complaining about being downvoted, I see a reason among those I listed above.
I once made a post that criticized the Anglocentric perspective of an article. — it was initially upvoted, but then became downvoted when UTC+2 went to sleep, and then upvoted again when UTC+2 woke up. — one can take a particular guess as to why.
> "If I downvote a misinformed post the original poster won't know where they went wrong, and people who see a grayed post won't necessarily understand what's wrong with it either."
that's ok, the onus is on the downvoted poster to figure it out for themselves. usually that requires seeing a pattern over the course of a few downvoted posts rather than pinpointing it exactly from a given post.
most downvoted posts break one or more hn rules, but a few are downvoted ideologically, so a little resilience is required. strictly unpopular opinions can often be more tactfully rephrased and at least be accepted for discussion, if not agreement. this is a pretty good life skill to develop generally anyways.
Not everything on HN is user-facing. For example, one comment can only sink to -4 points, but further downvotes on that comment still contribute to the user being muted. I've experienced that myself.
I think downvoting is an anti-pattern because it's a negative interaction, and I think negative interactions shouldn't be encouraged if we value high quality discourse.
If downvoting bad comments (for any definition of bad) was harder or even outright impossible you'd still have an alternative: upvote an other, better comment to have it shadow what you consider a less valuable contribution. And that's a positive interaction.
Whenever I find a comment that I think is on-topic and somewhat constructive, but I still fundamentally disagree with the take, I generally go hunting for a comment that embraces my point of view (or write one myself) and upvote that.
I very rarely downvote comments on this site, and generally only do it for comments that I consider to be completely off topic, flamebait or stupid "meme" references. That being said I do comment quite a bit and I admit that I'm always a bit frustrated when I take the time to write what I consider to be a constructive (if sometimes controversial) comment and I get downvoted reddit-style. It feels disrespectful, almost. I probably care too much about that stuff, I acknowledge that.
The main problem with FB IMO is the community, not the moderation tools. I highly doubt that adding downvotes to FB would vastly improve the average quality of the contributions, actually it may well make it worse.
While not a perfect solution, perhaps you could tag various conversations by subject and keeping track of which topics a user tends to discuss. If a user mostly talks about a few subjects, have their comments in conversations with those tags be prioritized by the ranking algorithm and deprioritized outside of it. Obviously just because you spend a lot of time talking about something doesn't mean you actually know much about it, but it's a start. Perhaps you could improve further by keeping track of users' karma within a topic (presumably those speaking from ignorance will be less upvoted), but this runs the risk of promoting views that are popular instead of informed.
"Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good system."
Say, I like the idea. No doubt people have discussed this to death elsewhere. You can definitely see downvotes used as simple disagreement or for punishing unpopular speech (rather than being wrong, let's say). That's a bummer but is a side effect of modern times.
Let's say that a issuing a downvote resulted in a 15 minute break from posting or voting. You gotta want to do it.
" people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about."
I'm afraid that's baked deeply into the DNA of computer programmers.
HN comments can't be killed by downvotes and the karma loss on the commenter is capped at -4. As forums-with-downvoting go, HN's version is fairly benign.
I think downvoting should cost something. Maybe not a whole point, but something.
If shutting someone else up (and let's not mince words here... that is exactly what you are doing) isn't worth even a token cost to you, maybe you should reconsider whether shutting them up is truly justified in the first place.
> The advantage of this system is that nobody gets downvoted, but at a steep cost: we’ve lost half the potential information.
A Mr. Claude Shannon would like a word. I joke, but when you have controls on voting rings and co-ordination, downvotes are necessarily noisier. An upvote is effectively neutral engagement with the content, where a downvote actively reduces engagement. From the perspective of wanting to mine the constructive engagement out of the collective minds of the audience, downvotes are about as meaningful and information dense as a fire alarm.
I really like downvoting where you lose one of your past upvotes in order to downvote. It's a nice little filter that people who care about how many upvotes they have won't use, and puts an end to some amount of frivolous downvoting.
In a meta way, you kind of have to use a little bit of your own point capital to downvote something, so if you're highly upvoted by the community then calling BS on something is easier for you and the risk taking for doing so makes more sense, versus someone who just signed up.
I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?
I am not sure adding a cost to downvotes would promote diversity so much. It is easy to game the system and post popular opinions to farm upvotes. If you do what you say, you give more power to the people already playing the reputation game.
You also let garbage fester because nobody will use points to downvote a stupid, agressive one-liner.
My experience is that:
- voting on HN works well for its intended purpose, which is surfacing the interesting conversations
- dead comments really deserve to die (I can’t remember a counter-example)
- greyed out comments tend to be right but unpopular, or right but rude, or wrong, or just stupid. Of these, the problematic cases are “right but unpopular”, which is not that frequent. And when it happens that’s fine, they are still readable.
> I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?
I assume it promotes engaging in the comments. It’s true that popularity contests should not be encouraged too much, but at the same time I can see how having a number that can go down would make some people think twice before knee-jerk posting or casual trolling.
I think one obvious problem with downvoting where downvotes automatically hide content is that it creates echo chambers. The downvote button is definitely a 'disagree' button here and I think it's not really conducive to great discussions.
Then again, this isn't really a forum - it's transitory comments about the news of the day. Perhaps the argument is that there shouldn't be substantive discussion here in the first place. You're clearly meant to respond to the article more than the individual comment - the tree style commenting system and automatically hidden nature of comments down the chain both speak to that.
I’m not sure I agree. I tend to say things that are somewhat controversial on HN, and if I said them in San Francisco I’d be liable to be tarred and feathered, being a Libertarian from Kansas, but I try to be diplomatic and haven’t yet had a comment that’s gotten hidden. I think people are fairly charitable as long as you’re presenting a cogent argument.
I always show dead comments and honestly, people aren’t missing out on much. To get your comment dead in my experience you have to either be extremely inflammatory or just spout absolute nonsense.
I think HN does it better than reddit, where the comments are hidden quickly once negative, but I've seen a lot of comments edited based on downvotes as people wonder what, exactly, other users are disagreeing with. Doesn't exactly contribute other than to say 'your opinion is wrong.'
I initially loved the idea of voting posts up and down. Thanks to seeing how it actually works on SO and here, well, I am not much of a fan anymore.
At the very least, if I ever implemented it myself, I'd require that people explain why they are voting up, or voting down, before they could vote. And I'd not limit users from being able to vote until they magically get to the right amount of "karma".
Without requiring an explanation, votes are more akin to boos and cheers than anything useful. Not a very good way to encourage a diverse culture.
> Not a very good way to encourage a diverse culture
I'd guess that's the point - giving power over visibility to users who've proved themselves in line with the forum zeitgeist helps maintain a site's culture as-is and prevent it "diversifying" into Smaller Facebook #50691.
Yeah, I really wish that HN required you to comment in order to downvote. Or even just required that a comment had replies before it could be downvoted; I don't care so much that every single person justifies their downvote as that the person getting downvoted gets an explanation.
I like that a comment requires at least one comment before a downvote. Maybe not a comment for each downvote, since that might encourage dogpiling. Imagine a new user makes a social faux pas and suddenly receives ~4 relatively negative comments.
I initially really liked this idea. I think the only problem is that it could lead to requiring more moderation. It's very hard to enforce quality. Right now I'm imagining a bandwagon chain of "You suck!" or other low quality comments just for the price of downvoting. I guess you could impose a minimum character requirement. At any rate, the idea of it being visible only to the user being downvoted is somewhat novel as well.
Having to work harder at moderation seems acceptable to me. And it'd be fairly simple to implement a "You can't just say 'you suck' when downvoting. If you do, you lose your downvoting privileges permanently." policy.
Removing content from a discussion IS moderation. That's why the idea is tying a 'reason for moderation' (the reply, or any reply existing at all at least) to the moderation action.
Such a moderation comment might be anything, but the more egregious examples:
Illegal content (of some sort); A threat upon persons or property (E.G.); Hate Speech; other things that a reasonable person would agree do not belong with a discussion; or just being Wildly off-topic.
That only incentivizes people who have all the time in the world to disagree on the internet. Most users with expertise just don't have that kind of mental-bandwidth to spare. Just as it is not worth your time to get into a verbal argument with flat-earthers, its not worth your time to comment on most posts that you disagree with.
I think this could backfire. Toxic/trolling comments do not need to be dignified with a response, and requiring one may increase the incentive to write inflammatory posts (assuming that at least some people do this—consciously or not—to instigate reactions).
For well-intentioned posts that are factually incorrect, it seems that there are usually replies that explain the reason for the downvote. When a comment is wrongfully banished to the grey nothingness, oftentimes others step up and defend it. The community immune system functions well as is.
Also, I adore the fade-to-grey side effect of the downvotes. It’s like spritzing a cat with water for scrounging on the counters—an ultimately harmless but super effective reprimand.
Posts like that should be flagged for moderation, not voted on. A community site should have guidelines that everyone can reference, and if something is in violation, there should be a way to flag that post.
Comment and explain your downvote, you'll likely be downvoted for doing so, or be accused of trying to be a mod, or waste your time explaining yourself to someone who wasn't even interested enough to post a substantial comment in the first place. The main reason I downvote is "low quality comment" which is subjective and I don't want to enter into a debate about arguing that it is against the author arguing that it isn't; it's a voting system, I vote, you vote, we all vote, and a consensus comes from that. I don't want it to be "my judgement is better than everyone elses", I want it to be my vote among many.
(Or rather, I do want it to be "my judgement is better than everyone elses, and I want to be able to delete other people's comments", and I recognise that's bad, and that a vote system limits the maximum damage I can do to one vote per comment).
To expand on my thoughts a bit, my goal with voting would be to get people to actually engage with each other. That's the whole point of a community site. Adding "points" is just a way to encourage more engagement.
With that in mind, I'd likely just not have downvotes period. If something is low quality enough to deserve a downvote, then it should be in violation of my community standards. Downvotes are designed to stop engagement. That's not the kind of thing I'd want unless it's something bad.
Then maybe do something a little different with upvotes. Say after you upvote with a comment a certain number of times, you get access to a quick upvote option. Or canned upvote comments.
And maybe general comments would count as an upvote unless you uncheck the box. That way we could keep generic upvote comments like "well thought out argument" or "he used good references" in their own little section without stifling good interactions.
The value of downvoting, or how Stackexchange gets it wrong about HN's voting system.
It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead without updating their understanding.
If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise to the top, but conversation keeps them there. Why downvote a story that isn't interesting? Just don't comment and it will go away soon. Flagging is for problematic stories.
What I love about HN is that, unlike Reddit and SE, is that discussion is the major feature. The moderation system is tailored around facilitating that. Contrast that to other sites, reputation is the game, and content revolves around the people playing that game.
12 years later, SE is still getting it wrong. Not just in their understanding of HN's downvotes, not just in their understanding of HN's purpose, but they're still a reputation game and the quality of the site suffers for it.
Do title submissions also start at -4? I noticed that there is often almost a hard line where article submission gets much more visibility if it goes over 4 points.
Reddit shows up/down totals on users, comments, and stories. It's really in your face. HN has a subtle little arrow or two, and you only see the sum of up/down on your own comments. We know when things have been downvoted, but it's much harder to tell if something has been upvoted. And when things do get downvoted, they're grayed out -- it takes more effort to read downvoted comments (click the date), so if you're skimming you'll just skip unpopular comments until it gets relevant again. So display-wise, I like the cleaner HN over the noisier and visibly gamified Reddit.
Also, not insignificantly, HN is a side project, not a startup. It can succeed at its goals and stay small, not worrying about "capturing the market" or whatever. Staying small means dang can generally be expected to read most of the comments on the site.
And by "small", I mean that there's rarely much action on the page-3 stories. Threads that get paginated are rarely worth wading into. If a million people started using HN, then it would quickly become so unusable that they'd all quit within a week. Reddit "solves" this "problem" by making subreddits, and now it's a poison-breathing hydra.
If you follow at all which stories are rejected flagging is used as downvoting on a daily basis unless your definition of 'problematic' is extremely broad.
The notion that HN is well-moderated is bizarre. HN is exceptionally hostile to those who hold beliefs contrary to HN-acceptable norms.
If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
The community here used to be absolutely amazing. 10-15 years ago the discussions here were actionable, and I was able to make valuable professional connections in the the comments.
These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.
And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this. Uncomfortable truths can’t be posted from IPs/cookies/users that you want to preserve. Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.
> These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.
The decline of open-mindedness is what I've noticed the most. The assumption of good intention on the part of someone with an opposing view. The willingness to at least entertain a thought or argument, even if you ultimately don't accept it. Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
There are definitely points of view here, no matter how well articulated, that will be buried in low-contrast purgatory very quickly. And I'm not just talking about "white supremacy" type stuff.
> The willingness to at least entertain a thought or argument, even if you ultimately don't accept it. Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
Yes, but at least unpleasant discussions usually just stop at that, unlike Reddit or even worse Twitter where you get a shitstorm of insults.
I think that decline of willingness happened in society at large. It's simply now reaching hackernews. There is very little that can be done to fix this at the level of HN. It will probably require a shift in broader society.
> Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
This is good, do this. The worst thing in threads IMO is endless subthreads attached to low-effort troll comments. Just downvote and move on. If the comment contains a factual misstatement, maybe post a quick note saying why it is incorrect, with a reference.
This is the crux of the matter, how do you know a comment is a troll, rather than an honestly held and expressed contraversial view? parent's point is that you can't in general. So it's up to defaults: default to assuming bad faith and you will be rewarded with swift oppression of trolls but also honest mavericks whose contraversy help stir things up and invigorate discussions, default to assuming good faith and you tolerate both with mixed results. There is no easy answer.
Recommended read on this is Paul Graham's "What you can't say"[0], a timeless piece on how the bathwater of offensive and unpopular opinions always contain the baby of non-conformist truth, and you don't know in advance which is which, so you need to tolerate the first lest it is actually the second in disguise.
There are many commenters who post abusively, but in my experience it is not the case that they're posting in bad faith. I think that is actually rather rare. Users are far too quick to assume this about each other.
If you express some completely heinous ideas in polite, mostly grammatical writing then normally you will not be banned. This is based on my experience of over a decade of various accounts and occasional banning on "Hacker" News.
> If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
>
> The community here used to be absolutely amazing. 10-15 years ago the discussions here were actionable, and I was able to make valuable professional connections in the the comments.
>
> These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.
>
> And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this. Uncomfortable truths can’t be posted from IPs/cookies/users that you want to preserve. Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.
This entire comment is one of the most closed-minded, "lower value" comments I've seen on HN recently.
Complaining about how comments aren't open-minded, and also that "hate speech" and "bigoted shit" is the norm is something of a contradiction. If one is open-minded, he should be tolerant even of "hate speech." He should also be open to the ideas that hate speech is both very real or not real at all. Censoriousness is inextricably closed-minded.
I can't speak to PG portfolio criticism, but I think dang does yeoman's work in moderation. Only once have I seen a decision that I thought was harsh, and I think everyone is entitled to a bad day every now and then.
If you walked into my house and started berating and insulting me, I'd probably have a dim view of you, too.
Also, how are you posting from a banned account? That seems to go against the nature of being banned.
Hate speech is a priori not very reasonable so getting rid of it is not a matter a censorship but of getting rid of what stand in the way of thoughtful discussions.
Also I don't think "in my house" metaphor has had much success. Which seems fair : Hacker News is not PG's house, although it is his baby, he handed moderation power over to the users, the algorithm and the moderators. Which is why we like it and trust it and use it. You can't just compare anything to one on one relationships, it does not work like that.
As someone that just stopped lurking, it's clear downvoting is used primarily as a "disagree" button. Case in point, this comment I'm replying to. I believe they're making a meaningful contribution to this discussion. Yet the downvotes have already commenced.
Just remember that that will only give the part of the story which is linked to that one username.
Commenters who post grand narratives about why they were banned typically have a long string of past banned accounts. The giveaway is that they never link to them. That would let readers make up their own minds about why they'd gotten banned, and how accurate their story really is.
The person you're replying to is shadowbanned, and their post actually got vouched for, but still (I think) starts off at a deficit.
Looking at your comment history, it looks like you enjoy wading into political conversations with strongly-held opinions. Food for thought, I'd have downvoted some of your comments that I agree with because they bring down the quality of the conversation.
No the problem is that he makes accusations that are not backed up by any data and this is contrary to the guidelines.
I consider myself more of a leftist than your typical hn user and when I have been abnormally downvoted I never felt it was because of my opinion but rather because I was too hot headed or too ignorant about what I was talking about.
So I am very concerned by those claims but without any data about presumed tolerance to bigotry stuff, they are of no value too anyone. Anybody could feel sore and angry about how some social online gathering is not as X as he wish he was. Heck, that's my life on Reddit.
Gimme data, gimme sources, I'll vote you up.
Given your claims of "white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed [...] extremely bigoted shit" being both completely inconsistent with my experience, and the specific things that you are claiming are present, it seems far more likely that you've been banned for the kinds of social authoritarianism (trying to control the speech and thoughts of others) that is particularly popular among a certain political faction lately than those things actually being prevalent and accepted.
I'm not sure about the companies but pg's stuff regularly gets criticized on here (even harshly sometimes, I think). Just a few days ago, there was one such story (highly upvoted) on the front page in response to one of pg's essays.
>point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
To be fair, much of the overtly racist and bigoted content I've seen lately has gotten voted down and flagged, and I've seen Dan step in and stand against it on a few occasions. I don't know if this is the result of a shift in my perceptions or in the community, but to me it seems like things were far worse a few years ago, and now at least a few of the notorious bad accounts have been banned. It's certainly not a paradise, God knows any time race, religion or gender comes up this place often winds up validating its execrable reputation, but I do think the mods are trying. It's not their fault the tech community is being taken over by incels and neo-reactionary fascists.
You're going to get downvoted and flagged to hell, but I mostly agree with your comment - there was a precipitous quality drop that came with the heavy moderation that people now think of as the identifying characteristic of HN. That being said, I think that after a few egregious missteps (such as the test ban on "politics"), the heavy moderation has been open and kind. I also suspect that there has been some mod meddling to keep my lefty-ass comments visible more than once.
I would like to point out that this is a silicon valley/SF tech forum; considering the demo, to mod out all of the vile sexist/race-realist objectivist bleating would be crushing. Just argue back. The left-liberal addiction to manager-calling is ruining their ability to defend their positions, heavily moderated "safe spaces" really become places where people can repeat their beliefs by rote, free from challenges. The reason libertarians are wrong is because their philosophy is intellectually bankrupt, not because it's upsetting. Practice in putting them down refines your own beliefs.
This is a right/authoritarian heavily moderated “safe space” where people who hold specific right-wing beliefs can repeat those beliefs by rote, free from challenges. You’ll struggle to find highly rated comments that support anti-trust initiatives or closer regulation of the tech industry. You won’t find a lot of highly rated comments that contain meaningful critique of any YC company, or many advocating higher taxes on companies or the rich.
Just by making my comments, I had people accusing me of “social authoritarianism”. Because my complaint that my viewpoint is not always welcomed was, in their mind, proof that I was trying to “forbid” them from thoughts.
I’d say more, but I’m banned from posting with any frequency on this account. Again... that is because this is a heavily moderated safe space.
That said, I’d argue that there’s no value in putting together a strong argument here anymore.
People are rewarded for writing a few pointless sentences that sound smart and agree with the common view. They are not rewarded for intelligent challenge. Voting is used to reward agreement with a viewpoint, and to punish disagreement.
> If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies
I've done that. Not been banned.
> point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite
Well, I mean, aside from being false, that’s also going to often be a specific labelling of something here as “white supremacist” or “hate speech”; flagging exists pretty specifically to deal with content where that description actually applies without sidetracking conversations with incendiary debate about whether it does. So, yeah, comments doing that will be flagged and moderated and, if thet persist, will likely get you banned.
> And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this.
If it was banned, you couldn’t post from it. So, since you obviously can, I assume you are misrepresenting the facts when you call it a banned account.
All their comments start dead. People call it shadow banning or hell banning. And some other accounts have [banned] after the name but keep commenting.
Comments by banned accounts are killed by software, but other users can vouch for them to unkill them (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). That's what happened in both of those cases.
> If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
I don't think this is true, or I just don't see any evidence it. Take a look a this HN yesterday thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26782031. Neither PG nor his YC companies are immune to criticism.
I have come across flagged stories that looked like they would form the basis of an interesting conversation, noticed a string of problematic comments on the story, and agreed with the story being flagged.
Sometimes the problem isn't with the story or disagreeable opinions. Rather, it is with the tone of responses.
The moderation is tailored to facilitate very specific types of discussion, and for specifically allowable opinions to be expressed.
My posting history started with me operating in very good faith, getting [dead] for politely expressing opinions that weren’t acceptable, and now I just occasionally post pre-dead posts here, knowing that few will even see them.
It’s my small way of reminding users who actually look at everything that this place is an extremely authoritarian place that is meant to only showcase certain things; and it is purposefully unwelcoming to others.
I always assumed SE got voting right because why else are they the top dog? I never felt any need for them to exist because programming forums (or usenet groups earlier) exised since forever and once Google give us usable search(sorry, Altavista) I could find an answer for basically any question.
I think SE has terrible voting. Voting fundamentally doesn't work for what they're trying to do, because if you want wiki-style best-of answers to specific questions you cannot use a simple counting algorithm.
For one, answers change over time. The best answer five years ago will have accumulated the most votes. The most current and correct answer will never be able to catch up with that.
Two, there's a lot of nitpicking and irrelevant point scoring. Making answers a competition instead of a collaboration brings out the worst in some people.
Three, there's an assumption that voters know what the best answer is. Because they often don't - which is why they're looking for answers - the answers with the most upvotes are the ones that look plausible. They're not necessarily definitive, or ideal.
Four - for code - the code sometimes has obvious bugs or typos. Upvotes are supposed to fix this, but clearly they don't.
Five - the mod problem, where valid questions are closed and duplicates aren't really duplicates.
I think SE would work better as a collaborative semi-wiki, or something else in that ballpark. I don't think the karma scoring does a good job - except in the very basic sense that you get some relevant answers in one place, and it's still up to you to decide which one (if any) solves the problem.
They introduced it to gamify the whole charade without any deeper thought. At the beginning they had a lot of people addicted to answering questions and displaying their points on blogs which to me always looked ridiculous.
They've got really good SEO game, and answers to most of my newbie questions when I'm learning a new language. But I tried contributing to the site for a little while... nope, it's wickedly political for all the wrong reasons and I quit before long.
It's gross how in the Reddit redesign comment threads longer than a couple levels deep are actually hidden, even if there's only a single thread on the post. Apparently deep discussion is something they now want to discourage.
It's worth noting that 2009 was a eon ago in internet time. Almost nothing from that era is applicable to social media behavior in 2021. Especially Hacker News, which IMO was much more elitist/hostile at that time and fortunately has improved in that aspect over the years.
Seemed friendly enough in 2010. There was a lot less news cycle discussion and more tech (but less product) discussion, so that might have been alienating. Also a lot more YC specific stuff, so maybe that felt elitist.
I'm a huge fan of no downvote button, so much so in fact that I don't think users of any karma level should be able to do it.
Why concentrate this power into the hands of a privileged few? It's a representative system where we vote certain users into high karma, but they needn't return any favors and can subsequently downvote things that are otherwise suitable for the platform. Privilege can, and will, be abused in full.
I feel like downvoting on HN is a way of saying “No. We don’t behave like that here”. It’s one of our community’s tools for preserving, teaching and enforcing our values with newcomers. Yes, it’s open to abuse. But it fills an important social function. And from that perspective, of course it’s limited to people who’ve been involved in the community awhile.
Don’t use downvotes to signal disagreement. It goes against the implicit and explicit guidelines of HN. And it drags HN closer to reddit.
Even if you see other people using downvotes for disagreement, that doesn’t make it ok for you to do the same.
Downvotes are for when people violate the norms and values of our community without thoughtfulness or self awareness.
The difference is subtle sometimes, but your comment is exactly the kind of thing I downvote. Low effort, dismissal / rejection of the community’s norms without nuance or justification beyond “well other people do it too so that makes it ok”.
Actually, I think you completely misunderstood. I agree with you 110 percent that downvotes shouldn't be used to signal disagreement; I disagreed with you because that is, in fact, exactly how it is used most of the time. My downvote of you was ironic, illustrative of just how stupid down votes are. I was making a point. I think HN should remove down votes entirely, or make them costly, or required a tagged explanation.
I use downvotes to signal disagreement when, from my perspective, someone is giving bad advice, not accurately representing the truth, speculating in an unproductive way, distracting from the discussion with completely unfounded claims, etc.
I personally think of "disagreement" as a continuum, where one end is pretty close to my own view, and the other is absolutely abhorrent or incoherent. Certainly part of that continuum warrants downvotes. "Don't use downvotes to signal disagreement," is meaningless in that context.
More concretely, the HN guidelines say nothing about why to downvote. They only say, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
> I use downvotes to signal disagreement when, from my perspective, someone is giving bad advice, not accurately representing the truth, speculating in an unproductive way, distracting from the discussion with completely unfounded claims, etc.
This seems to be a really wide net for downvotes, and almost certainly won't match other people's use cases for downvoting. I don't think downvoting should be open to interpretation like this, hence why I think it should be removed. The alternative? Just don't upvote, or flag if something is truly inappropriate.
> I personally think of "disagreement" as a continuum, where one end is pretty close to my own view, and the other is absolutely abhorrent or incoherent.
Yeah, I like this perspective but I think there's two axes we can separate a little. One axis is disagreement. (I agree with you <-> I disagree with you). the other axis is effort / coherence. (I'm going to invest significant effort to clearly articulate my point of view <-> I'm going to make a flippant off-handed comment).
Disagreement alone isn't the problem - I've had some lovely conversations on HN with people I disagree with. Eg, a couple weeks ago I had this interesting exchange[1] talking about RMS on the FSF board. But the conversation worked because everyone was careful and articulate. When someone says something I disagree with, but they say it in a thoughtful, well articulated way, I learn something new.
There's probably more factors at play, but as a rule of thumb I suppose downvotes are in the low effort + strong disagree quadrant. In that zone I feel like there's no implied intent to even talk it through. And absent conversation, why are we even here?
I like those axes. I also enjoy conversations with someone where I disagree, and I wouldn't downvote purely based on disagreement, but generally due to some other factor.
Perhaps I'm only acknowledging that I'm less likely to downvote someone that I agree with? For example, if someone speculates wildly but it's consistent with my own experience, I'm not likely to downvote. If someone speculates wildly and it's inconsistent with my experience, I'm far more likely to downvote.
Probably where we disagree is whether it's OK to downvote a comment that someone put effort into. I've seen someone ask a question about a particular technology, and someone who clearly has very little experience with that technology posts a long screed where they're ~~talking out their ass~~ sharing their opinion in a way that sounds authoritative. Or maybe they're repeating business-level talking points instead of getting down to technical brass tacks.
I hope that gives an idea what I mean. I don't want to see comments like that on HN, regardless of how much effort or how well-meaning the comment is.
> Don’t use downvotes to signal disagreement. It goes against the implicit and explicit guidelines of HN. And it drags HN closer to reddit.
Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN! There has certainly never been a guideline against it, and the case law is clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314.
I think the idea that things should be otherwise actually comes from Reddit (no?) which takes this to a triple back flip level of irony.
Flagging is for spam, at least that what I use it for. I reserve my downvotes for conversational indecency: bad faith arguments, personal attacks, not acknowledging/engaging the parent post's points.
I'm not sure why spam should be treated any differently than conversational indecency (personal attacks, bad faith arguing); in theory it could all fall under the bucket of "this doesn't belong here", right?
Personally, I flag for blatant rule violations such as comments that are filled with personal attacks or spam.
I will downvote comments that are simply low quality, like comments that merely say "^ This!". I don't usually downvote bad faith arguing because it's hard to prove when someone is arguing in bad faith versus just simply having bad arguments.
> when someone is arguing in bad faith versus just simply having bad arguments.
Sometimes the person just misinterprets the conversation, especially if not being a native english speaker, but the responses could get overly harsh and that's a pity because I'd like to see more international discussions here.
Those are mostly out of date. Maybe stop self-celebrating past victories, it's not very becoming. ;)
Flagging is where HN gets it wrong, IMO. So many slightly
controversial and important topics are being removed with this mechanism. We're left with all the vanilla stuff.
Flagging is necessary to keep the site on-topic in my opinion. People will happily upvote controversy that has little value or importance to this site.
It's funny you say this, because the topics on HN are actually quite broad. If flagging weren't a thing, all we'd be talking about is Trump this, guns that, free speech this, trans that, racism here, racism there. Now that would be quite boring.
I agree that flagging has value, but it is grossly misused to suppress discussions that are on topic but are outside of the overton window.
Generally speaking I think HN is wonderful, and if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship, I'll gladly make that trade, but I do wish people had thicker skin (that's a problem on all sides by the way).
Individual comments are rarely flagged for anything other than outright spam or harassment. I browse with "show dead" turned on.
I have seen entire heated topics killed but that kills both sides of the argument equally. What value is a 500-comment talk-over-each-other argument, fundamentally about politics even if on-topic, on this site? I doesn't seem like something we should waste time on.
Rarely does anyone ever comment to agree on something. And merely being contrarian is not valuable in of itself.
If a few things are over-moderated I might be mildly missing out. So what? Humans are fallible. There is no perfect system. You're not arguing that HN is so moderated that it's completely worthless. You're not even getting close to that.
So what do we do about a system that isn't perfect but is doing a pretty fine job?
I have recently found a whole lot of value in figuring out what everybody agrees about. A lot of the time that is right. And when it is wrong, it is good to know, and encourages (me at least) to really figure out why the fence is there before I remove it.
I agree with you, my opposition is actually regarding posts. I have been active on a number of posts over the last couple of years that were very much on topic but were on controversial issues, and they will get flagged to death after being on the front page for a few minutes, and at that point further conversation is dead and the post sinks into irrelevance.
> if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship,
The rules to stay on topic is not the same as censorship. Often I noticed people talk (write) past each other and get into misunderstandings; it happens to me I'll admit.
> controversy that has little value or importance to this site
What do you mean by "this site"? The participants in this forum are the site. I've had discussions flagged that I thought to be valuable. Why would you want to get rid of controversy anyway? Do you want to discuss only popular old hat things? Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.
I've seen purely technical discussions being removed from page 1 just because some people really wanted that stuff to go away, and had the power to make it happen.
I've expanded about what I think about this in the neighboring comments. I'd like to ask this though. When you feel that a thread is going off-topic, to the detriment of the forum, please post a comment pointing that out. Others might disagree with you, or they might see your point. What I find really problematic is when a discussion that I care about is flagged without any input. I perceive it as spiteful, because usually it's me having a controversial opinion, and I'm more likely to be spiteful in turn, though of course I try not to be. I don't mind people questioning the quality of my contribution. I actually welcome it, because I care. Just don't reject it off-hand.
> Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.
And yet part of that diversity is that ecosystem has different niches :).
You can discuss politics, sports and controversy anywhere else on the Internet. HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place.
> HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place.
That's where we differ. To me HN is valuable because of the people and the continued success in maintaining a good standard of discussion. To me HN is not what we discuss, but how, and with whom.
HN guidelines say that what's on topic is what a good hacker would find interesting, but who is to say what that is? The guidelines basicly say that what's on topic is anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Again, what I think is that the "good hacker" is us. We shouldn't nitpick topics. We should take care to have good discussions. We consider technology important and relevant, so we discuss it. Same for everything.
I think we don't differ all that much. I also find the people and quality of discourse the most valuable thing on HN. However, I also claim that these things are not orthogonal to the topics of discussion!
Some topics (like politics) naturally induce more impulsive, emotional reactions than others (like innards of Erlang's BEAM runtime). The more you allow the former to dominate the latter, the worse average discourse gets, and the faster good people leave - it's a feedback loop that quickly grinds a community down to the lowest common denominator.
That's why stable, quality communities either expel (like HN) or contain (like plenty of forums limiting politics to only the Offtopic board) such topics. And it's not like it's a new invention - a lot (possibly most) societies have a long-standing custom that says not to bring up politics and religions in typical conversations between strangers (or at dinner with extended family).
I sympathize. I used to actually choose technologies (up to a point) based on what kinds of discussions were to be had in their IRC channels.
I'd say that avoiding controversial topics is just something that happens when you struggle to maintain a good discussion. Sometimes you have to end a discussion because of how bad it is. But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.
When I see that a conversation is going south, I try to bring coolheadedness to it, or point out how it could be made better. I think that's the way to a good forum.
I spent a lot of time in my teenage years on IRC, talking about technology until late hours, so this resonates :).
I think I see what you're getting at, so let me reassure you a bit, and correct for any miscommunication I may have caused:
> But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.
HN doesn't strictly forbid controversial topics. The guidelines[0] outline what is and isn't considered on-topic, provide heuristics for good behavior and pleas to avoid certain bad patterns. They don't say, "these topics will be automatically removed", or "these topics will get you insta-banned". They're just guidelines, a description of what this place should strive for. They work as a Schelling point[1] for individual participants.
So what happens in practice is, when you post a clear-cut intellectually stimulating hacker topic, it'll get upvoted. If it's boring, it'll get ignored. If you post a completely garbage submission, it'll get flagged faster than you can refresh the site. If a topic is on a fence, the balance of upvotes, flags and vouches will lean one way or the other. It's an organic system, but the direction it's leaning is strongly shaped by the guidelines - the one thing everyone knows everyone is expected to know :).
It's also easy to observe that whether or not a given topic stays on the front page or gets quickly flagged out of it isn't just a function of the topic and the source - but also the context (and I think sometimes the timezone). For example, political news aren't very prominent on HN, except when something really big happens, and HN briefly turns into a 24h news station.
And on the controversy itself, the general principle is - it's not the topic being controversial itself that's the problem. The problem is if the discussion around it decays into low-quality bickering. For some topics this is almost a law of nature, so people flag them on sight. But others only get flagged down if and when they evolve into actual flame war.
Flagging is a problem sometimes. I feel like it's common for a comment to get flagged when someone strongly opposes it. It's really upsetting to see that. Especially since it feels like the flaggers are a small minority, but they're shutting down discussions for everyone.
HN definitely moves in the proper direction on this one. The ONLY purpose of down votes is to suppress conversation. If, contrarily, a user wished to provide a form of disagreement they would do so with a reply. Why? Because votes are a means of action to express an appeal to agreement/disagreement.
I remember pointing this out once on Reddit, before I deleted my account there, and it temporarily changed peoples' behavior resulting in more replies to disagreeable comments in either r/javascript or r/programming (I don't remember which). Most of the justifications that arose from down voting without a reply, supposedly a silent and anonymous form of disagreement, all summarized down to excuses about how writing anything takes too much time or a user's an inability to write an original comment. But then, in those users defense, Reddit feels like such an echo chamber.
> The ONLY purpose of down votes is to suppress conversation.
This assumes all conversation is equal quality. That particular point has never been true in social media, and has actually become worse post-2016, with increased partisanship and bad faith arguing.
It's impossible to run a high-quality discussion forum without some sort of check on bad behavior. That said, it's up for debate whether downvotes are the best answer to this problem.
First, your point implies down votes are a check on bad behavior as opposed to a form of disagreement. I suspect many users use social media voting for a variety of different reasons.
Secondly, there are two solutions to that problem:
1. If you believe the environment, group, or social body of a particular conversing venue is heavily biased, whether deliberate or not, you don't have to participate there. Simply leave.
2. If you believe a particular user is deliberately exercising some form of bad behavior or displays an inability to follow the conversation you don't have to reply to them. Simply let it die.
For example: whether or not I ever liked or voted for President Trump I would never spend time on Reddit at r/theDonald because I know conversation there is biased like a form of cult worship. Why bother conversing where you are not allowed to disagree on any matter?
It is still wrong. But even brilliant people/groups/institutions can get it stubbornly wrong. Let us say that HN thrives despite the disutility of the downvoting regime.
I think dang was being facetious here when he said "getting it wrong." He knows damn well that downvoting does no good for a platform since it is so easily abused to suppress ideas.
Yes, facetious and a little smug—but the rest of your comment is wildly off base from my perspective. Saying that downvoting does no good for HN is like saying white blood cells do no good for an organism. It's critical to the immune system. Yes, downvotes can do harm, just like white blood cells can. But try living without them.
I would like the ability to see my ratio of upvotes to downvotes. I think it would help show me if I was applying the same zeal to promote ideas as I use to demote them.
I assume that Jeff has changed his mind on this because Discourse does not have down-votes (with the caveat that Discourse has a different audience from HN). I wonder what made the difference?
He and Joel had this bullet-proof theory that, since quality answers are more valuable on SO than questions, the site should encourage users to criticize their peers.
So what presumably happened is that he noticed that philosophy, sound as it may be on paper, created a miserable atmosphere.
I've been through several forum deaths. The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse. This makes the best people leave in short order.
In a sense there's no way to structure a forum to avoid this. Being outnumbered by people who don't value open communication is unpleasant with or without downvoting. Forums that are highly specific to a small audience can last a long time. Popularity is the death-knell.
Be the change that you want to see in the universe. HN has a super easy to use API and I have downloaded the entire history of the site before for a past project. If you don't want to do the leg work yourself I am positive that the data set is out there for download somewhere if you google around.
Data analysis note: the public datasets only have submissions and comments, and just because a HN user has stopped submitting/commenting doesn't mean they quit HN. Lurking is fun.
My old handle unfortunately and innocently looks like (or can be interpreted as) "I'm just here to start shit!" It did not occur to me it might be misinterpreted a certain way until six weeks after I started it and I didn't think it important at that point. As I gained more karma, I did a blog post at some point explaining the completely innocent origin story for it (typo and all). After I hit the leaderboard, I decided, basically, "Oh, brother. This is so not worth the hassle involved. Yeesh." And changed to my actual first and middle names.
That would give no information about the reason someone left: there are a lot of reasons to stop interacting with hn that have nothing to do with the “best people leave in short order” theory.
I used to be incredibly active on here, and then I started getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for political reasons. I have all but stopped commenting compared to my previous activity. It just stopped being fun. Even posts I make that have nothing to do with politics, that only point out provable, factual information, get downvoted. I have over 13K karma, even after losing a few thousand points over the last 18 months or so. So the things that I have to say weren't always unpopular. I didn't change - the community did. It became a hostile, vindictive place.
I still visit daily because HN does a good job of surfacing interesting articles, but I used to find the comments more interesting than the stories themselves. That has changed in the last few years, as identity politics have taken hold. I can now accurately predict the content of many of the comments on a given story by simply reading its title. It's sad to see.
I was reading a somewhat controversial comment from you and then visited your account page probably to check for sibling comments in the same post. Your about me definitely changed how I feel about your comments and probably the source of your recent experience.
My about me is based upon my experience here over the last few years. I updated it at some point in the last 6 months, long after all this started. So it is a symptom of my experience here, not a cause.
It being based on your experience doesn't change the fact that it looks like it was written for the explicit purpose of getting under people's skin. Essentially, the responses you are getting (here) are the ones you are angling for.
When I first put that up, I actually ended it by saying "Be part of the solution" or something along those lines. Then, as the downvotes kept coming, I came to realize that most of the people checking my profile had just downvoted one of my comments, and were there looking for additional comments to downvote. I have watched the downvotes come in batches, across threads. That's why it has a pretty negative tone.
I think you're using an overly broad brush. For example, you still feel it's worthwhile to comment sometimes which implies that there are bastions of useful content, which you don't list. I'm sure we disagree on things, which limits the extent of groupthink.
Beyond that, there's the relative difference between HN and places like 4chan. Nuance is helpful.
I have briefly perused your comments and most of them seem to be interesting contributions. Some of them were definitely downvoted for no real reason AFAICT other than offering up unpopular opinions, and still others appeared to be downvoted for being what I think is a combative tone. You do, in general I think, come across as a bit combative. You have interesting, relevant, and/or factual things to say, maybe consider how what you are saying comes across.
I don't actually know. I am who I am, and have been responding to things in the same way since I arrived on the site. I took a lot of flack for criticizing GDPR, which I agree with in principle but believe was very poorly implemented. Also people seem to have confused me for a Trump supporter, even though I am middle-of-the-road politically - which is why I suspect that I get many automatic downvotes regardless of the content of my comments. I try to call things as I see them, and any criticism of left-leaning principles/programs/policies on here - even the most misguided ones - tends to meet with instant, harsh rebuke.
> I try to call things as I see them, and any criticism of left-leaning principles/programs/policies on here - even the most misguided ones - tends to meet with instant, harsh rebuke.
Something to consider; is it a harsh rebuke or just other people calling it as they see it?
If you will forgive the armchair psychoanalysis, perhaps "call things as I see them" is not a good approach? Does that not indicate a lack of engagement with the discourse? You seem to respond negatively, with accusations of bad faith, to a number of respondents who I thought had valid responses; this is builds antagonism.
I have stopped being offended by downvotes -- I am better at accepting them as opposing my viewpoint without having a better counter-argument. If a topic is controversial, I know it will attract downvotes, and I'm fine with insulting people who hold abhorrent views.
If you tone down the hyperbole a little, and write with less of a conspiracy minded tone, I suspect you will have far fewer downvotes; HN is rather libertarian leaning overall.
> I started getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for political reasons.
That could well be because a lot of the downvotes I saw in your recent comment history were on outright political topics (Parler/Trump‘s ban from Twitter/…) It might help if you just stayed away from those if you otherwise enjoyed being active here?
It's hilarious how your comment got immediately downvoted for sharing a personal anecdote about the very same thing. Must really be rubbing the people who downvote for political difference reasons the wrong way.
Browsing your recent comments, have you considered ... not commenting about downvotes?
I see a lot of "Why am I getting downvoted for this?", "Group think, downvotes, blah blah blah.", "I'm going to get downvoted for this but...", all of which are just magnets for more downvotes.
I think if you just stopped commenting on the downvoting, well, you'd still get the odd comment downvoted from time to time, because hey, you say things people don't like, you're going to get the downvotes, and yeah, people don't always explain why, which I know is annoying ... but you'd at least no longer be compounding it with the three or four follow-on comments that also all get downvoted, and your net karma would probably be fine.
You saw a recent thread about it in my history, but that is not something I normally comment on. I’ll bring it up every now and then when I say something entirely factual because I find it funny that people will downvote indisputable facts simply because they don’t happen to like what the fact says about their preferred narrative. But this was happening long before I ever started talking about them.
It’s appropriate to talk about here because the voting system is the topic of this article.
I think slashdot’s voting system was well equipped to avoid that problem, but they faded anyway. Maybe it was the redesign? I think many of their innovations in 1999 would go a long way to resolve political downvoting today—-new accounts were unable to vote on comments, you were unable to vote and comment in the same posts, metamoderation to ensure fairness, and up or downvotes having to fit categories like ‘insightful’ or ‘offtopic’.
I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. If this is allowed to go on, people will be afraid of making controversial (but intelligent) posts, and this place will become another reddit.
> down voted simply because they went against the status-quo.
Every tool will be abused sometimes.
I think the voting system mostly works extremely well - the system needs to be viewed as a whole with all the compromises that includes, rather than drill down on one particular failure.
Sometimes people use voting for bad reasons — I know I have (though I am quite conscientious to try and learn to vote more carefully).
Agree.
And yes, privilege just uncontroversial standpoints or promote indirect pressure over the members will result in community fragmentation. Therefore HN could turn into "one of many" monotone sites to just pass around.
I suspect that events outside of HN would have more of a chilling effect than the environment of HN itself. I know there are times when I felt like presenting a contrary view on a story but did not. I suspect that a fair number of HN members may even accept those points of view. Yet I have also seen enough of those "conversations" to know that they rapidly go downhill.
> I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo.
It is not possible to download posts on HackerNews, no matter how many karma you have. Did you mean comments? Because I think that actually one of the strongests points of HN that all posts will get equal footing. (they can be flagged though)
Isn’t there supposed to be a vouch system? I’ve seen comments that were flagged to death that shouldn’t have been (and a lot more vice versa) but I never seem to see the vouch link whether I have showdead on or not.
I've noticed that when I comment against the status quo, my comments quickly dip to -2 or lower from rapid fire downvotes, then slowly tick upward into positive territory over time as the more patient readers come through.
It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal. Maybe give less weight to someone who rapid-fire downvotes comments faster than they could possibly read them?
> It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal.
Perversely, downvotes aren't available on comments older than 24 hours, but upvotes are, so comments that attract a mixture of up- and down-votes get a strong upward bias on votes they attract after a day (since the upvotes happen and the downvotes don't).
Not sure how relevant that effect is to more short-term issues, though.
It does make the downvotes irrelevant in a way, it only signals strong disagreement which I think it's good to know. But it's not good to interpret the downvotes as correction method for yourself because it only leads to more echochamber.
Except that once enough negative votes have been received it becomes impossible to upvote. It's like sumo -- pushed too far and it goes out. However, the number is much too small, 3 or 4 downvotes.
Flagging operates similarly; as there is no reason attached to the flag it is simply 'dislike'. Slashdot's tags were much more nuanced.
Long wanted to see “spark graphs” [Tufte] next to vote totals, indicating the dynamics of up/down votes over time. I’ve had comments generate lots of activity, yet votes balance out to something mundane (like +2) despite wild fluctuations.
Agreed, though personally I think that the complement is also true, and maybe more insidious: A lot of comments get upvoted because they state an uncontroversial, obvious position that everybody agrees with already.
This is insidious because it encourages people to be the first to say the least interesting thing in order to get rewarded with comment karma. Those comments bubble up to the top of the thread, where they're held aloft by more and more people who see their existing opinions restated.
Ultimately the reward structure encourages discussions where people are indulged, in the same way the punishment structure discourages people being challenged.
I'd say this effect is more pronounced on Reddit than HN, but you can see it here too.
I'm not looking for "edgy" comments, I'm just saying that it's more useful in the long run to upvote comments that provide new information or perspectives, or at least state a common sense position in a different, compelling way.
Some of my stupidest posts get upvoted through the roof. Posts which I put in a lot of work on? Mixed bag.
Partly this is a first-poster thing. If you post early, then you'll either get a lot of up or down votes. Take time to post, and well, might get nothing.
A lot of people were pretty upset about the redesign. They also sold to Conde Nast and started adopting a different (more intrusive) model of advertising. I can't remember details but the site started feeling more.... slimey over time.
Slashdot's commenting/moderation system was exceptional.
This is one of those things that I did not realize kills discourse until I experienced a community that mainly posts serious content and discussion. Reddit now is particularly bad as each thread is sea of quips, one-liners, and trashtalk which pretty much floods out the pond of interesting discussion. "Funny" can be a great thing, but if that's all anyone ever tries to offer, it becomes very tiresome.
To be fair to reddit, there are plenty of subreddits that have similar policies (e.g. /r/science). It works most of the time apart from when a particular post ends up x-posted or on /r/popular or something similar.
I vaguely recall that there was a way for each user to set a bias for each moderation tag, so you could put -5 on the "Funny" tag and effectively hide them (or at least move them to the bottom of the comments).
to my recollection you didn't gain karma on funny mods. So a completely boneheaded comment may net -8 karma, but still show up as +5 Funny which would be the "ironic" Funny comment.
Slashdot is where I learned about bitcoin mining in 2011 or so and then I woke up and a) started applying the time value of money to a lot of things and b) stopped having intellectual discussions on the open internet.
That is very real truth that according to the current narrative taking place in the comments here, many of you will downvote what I am saying because you don’t like... whatever it is you don’t like.
I have had children and paid off two mortgages since then. Explaining my point of view to the mob no longer has value to me.
For what it's worth, I would normally downvote this post because it essentially opens with "I'm absolutely right", goes straight into "I will be downvoted" and closes with "I don't need attention". What is the point of that? All that you've come here to say is apparently that you don't need to be read and you're successful regardless of what anyone thinks. Great, I'm happy for you. What value have you added to this conversation? You're not helping on an emotional level and intellectually I'm really struggling to see the insight I'm supposed to be deriving from this as well.
Personally, I left slashdot when I felt the community changed. It started to feel less like excitement, and more like cranky libertarians complaining. I remember CmdrTaco leaving the helm, so maybe it was his steering that kept it good to me? No idea.
When I gave up on slashdot I put a call out to my social circle for a replacement, and that's how I learned about HN! That was nearly a decade ago, and I'm still grateful!
I dunno about everybody else, but there were about 15 years where every single story had several trolls commenting purely for the purpose of dropping a racial slur. Meta-moderate for long enough, and you could occasionally earn 5 karma, which could easily get blown on downvoting stupid shit from a single story. It was a cesspool, and I think a lot of people left because of that.
They started a really good thing with the user moderation, I think meta-moderation and the vote-category dropdown are very smart, but they locked it down too hard and moderation was largely ineffective.
I’m not a fan of meta moderation. It lacks context. I upvoted or downvoted for reasons and without knowing that reason how can someone determine whether that was appropriate? When I metamoderated I was extremely forgiving for the same reason. Unless it was clear abuse I “okayed” it.
Incidentally at some point I stopped getting moderation points even though I was a frequent meta moderator. Whether that was due to meta moderation of my mods, I don’t know.
There were rumors of a blacklist and there was a thread which was closed down critical of either an admin or the site. I participated in the thread rather moderately IIRC, but that was around the time I never saw another mod point.
At least on HN, dang will tell you what he didn’t like about your behavior. dang is also outwardly cool with disagreeing with him, which isn’t true with everyone.
I think that stuff was not a reflection on forums or moderation in general but specific to the time that Slashdot was born in.
Rob Malda had a very strong pro free-speech stance and so the site developed this odd sub-culture early on that was very self-referential and filled with Slashdot specific memes. In fact Slashdot had memes before memes even became a widely used word. Natalie Portman+hot grits etc.
I think it attracted people who enjoyed the thrill of being able to "publish" anything at all. I am very skeptical those people actually said those sorts of things or even believed them in real life, because most of the racial troll posts were almost entirely template and extremely repetitive in meme-like ways, most of them were barely coherent: they weren't people genuinely trying to convince anyone of anything.
There was a second factor that I suspect was also 'encouraging' trolls at this time: Slashdot's combination of "We never delete a post for any reason", allowing anonymous comments and a very sophisticated moderation system turned it into a game for some people. There were people who just enjoyed trying to break the site by doing things that you don't see on any other forum. For instance there was a period where people kept coming up with creative abuses of Unicode to construct page widening posts, stuff like that. You had a lot of creative programmer types faced with something that was an utterly pure system, designed to stop abuse with no human-level decisions to beat, and no legal penalties for trying. So it turned into a form of lightweight hacking practice, both machine and social, without any actual legal risk.
These days people who enjoy finding exploits in computer systems for the sheer thrill of it have plenty of more profitable outlets, like the zero day hunt programs run by big companies. If someone were to try creating a new Slashdot and recapturing the glory days I think they'd be faced with a totally different set of problems.
>The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse.
You've quite well described my latest experienced with StackExchange sites that are very popular (like Stack Overflow). The downvotes rain for any question without feedback. A comment provides an answer, but not an "Answer" that can be pinned. Vague "Opinion based" flags are sometimes levied, but similar questions for different regimes are upvoted and given quality answers.
I've had similar experiences on ServerFault part of StachExchange. If I simply answer a question with the correct technical answer, my answer is basically ignored. If I take that exact same answer and add a bold title, some cute paragraph formatting, some no-format text boxes, add some flowery wording like I am giving a Ted Talk, then people love my answers. So that is what I do and why I rarely answer questions any more. They also try to encourage me to edit other peoples posts, but I already have a day job.
I feel like a lot more people qualify to do metamoderation in the SO network than ever do it. This is essentially sabotage in the form of benign neglect.
Very true and it gets even more complicated when there are small circles of full time editors that invoke elitism around document writing styles as well as chiming in on highly subjective answers and invoking dogmatic principals. In Unix/Linux, there are millions of ways to solve a problem, but the solution must fit into their perceived right way. Before long, people not in those elite circles or who do not get the hint are discouraged from editing or answering anything.
Fundamentalism and tribalism seems to exist in any subject. - I find incredibly annoying, disappointing, saddening and infuriating — yet can’t help but wonder if it’s the necessary evolutionary byproduct of our species to collaborate and overcome obstacles too large to tackle alone.
It's true, but the gamification and rules, IMHO, attract personalities that take that stuff really, REALLY, seriously. Even to the point of being absurd.
I suppose it's a kind of power trip to go around and mark questions as "duplicate" for even the most superficial nonsense-- I am looking at you, @gnat !
HN having a reasonably high karma threshold for downvoting was a great decision that guards against a lot of common problems. I think that feature, along with the community as a whole being very mindful about protecting the forum quality, plus Dang being an excellent moderator, have greatly contributed to keeping it strong for many years.
It's not just downvoting that makes HN strong, it's IP banning. Right now I'm commenting via a new user I created via my work VPN, because nothing on my home network is allowed to create new users on HN now or effectively comment, since I always did so using temporary accounts. I'm getting so much more done, so- thanks, HN!
I made the mistake of practicing free speech in a way that didn't meet the standards. Specifically, I called something out for being stupid in one comment with 1-2 expletives and in another comment I shared a paranoid experience I had with my vaccine, stating clearly it was probably paranoid. If those two things aren't a reason to take away my free speech, I don't know what would be. Go, HN! Up with the valley!
Are static ips a common thing in the US? Here in Germany getting a fresh ip is as easy as restarting the router unless you explicitly pay for a static ip.
I'm not using a static IP, but heck they did it anyway. They might have even banned my device IDs (MAC IDs) or thing associated with my route. I don't like VPNs. They're a false sense of security, like Tor, and babies. I never trusted babies...
For some people, simply rebooting their router gets a new IP. Others have to explicitly tell it to release the IP and then renew it. Others have to change their router's MAC address.
I know that personally, if I release it and renew it, I'll get assigned the same IP. Though my IP is technically dynamic, it hasn't changed in the 5 years I've been in this house. I haven't tried changing my MAC address, but with a previous ISP, I had changed my router's MAC and it wouldn't even get an IP at all until I changed it back. Makes me wonder what would happen if I had changed it to the MAC of a router being used by another customer...
Well, you can use a bunch of troll accounts to downvote people who disagree with you. Meanwhile, troll accounts up voting a bad post would put it neutral or slightly positive, I'd guess.
I think people tend to downvote out of negative emotion but more likely upvote out of genuine interest. All it takes is one bad actor to downvote a comment early and it may never again gain enough visibility to get the position it actually deserves.
On the other hand, the absence of upvoting keeps the comment at a neutral level. Its speed of losing visibility can't be unfairly accelerated, and so it has a chance at competing with comments of the same level.
If a new account can neither upvote nor downvote, then wouldn't it be a catch 22 where no one ever gains any karma? Also as someone else pointed out, people often downvote for political purposes whereas the only reason I can think of someone abusing upvotes would be for spam which gets handled by HN's filters pretty well.
There's a lot more. You shouldn't be able to downvote replies to your post. Rate limits. Metamoderation. Hell/shadowbanning. Most good forums rely on an active superadmin moderation a lot - when that goes away or is unreliable the site dies.
The bias in favor of Apple is extreme. I genuinely don't know if the mods are actively paid off, if Apple astroturfs, or whatever. But it seems those threads are disingenuous. It's impossible to form evidence because good criticism of Apple is often deleted.
People with the opposite view see the opposite "extreme" bias. It's basically entirely in the eye of the beholder.
What's odd is how common it is, and how absolutely people are convinced that their particular strain of these contradictory generalizations is the accurate one.
There’s a similar dynamic on Nextdoor in my neighborhood. You’re basically not allowed to disagree with the OP. Commenters will say things like “this isn’t the place for it” without addressing the content or actual appropriateness. Usually you’ll be drown out by a bunch of “compassionate” posts or stupid questions[0] as well.
If you want to disagree with someone you can start your own post and many of the same people will “protect” your post from disagreement as well. It’s basically impossible to have an actual discussion in that environment.
[0] - Stupid as in the answer to their question is literally in the text of the post they’re responding to in the first place.
This is clearly a minority opinion, but in my view well-stated factual anecdotes that the majority find uncomfortable deserve upvote, always.
But that's not what they get, not even here on HN.
The high karma threshold is helpful, but I doubt raising it further would do much. Some qualitatively different vetting mechanism is wanted. Thought about the problem a lot, but so far reached only a few inchoate notions.
The broken concept is downvoting for others. Instead, it should be downvoting for yourself. If somebody downvotes of flags something, I don't want that something to be hidden from my view, unless I've upvoted the downvoter in past. The "global downvoting" model feeds the wannabe censors who feel entitled to impose their opinion on others.
I like the idea of paying to downvote, but also an interesting effect of downvotes is that they skew views of a position.
Having one upvote and 100 downvotes is the same as having 401 upvotes and 500 downvotes. Isn't that odd? One is a comment everyone hates and the other is a comment almost half of all people like.
what you're getting at is that both the mean and the variance have information (they're independent variables), which is good to keep in mind. on hn, both of your examples would be at -4 (dead) with no way of differentiating the two.
This reads to me like charging people to pick up trash while they're out walking. Voting is a mini-act of trying to improve the site for others by sweeping trash comments down and out of others' way and lifting good comments up to prominence; who would pay to do that? Who would think it reasonable to expect people to pay to do it?
One thing I noticed recently about HN voting is that it seems like you can upvote but cannot downvote immediate replies to your own comments. Other users can still downvote the comments. When I noticed that it struck me as very clever and something reddit should immediately poach. It's like a built-in cooling off period.
The amount of karma (points) on your comment and Red-I mean "hacker" "news" account has decreased by one.
Why did you do this?
There are several reasons I may deem a comment to be unworthy of positive or neutral karma. These include, but are not limited to:
*Rudeness towards other Posters,
*Spreading incorrect information,
*Sarcasm not correctly flagged with a `/s`.
Am I banned from the HN?
No - not yet. But you should refrain from making comments like this in the future. Otherwise I will be forced to issue an additional downvote, which may put your commenting and posting privileges in jeopardy. If you accrue enough down-votes, dang will be forced to hellban or IP-ban you, which will completely and permanently prevent you from using the website whatsoever (until you get another account and IP which takes like 2 minutes).
I don't believe my comment deserved a downvote. Can you un-downvote it?
Sure, mistakes happen. But only in exceedingly rare circumstances will I undo a downvote. If you would like to issue an appeal, shoot me a private message explaining what I got wrong. I tend to respond to PMs within several minutes. Do note, however, that over 99.9% of downvote appeals are rejected, and yours is likely no exception.
How can I prevent this from happening in the future?
Accept the downvote and move on. But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated on news.ycombinator.com. I will continue to issue downvotes until you improve your conduct. Remember: HN is privilege, not a right.*
Personally I'd prefer if comments displayed upvotes and downvotes as separate tallies instead of a total. It means something very different if a post as a lot of up and down votes that sum to about zero or if it has no votes at all.
I think a critical missing context of reposting an old 2009 article is that a newer post in 2011 makes downvotes free instead of costing reputation:
>Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
Why? He saw that users were too hesitant in downvoting which allowed bad content to grow and further degraded the site. Changing the downvoting mechanics fixed that.
(I don't know if there's been an update since 2011 to the downvoting system and incentives.)
I just wish you could remove the number next to your name natively in HN. It can't seriously take more than 5 minutes to implement this. There's no excuse IMHO. I want to interact with the site without seeing the number change and wondering why it did.
I can sympathize. I used to have a filter for reddit to eliminate the tally because I didn't like the effect it had on me.
I think the thing is though, HN and reddit don't give you options to remove these numbers because they have an effect. It's the nudge they give to people to adjust their contributions to be something the community actually wants. No shock these services are not offering options to turn that nudge off.
It might be nice of them to give the tally as class to make it easy to filter with a userstyle, though.
I don't know if these are popular opinions or not:
1: I really wish I could downvote Hacker News articles.
2: I really wish there was some friction to downvoting. Perhaps something like choosing among: disagree, factually wrong, mean, incoherent
Regarding the downvoting of articles: For awhile I used to see a regular pattern of weird articles on the front page. The discussion would then predictably involve a mod defending the article. IMO, I think downvoting an article would help in this situation.
I love the idea of +0 for Agree and -0 for Disagree. A comment’s score should be about how high quality it is, not how popular it is or how many people agree with it. Keep a separate agree/disagree count for users who are curious. Leave actual negative scores for low quality things like spam, flamebait and harassment.
> A comment’s score should be about how high quality it is, not how popular it is or how many people agree with it.
It almost goes without saying, but that's how just about all online communities say the upvote/downvote buttons are to be used. Unfortunately no online community can be trusted to be mature enough to actually follow the rules. Not even HackerNews manages to robustly resist the downvoting of dissenting opinions.
> Keep a separate agree/disagree count for users who are curious.
That's an interesting idea, to my knowledge SoylentNews doesn't implement this. Having a two dimensional score, one for quality and one for popularity, might be effective in getting people not to abuse the quality feedback system.
Yeah, that's the one thing I miss from Slashdot while I'm here.
I think it still has the feature... I just haven't used Slashdot enough over the past few years to moderate.
But, one of the things I like here is that you can vote in the same thread that you're posting in. (IE, I upvoted you because you reminded me where my idea came from.)
Reduce the bandwagon effect. People see a slightly gray (0 points) comment and pile up on it without thinking. It affects their view and introduces a subconcious bias.
Just don't grey out comments for 2 hours or so to allow people to vote. It's fine to greyout comments after that.
I rather really wish there was no way at all to vote on comments. — what purpose does it serve?
I very often see the top comment on the page to be a thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong nor easily disagreed with, and thus incurring the most upvotes from simply being quick to read.
> I rather really wish there was no way at all to vote on comments. — what purpose does it serve?
It serves both to manage the S/N ratio and to provide feedback to commenters on what the community sees as signal vs. noise.
> I very often see the top comment on the page to be a thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong
I don’t see that often on threads with substantial discussion. I suppose if that was a real problem, weighting upvotes by some measure of how relatively unfavorable the comment’s position is at the time upvoted would mitigate it.
> It serves both to manage the S/N ratio and to provide feedback to commenters on what the community sees as signal vs. noise.
No, it provides feedback as to what the community wishes to see as to better help those who care conform to it.
Absolutely useless, unimaginative comments that contribute nothing and state the obvious are seldom downvoted, so long as they not voice anything that disagrees with the voterbase, and may even be upvoted.
> I don’t see that often on threads with substantial discussion. I suppose if that was a real problem, weighting upvotes by some measure of how relatively unfavorable the comment’s position is at the time upvoted would mitigate it.
I went through your own list of comments and could find some greyed out comments that really had no business being greyed out and downvoted.
This is not noise, this is something someone disagreed with, for reasons I don't understand.
I've seen quite a fair bit of greyed out comments on H.N. that were accurate and informative, as the comments that truly do not belong are most likely removed by the moderators to begin with.
I believe that comments are most likely to be upvoted by users when they say something the user already agrees with without thinking, as such something that tells him nothing new. — the end result is that the least informative, most obvious comments tend to be the most upvoted.
Downvoting is enabled when your karma reaches a threshold (500?). You can undo votes in either direction via the “unvote” or “undown” links that appear after voting. I think this is only possible for a short period of time after your original vote.
Accidental upvotes used to be a problem, but that's been fixed for a while now. You should see the word "unvote" appear https://i.imgur.com/jaNanv9.png
474 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadAnd I think that HN has held up pretty well over the years.
Atwood's experience with downvoting on Hacker News is definitely a bit dated as well:
> (update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized. It is buried in the faq)
> (I apologize for my misunderstanding, but there’s no visible UI for downvoting, and I can’t recall ever seeing a single negative voted comment in all the times I’ve visited Hacker News! Also, I put these comments in parens to make them extra-LISPy so Paul Graham would see my corrections.)
For you. I see two arrows - one for upvoting and one for downvoting - next to every comment in this thread.
[edit] Haha, somehow missed that this was a quote from the article, sorry :D
There's been a couple of blog posts from the SE staff trying to move the needle on how close/downvote happy the community is.
Stack Overflow's moderation system has not scaled very well; it's unhelpful for new users, and frustrating for power users and volunteer moderators. The company has largely refused to address these issues since about ~2015, when they promised a series of grandiose moderation overhauls and...never implemented any of it.
Since then, their usual strategy for dealing with moderation failures is to throw the community under the bus. The article you linked caused a lot of drama within the community, because it accused volunteers of "judging users for not knowing things" for performing basic moderation tasks like marking questions as duplicates -- a feature that's supposed to help users by pointing them to an authoritative answer. The duplicate feature has a lot of warts; it does not adequately explain how users can nominate their question for reopening by clarifying why it's not a duplicate, and even if it was discoverable the reopen process is horribly broken anyway. But instead of addressing the obvious issues with the moderation system, they just wrote a blog post about how hostile their volunteers are.
A longtime SE power user explained it better than I could: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777
> For years, you have been working on cleaning up an oil drip out of a beautiful lake with a spoon, but the small spoon you have is actually a fork. You've spent years asking for at least a spoon to work with, but have gotten nothing. For some reason, though, you keep at it with the fork, for different reasons - some are the people next to you also working with forks, some are the occasional diamond that you can clean and set and make nice - all for free and out of your own time.
> Then, one day [...] the lake starts shouting at you about how the fork you're using is being unfair to the oil - that you're being too unwelcoming to the oil and not treating it properly, completely ignoring the fact that you've been using a fork and have been asking for better tools for years. The lake slaps you anyway.
In fairness: within the last year or two they finally seem to have hired some staff members who finally get it and are taking steps towards actually fixing the site's moderation problems. However, I haven't been on the site for a while and so I couldn't tell you whether they are actually having a meaningful impact or just making more empty promises.
That is such a time frame to choose; right in the middle of it, 1 year 6 months ago, the Monica incident happened[1]. Do you mean before that or after that?
In summary, StackOverflow said they were discussing a code of conduct that would mandate volunteer moderators use someone's preferred pronouns. Monica, a widely respected moderator, asked if she could continue using gender-neutral language under the proposed code of conduct. They kicked her out alledging (incorrectly) that this was a statement of intent to break the rules they hadn't brought in yet. Then 50+ other moderators stood down in protest[2]. Then the company doubled down on their decision and their following silences. This unravelled into a lot of people voicing their discontent with the way the StackExchange company interacts with the volunteer mods and the community, and builds on the back of the ~2019 one-sided changes to try and make the community more welcoming to new users by being harder on the people who are already the community, and how badly that went down, and company employee leaks saying the company is not engaging with the community, and an apparent increase in pushing for money to return to investors rather than any other mission.
Right about the same time, they retrospectively relicensed all questions, answers and comments ever submitted, possibly illegally, and then refused for a long time to comment on it.[3]
[1] https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-... and a related post covering other things the company has done fairly badly ~1 year ago - https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/342950/
[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...
[3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...
I was referencing stuff like the closure changes [1], review queue redesign [2], and the updates to the “ask” page [3]. Again, I haven’t been on SO much lately so I don’t now how well that’s been working out or how receptive they’ve been to Meta feedback, but it’s reassuring to see they’re finally focusing on parts of the site that have needed it desperately for so many years. Additionally, they seem to be doing better about listening to Meta (at least compared to the “0.015%” reign of terror).
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/394871/upcoming-fea...
[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/346901/improving-th...
[3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/344513/the-new-ask-...
The success of "broken windows" policing is not supported by much evidence, so the rest of article based on this concept is suspect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticis...
I manage an instant messaging community of about 10000 stem professionals and you can see negative community feedback loops develop or die down in real time depending on how you act on them. It's evident new members take in the vibe when they arrive and act to reinforce good or bad trends. If you let people make crass jokes, soon they're posting rude comments then insulting each others. If you let people post memes about technical topics, soon it's random tiktok videos, then it's porn. If you let a regular member go off on a newbie who asks a bad question, the next thing you know people are bullying newcomers left and right.
All I wanted was to build a nice virtual gathering spot and meet cool people but now I have to play fascist because the feedback effect is so strong.
Last time I tried (a few years ago), voting in either direction required a minimum number of points there also.
These days, I accept the votes on S.O. for what they are, and hit the "End" key to read the least-upvoted answer first.
That's interesting. I wonder how that could be the case.
Also, I think in those days you did see vote numbers, but you didn't see the big obvious greying out of downvoted comments that exists today.
If plentiful downvoting is allowed, discourse becomes a popularity contest. Fortunately most of the experienced users here seem to understand this and reserve their downvotes for appropriate situations.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, quality posts are almost always downvoted immediately. (I assume it's by self-promoters hoping that it will cause their content to rise in the rankings.)
Hiding posts scores has helped with bandwagoning, but I wish the two options were "upvote" and "report to mods."
This to me seems like the best approach.
A) It would be nice if the mods had a way to flag the post to make it require additional work to see on most / default clients.
B) If multiple mods sign off on a given post being a poor match for constructive discourse that is when most clients wouldn't even display the existence without a special viewing mode or preference. (This assumes an append / write-only forum.)
C) For all USERS, it would be nice if a special type of reply allowed for a post to be a "contrasting viewpoint", which might get displayed at the same node-level as the post being replied to, as part of a package of tightly related views on a topic.
Comments that hit -1 can still recover. Comments rarely recover after -3 or so. The only counter is for the commenter to edit and call out readers for frivolous downvoting.
I never delete posts simply because they are unpopular. In my personal view, that's a coward's move. It tells me that the user doesn't really have any actual conviction, doesn't really believe in what they're saying. If being popular is more important to that person than being correct, then I find their opinion worthless. Because apparently it can be dictated by popular opinion. And I mean actually correct, not just "winning the argument".
I also dislike people who double reply or who use the edit feature to essentially pull an "and another thing". Living out the l'esprit d'escalier fantasy essentially.
Also people who proclaim they won't be responding or tell others not to respond. It's a poor rhetorical tactic to silence opposition because you don't have a good response.
Still, kudos for standing by an unpopular but correct statement in that instance. And kudos to the person who gave you gold for it.
That usually earns a downvote from me. People commenting on downvotes is boring and usually shows a lack of insight, for example obviously making zero effort to understand why their comment is poorly received, or blaming a conspiracy, or blaming groupthink. I have occasionally answered “why the downvotes” questions, but it usually feels like a waste of my time to do so.
If we take HN as reddit 2.0, what would be HN 2.0 I wonder? If I were the one to make it I'd create a system to promote the comments of people with professional expertise on the subject being discussed. HN has mostly solved the politeness and flamewar issues but IMO one its major flaws is that people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about.
See: any thread about aeronautics, education, or (historical) warfare.
I would also expect such a place to have a magnitude or two fewer people.
With no gatekeeping, there's lots of activity and pros feel like participating once in a while with deep discussions sparked from seemingly simple questions, but on the other hand a lot of pros feel alienated and leave if the average level of competency is too low.
I've been toying with the idea of pro:newbie ratios but haven't implemented anything yet.
Pros learn by watching other people's problems get addressed, and contribute when it falls under their domain expertise. They interact in a positive way to form the personality of the messageboard. Which should be a reference point for an actual newbie who wants to participate long-term, but it should be expected that most visitors will not return after their problem is solved. The message board becomes a curated/community archive for solutions.
Where the subject matter and the discussion are contained within the board.
That's for a problem-solving message board.
Now HN is a tech news aggregator with comments which make it a board of a different kind, with way more diverse comments to deal with than any one news site.
And very many news sites individually are challenged to adjust to the recognized lower quality of comments the last few years by trying experimental approaches or no longer accepting comments at all.
The news is always elsewhere, only the comments are here and that makes it debatable.
Maybe there's such a thing as a problem-creating message board?
Habr.com makes both up and downvotes costly, and they have an evolved system checks and balances. The best I´ve seen. They can even fight off Kremlin bots successfully, this is major feat in their region/language of choice.
- You can earn points but never lose them by submitting URLs for discussion.
- You can't lose more than 4 points per post, no matter how many times it is downvoted. There is no upper limit to points gained from a single upvoted comment.
- There is only a 24 hour time window in which comments can be downvoted, but they can still be upvoted even months later.
The expertise problem is harder. Sometimes I see a post that has more misconceptions than sentences, but is grammatically correct and written in a confident tone. Only people who actually understand the subject matter will spot the problems quickly. It's tedious to write introductory level corrections for commonly repeated mistakes. For some of them I have considered keeping a mini-FAQ locally and pasting standard responses to standard misconceptions, but HN also discourages repeating identical posts.
If I downvote a misinformed post the original poster won't know where they went wrong, and people who see a grayed post won't necessarily understand what's wrong with it either. The saving grace of the downvote is that it affects comment sorting order, so at least misconception-heavy posts that are downvoted won't dominate the upper reaches of the discussion page.
I lurk and post once in a while. What I’ve noticed is that rarely is something downvoted for being factually incorrect (relatively speaking). You just have to offer a perspective that doesn’t conform with the hive mind and the downvoting essentially amounts to censorship of opinions.
When I see heated back-and-forth discussion chains I'll often find myself downvoting several comments and upvoting none of them, because sarcastic quippy retorts to bad comments are also bad comments.
I'll also downvote comments for factual inaccuracy, particularly if I don't have the time to patiently correct them. This only partially mitigates the damage and doesn't really help the original author to learn. When someone writes a comment with just a single big mistake, and they don't seem to have a history of willfully repeating it, that's when I am most likely to write a lengthy reply with explanation and citations.
I once made a post that criticized the Anglocentric perspective of an article. — it was initially upvoted, but then became downvoted when UTC+2 went to sleep, and then upvoted again when UTC+2 woke up. — one can take a particular guess as to why.
Despite whether I agree with it, I upvote anything that I learn something new from.
Factual incorrectness is often downvoted, but usually only if there is a reply that points it out.
that's ok, the onus is on the downvoted poster to figure it out for themselves. usually that requires seeing a pattern over the course of a few downvoted posts rather than pinpointing it exactly from a given post.
most downvoted posts break one or more hn rules, but a few are downvoted ideologically, so a little resilience is required. strictly unpopular opinions can often be more tactfully rephrased and at least be accepted for discussion, if not agreement. this is a pretty good life skill to develop generally anyways.
Presumably the onus is on you to figure that out, but good luck, since I'm not sure either and usually I can tell.
If downvoting bad comments (for any definition of bad) was harder or even outright impossible you'd still have an alternative: upvote an other, better comment to have it shadow what you consider a less valuable contribution. And that's a positive interaction.
Whenever I find a comment that I think is on-topic and somewhat constructive, but I still fundamentally disagree with the take, I generally go hunting for a comment that embraces my point of view (or write one myself) and upvote that.
I very rarely downvote comments on this site, and generally only do it for comments that I consider to be completely off topic, flamebait or stupid "meme" references. That being said I do comment quite a bit and I admit that I'm always a bit frustrated when I take the time to write what I consider to be a constructive (if sometimes controversial) comment and I get downvoted reddit-style. It feels disrespectful, almost. I probably care too much about that stuff, I acknowledge that.
Say, I like the idea. No doubt people have discussed this to death elsewhere. You can definitely see downvotes used as simple disagreement or for punishing unpopular speech (rather than being wrong, let's say). That's a bummer but is a side effect of modern times.
Let's say that a issuing a downvote resulted in a 15 minute break from posting or voting. You gotta want to do it.
" people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about."
I'm afraid that's baked deeply into the DNA of computer programmers.
If shutting someone else up (and let's not mince words here... that is exactly what you are doing) isn't worth even a token cost to you, maybe you should reconsider whether shutting them up is truly justified in the first place.
A Mr. Claude Shannon would like a word. I joke, but when you have controls on voting rings and co-ordination, downvotes are necessarily noisier. An upvote is effectively neutral engagement with the content, where a downvote actively reduces engagement. From the perspective of wanting to mine the constructive engagement out of the collective minds of the audience, downvotes are about as meaningful and information dense as a fire alarm.
In a meta way, you kind of have to use a little bit of your own point capital to downvote something, so if you're highly upvoted by the community then calling BS on something is easier for you and the risk taking for doing so makes more sense, versus someone who just signed up.
I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?
And avoid users speaking to the audience opposed to directly addressing the parent comment
Hacker news gates some functionality based on accumulated Votes, so maybe once you hit the necessary threshold it is hidden
You also let garbage fester because nobody will use points to downvote a stupid, agressive one-liner.
My experience is that:
- voting on HN works well for its intended purpose, which is surfacing the interesting conversations
- dead comments really deserve to die (I can’t remember a counter-example)
- greyed out comments tend to be right but unpopular, or right but rude, or wrong, or just stupid. Of these, the problematic cases are “right but unpopular”, which is not that frequent. And when it happens that’s fine, they are still readable.
> I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?
I assume it promotes engaging in the comments. It’s true that popularity contests should not be encouraged too much, but at the same time I can see how having a number that can go down would make some people think twice before knee-jerk posting or casual trolling.
Then again, this isn't really a forum - it's transitory comments about the news of the day. Perhaps the argument is that there shouldn't be substantive discussion here in the first place. You're clearly meant to respond to the article more than the individual comment - the tree style commenting system and automatically hidden nature of comments down the chain both speak to that.
I always show dead comments and honestly, people aren’t missing out on much. To get your comment dead in my experience you have to either be extremely inflammatory or just spout absolute nonsense.
At the very least, if I ever implemented it myself, I'd require that people explain why they are voting up, or voting down, before they could vote. And I'd not limit users from being able to vote until they magically get to the right amount of "karma".
Without requiring an explanation, votes are more akin to boos and cheers than anything useful. Not a very good way to encourage a diverse culture.
I'd guess that's the point - giving power over visibility to users who've proved themselves in line with the forum zeitgeist helps maintain a site's culture as-is and prevent it "diversifying" into Smaller Facebook #50691.
Such a moderation comment might be anything, but the more egregious examples:
Illegal content (of some sort); A threat upon persons or property (E.G.); Hate Speech; other things that a reasonable person would agree do not belong with a discussion; or just being Wildly off-topic.
For well-intentioned posts that are factually incorrect, it seems that there are usually replies that explain the reason for the downvote. When a comment is wrongfully banished to the grey nothingness, oftentimes others step up and defend it. The community immune system functions well as is.
Also, I adore the fade-to-grey side effect of the downvotes. It’s like spritzing a cat with water for scrounging on the counters—an ultimately harmless but super effective reprimand.
(Or rather, I do want it to be "my judgement is better than everyone elses, and I want to be able to delete other people's comments", and I recognise that's bad, and that a vote system limits the maximum damage I can do to one vote per comment).
With that in mind, I'd likely just not have downvotes period. If something is low quality enough to deserve a downvote, then it should be in violation of my community standards. Downvotes are designed to stop engagement. That's not the kind of thing I'd want unless it's something bad.
Then maybe do something a little different with upvotes. Say after you upvote with a comment a certain number of times, you get access to a quick upvote option. Or canned upvote comments.
And maybe general comments would count as an upvote unless you uncheck the box. That way we could keep generic upvote comments like "well thought out argument" or "he used good references" in their own little section without stifling good interactions.
The Value of Downvoting, Or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633668 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)
10 Years In, Was He Right? “Value of Downvoting; How HN Gets It Wrong” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23409231 - June 2020 (1 comment)
The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13325726 - Jan 2017 (12 comments)
The Value of Downvoting or How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10875619 - Jan 2016 (36 comments)
Reddit's Discussion about HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508801 - March 2009 (24 comments)
The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948 - March 2009 (114 comments)
It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead without updating their understanding.
If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise to the top, but conversation keeps them there. Why downvote a story that isn't interesting? Just don't comment and it will go away soon. Flagging is for problematic stories.
What I love about HN is that, unlike Reddit and SE, is that discussion is the major feature. The moderation system is tailored around facilitating that. Contrast that to other sites, reputation is the game, and content revolves around the people playing that game.
12 years later, SE is still getting it wrong. Not just in their understanding of HN's downvotes, not just in their understanding of HN's purpose, but they're still a reputation game and the quality of the site suffers for it.
Correct, -4 is the lowest a comment can go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
SE prominently displays reputation points, which is different.
Though I doubt redditors reddit just for the karma.
Also, not insignificantly, HN is a side project, not a startup. It can succeed at its goals and stay small, not worrying about "capturing the market" or whatever. Staying small means dang can generally be expected to read most of the comments on the site.
And by "small", I mean that there's rarely much action on the page-3 stories. Threads that get paginated are rarely worth wading into. If a million people started using HN, then it would quickly become so unusable that they'd all quit within a week. Reddit "solves" this "problem" by making subreddits, and now it's a poison-breathing hydra.
If you follow at all which stories are rejected flagging is used as downvoting on a daily basis unless your definition of 'problematic' is extremely broad.
If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....
The community here used to be absolutely amazing. 10-15 years ago the discussions here were actionable, and I was able to make valuable professional connections in the the comments.
These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.
And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this. Uncomfortable truths can’t be posted from IPs/cookies/users that you want to preserve. Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.
The decline of open-mindedness is what I've noticed the most. The assumption of good intention on the part of someone with an opposing view. The willingness to at least entertain a thought or argument, even if you ultimately don't accept it. Much easier to just hit the down-arrow and move on, satisfied in knowing that wrongthink was punished with a nice -1.
There are definitely points of view here, no matter how well articulated, that will be buried in low-contrast purgatory very quickly. And I'm not just talking about "white supremacy" type stuff.
Yes, but at least unpleasant discussions usually just stop at that, unlike Reddit or even worse Twitter where you get a shitstorm of insults.
This is good, do this. The worst thing in threads IMO is endless subthreads attached to low-effort troll comments. Just downvote and move on. If the comment contains a factual misstatement, maybe post a quick note saying why it is incorrect, with a reference.
This is the crux of the matter, how do you know a comment is a troll, rather than an honestly held and expressed contraversial view? parent's point is that you can't in general. So it's up to defaults: default to assuming bad faith and you will be rewarded with swift oppression of trolls but also honest mavericks whose contraversy help stir things up and invigorate discussions, default to assuming good faith and you tolerate both with mixed results. There is no easy answer.
Recommended read on this is Paul Graham's "What you can't say"[0], a timeless piece on how the bathwater of offensive and unpopular opinions always contain the baby of non-conformist truth, and you don't know in advance which is which, so you need to tolerate the first lest it is actually the second in disguise.
[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Citation needed - this claim is very far from my own experience. If you think you'll be banned, then email me with your evidence and I'll look at it.
If you express some completely heinous ideas in polite, mostly grammatical writing then normally you will not be banned. This is based on my experience of over a decade of various accounts and occasional banning on "Hacker" News.
He moderates in a way that is intended to create comfort for an in-group. It’s a “safe space” for a specific type of person.
This entire comment is one of the most closed-minded, "lower value" comments I've seen on HN recently.
Complaining about how comments aren't open-minded, and also that "hate speech" and "bigoted shit" is the norm is something of a contradiction. If one is open-minded, he should be tolerant even of "hate speech." He should also be open to the ideas that hate speech is both very real or not real at all. Censoriousness is inextricably closed-minded.
I can't speak to PG portfolio criticism, but I think dang does yeoman's work in moderation. Only once have I seen a decision that I thought was harsh, and I think everyone is entitled to a bad day every now and then.
If you walked into my house and started berating and insulting me, I'd probably have a dim view of you, too.
Also, how are you posting from a banned account? That seems to go against the nature of being banned.
Also I don't think "in my house" metaphor has had much success. Which seems fair : Hacker News is not PG's house, although it is his baby, he handed moderation power over to the users, the algorithm and the moderators. Which is why we like it and trust it and use it. You can't just compare anything to one on one relationships, it does not work like that.
Commenters who post grand narratives about why they were banned typically have a long string of past banned accounts. The giveaway is that they never link to them. That would let readers make up their own minds about why they'd gotten banned, and how accurate their story really is.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Looking at your comment history, it looks like you enjoy wading into political conversations with strongly-held opinions. Food for thought, I'd have downvoted some of your comments that I agree with because they bring down the quality of the conversation.
I consider myself more of a leftist than your typical hn user and when I have been abnormally downvoted I never felt it was because of my opinion but rather because I was too hot headed or too ignorant about what I was talking about.
So I am very concerned by those claims but without any data about presumed tolerance to bigotry stuff, they are of no value too anyone. Anybody could feel sore and angry about how some social online gathering is not as X as he wish he was. Heck, that's my life on Reddit. Gimme data, gimme sources, I'll vote you up.
To be fair, much of the overtly racist and bigoted content I've seen lately has gotten voted down and flagged, and I've seen Dan step in and stand against it on a few occasions. I don't know if this is the result of a shift in my perceptions or in the community, but to me it seems like things were far worse a few years ago, and now at least a few of the notorious bad accounts have been banned. It's certainly not a paradise, God knows any time race, religion or gender comes up this place often winds up validating its execrable reputation, but I do think the mods are trying. It's not their fault the tech community is being taken over by incels and neo-reactionary fascists.
I would like to point out that this is a silicon valley/SF tech forum; considering the demo, to mod out all of the vile sexist/race-realist objectivist bleating would be crushing. Just argue back. The left-liberal addiction to manager-calling is ruining their ability to defend their positions, heavily moderated "safe spaces" really become places where people can repeat their beliefs by rote, free from challenges. The reason libertarians are wrong is because their philosophy is intellectually bankrupt, not because it's upsetting. Practice in putting them down refines your own beliefs.
Just by making my comments, I had people accusing me of “social authoritarianism”. Because my complaint that my viewpoint is not always welcomed was, in their mind, proof that I was trying to “forbid” them from thoughts.
I’d say more, but I’m banned from posting with any frequency on this account. Again... that is because this is a heavily moderated safe space.
That said, I’d argue that there’s no value in putting together a strong argument here anymore.
People are rewarded for writing a few pointless sentences that sound smart and agree with the common view. They are not rewarded for intelligent challenge. Voting is used to reward agreement with a viewpoint, and to punish disagreement.
I've done that. Not been banned.
> point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite
Well, I mean, aside from being false, that’s also going to often be a specific labelling of something here as “white supremacist” or “hate speech”; flagging exists pretty specifically to deal with content where that description actually applies without sidetracking conversations with incendiary debate about whether it does. So, yeah, comments doing that will be flagged and moderated and, if thet persist, will likely get you banned.
> And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this.
If it was banned, you couldn’t post from it. So, since you obviously can, I assume you are misrepresenting the facts when you call it a banned account.
Everything I post starts dead.
I don't think this is true, or I just don't see any evidence it. Take a look a this HN yesterday thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26782031. Neither PG nor his YC companies are immune to criticism.
Sometimes the problem isn't with the story or disagreeable opinions. Rather, it is with the tone of responses.
My posting history started with me operating in very good faith, getting [dead] for politely expressing opinions that weren’t acceptable, and now I just occasionally post pre-dead posts here, knowing that few will even see them.
It’s my small way of reminding users who actually look at everything that this place is an extremely authoritarian place that is meant to only showcase certain things; and it is purposefully unwelcoming to others.
For one, answers change over time. The best answer five years ago will have accumulated the most votes. The most current and correct answer will never be able to catch up with that.
Two, there's a lot of nitpicking and irrelevant point scoring. Making answers a competition instead of a collaboration brings out the worst in some people.
Three, there's an assumption that voters know what the best answer is. Because they often don't - which is why they're looking for answers - the answers with the most upvotes are the ones that look plausible. They're not necessarily definitive, or ideal.
Four - for code - the code sometimes has obvious bugs or typos. Upvotes are supposed to fix this, but clearly they don't.
Five - the mod problem, where valid questions are closed and duplicates aren't really duplicates.
I think SE would work better as a collaborative semi-wiki, or something else in that ballpark. I don't think the karma scoring does a good job - except in the very basic sense that you get some relevant answers in one place, and it's still up to you to decide which one (if any) solves the problem.
They introduced it to gamify the whole charade without any deeper thought. At the beginning they had a lot of people addicted to answering questions and displaying their points on blogs which to me always looked ridiculous.
They've got really good SEO game, and answers to most of my newbie questions when I'm learning a new language. But I tried contributing to the site for a little while... nope, it's wickedly political for all the wrong reasons and I quit before long.
That might be true, but a more benign explanation is incompetence.
Why concentrate this power into the hands of a privileged few? It's a representative system where we vote certain users into high karma, but they needn't return any favors and can subsequently downvote things that are otherwise suitable for the platform. Privilege can, and will, be abused in full.
Even if you see other people using downvotes for disagreement, that doesn’t make it ok for you to do the same.
Downvotes are for when people violate the norms and values of our community without thoughtfulness or self awareness.
The difference is subtle sometimes, but your comment is exactly the kind of thing I downvote. Low effort, dismissal / rejection of the community’s norms without nuance or justification beyond “well other people do it too so that makes it ok”.
I personally think of "disagreement" as a continuum, where one end is pretty close to my own view, and the other is absolutely abhorrent or incoherent. Certainly part of that continuum warrants downvotes. "Don't use downvotes to signal disagreement," is meaningless in that context.
More concretely, the HN guidelines say nothing about why to downvote. They only say, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
This seems to be a really wide net for downvotes, and almost certainly won't match other people's use cases for downvoting. I don't think downvoting should be open to interpretation like this, hence why I think it should be removed. The alternative? Just don't upvote, or flag if something is truly inappropriate.
Yeah, I like this perspective but I think there's two axes we can separate a little. One axis is disagreement. (I agree with you <-> I disagree with you). the other axis is effort / coherence. (I'm going to invest significant effort to clearly articulate my point of view <-> I'm going to make a flippant off-handed comment).
Disagreement alone isn't the problem - I've had some lovely conversations on HN with people I disagree with. Eg, a couple weeks ago I had this interesting exchange[1] talking about RMS on the FSF board. But the conversation worked because everyone was careful and articulate. When someone says something I disagree with, but they say it in a thoughtful, well articulated way, I learn something new.
There's probably more factors at play, but as a rule of thumb I suppose downvotes are in the low effort + strong disagree quadrant. In that zone I feel like there's no implied intent to even talk it through. And absent conversation, why are we even here?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26611767
Perhaps I'm only acknowledging that I'm less likely to downvote someone that I agree with? For example, if someone speculates wildly but it's consistent with my own experience, I'm not likely to downvote. If someone speculates wildly and it's inconsistent with my experience, I'm far more likely to downvote.
Probably where we disagree is whether it's OK to downvote a comment that someone put effort into. I've seen someone ask a question about a particular technology, and someone who clearly has very little experience with that technology posts a long screed where they're ~~talking out their ass~~ sharing their opinion in a way that sounds authoritative. Or maybe they're repeating business-level talking points instead of getting down to technical brass tacks.
I hope that gives an idea what I mean. I don't want to see comments like that on HN, regardless of how much effort or how well-meaning the comment is.
Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN! There has certainly never been a guideline against it, and the case law is clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314.
I think the idea that things should be otherwise actually comes from Reddit (no?) which takes this to a triple back flip level of irony.
I will downvote comments that are simply low quality, like comments that merely say "^ This!". I don't usually downvote bad faith arguing because it's hard to prove when someone is arguing in bad faith versus just simply having bad arguments.
Sometimes the person just misinterprets the conversation, especially if not being a native english speaker, but the responses could get overly harsh and that's a pity because I'd like to see more international discussions here.
Flagging is where HN gets it wrong, IMO. So many slightly controversial and important topics are being removed with this mechanism. We're left with all the vanilla stuff.
Generally speaking I think HN is wonderful, and if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship, I'll gladly make that trade, but I do wish people had thicker skin (that's a problem on all sides by the way).
I have seen entire heated topics killed but that kills both sides of the argument equally. What value is a 500-comment talk-over-each-other argument, fundamentally about politics even if on-topic, on this site? I doesn't seem like something we should waste time on.
If a few things are over-moderated I might be mildly missing out. So what? Humans are fallible. There is no perfect system. You're not arguing that HN is so moderated that it's completely worthless. You're not even getting close to that.
So what do we do about a system that isn't perfect but is doing a pretty fine job?
The rules to stay on topic is not the same as censorship. Often I noticed people talk (write) past each other and get into misunderstandings; it happens to me I'll admit.
What do you mean by "this site"? The participants in this forum are the site. I've had discussions flagged that I thought to be valuable. Why would you want to get rid of controversy anyway? Do you want to discuss only popular old hat things? Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.
If you want to discuss off-topic controversies, there's an entire Internet full of sites to have that discussion on.
Because I've seen people totally make up stuff to make a point.
And yet part of that diversity is that ecosystem has different niches :).
You can discuss politics, sports and controversy anywhere else on the Internet. HN has a different focus, and many of us (myself included) would like to keep it that way - because that's literally the basis for the whole value of this place.
This needs to be expressed more often, too bad often people do write that but not in a friendly way and some threads go on with countless bickering.
That's where we differ. To me HN is valuable because of the people and the continued success in maintaining a good standard of discussion. To me HN is not what we discuss, but how, and with whom.
HN guidelines say that what's on topic is what a good hacker would find interesting, but who is to say what that is? The guidelines basicly say that what's on topic is anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Again, what I think is that the "good hacker" is us. We shouldn't nitpick topics. We should take care to have good discussions. We consider technology important and relevant, so we discuss it. Same for everything.
Some topics (like politics) naturally induce more impulsive, emotional reactions than others (like innards of Erlang's BEAM runtime). The more you allow the former to dominate the latter, the worse average discourse gets, and the faster good people leave - it's a feedback loop that quickly grinds a community down to the lowest common denominator.
That's why stable, quality communities either expel (like HN) or contain (like plenty of forums limiting politics to only the Offtopic board) such topics. And it's not like it's a new invention - a lot (possibly most) societies have a long-standing custom that says not to bring up politics and religions in typical conversations between strangers (or at dinner with extended family).
I'd say that avoiding controversial topics is just something that happens when you struggle to maintain a good discussion. Sometimes you have to end a discussion because of how bad it is. But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.
When I see that a conversation is going south, I try to bring coolheadedness to it, or point out how it could be made better. I think that's the way to a good forum.
I think I see what you're getting at, so let me reassure you a bit, and correct for any miscommunication I may have caused:
> But forbiding topics is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's admitting defeat.
HN doesn't strictly forbid controversial topics. The guidelines[0] outline what is and isn't considered on-topic, provide heuristics for good behavior and pleas to avoid certain bad patterns. They don't say, "these topics will be automatically removed", or "these topics will get you insta-banned". They're just guidelines, a description of what this place should strive for. They work as a Schelling point[1] for individual participants.
So what happens in practice is, when you post a clear-cut intellectually stimulating hacker topic, it'll get upvoted. If it's boring, it'll get ignored. If you post a completely garbage submission, it'll get flagged faster than you can refresh the site. If a topic is on a fence, the balance of upvotes, flags and vouches will lean one way or the other. It's an organic system, but the direction it's leaning is strongly shaped by the guidelines - the one thing everyone knows everyone is expected to know :).
It's also easy to observe that whether or not a given topic stays on the front page or gets quickly flagged out of it isn't just a function of the topic and the source - but also the context (and I think sometimes the timezone). For example, political news aren't very prominent on HN, except when something really big happens, and HN briefly turns into a 24h news station.
And on the controversy itself, the general principle is - it's not the topic being controversial itself that's the problem. The problem is if the discussion around it decays into low-quality bickering. For some topics this is almost a law of nature, so people flag them on sight. But others only get flagged down if and when they evolve into actual flame war.
All in all, I think it's a decent system.
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
Flagging is a problem sometimes. I feel like it's common for a comment to get flagged when someone strongly opposes it. It's really upsetting to see that. Especially since it feels like the flaggers are a small minority, but they're shutting down discussions for everyone.
I remember pointing this out once on Reddit, before I deleted my account there, and it temporarily changed peoples' behavior resulting in more replies to disagreeable comments in either r/javascript or r/programming (I don't remember which). Most of the justifications that arose from down voting without a reply, supposedly a silent and anonymous form of disagreement, all summarized down to excuses about how writing anything takes too much time or a user's an inability to write an original comment. But then, in those users defense, Reddit feels like such an echo chamber.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...
This assumes all conversation is equal quality. That particular point has never been true in social media, and has actually become worse post-2016, with increased partisanship and bad faith arguing.
It's impossible to run a high-quality discussion forum without some sort of check on bad behavior. That said, it's up for debate whether downvotes are the best answer to this problem.
Secondly, there are two solutions to that problem:
1. If you believe the environment, group, or social body of a particular conversing venue is heavily biased, whether deliberate or not, you don't have to participate there. Simply leave.
2. If you believe a particular user is deliberately exercising some form of bad behavior or displays an inability to follow the conversation you don't have to reply to them. Simply let it die.
For example: whether or not I ever liked or voted for President Trump I would never spend time on Reddit at r/theDonald because I know conversation there is biased like a form of cult worship. Why bother conversing where you are not allowed to disagree on any matter?
What do you think HN does get wrong?
Phrasing it in a more positive way, what could you do to raise the quality of conversation on HN even higher?
So what presumably happened is that he noticed that philosophy, sound as it may be on paper, created a miserable atmosphere.
In a sense there's no way to structure a forum to avoid this. Being outnumbered by people who don't value open communication is unpleasant with or without downvoting. Forums that are highly specific to a small audience can last a long time. Popularity is the death-knell.
By leaving I would say over 180 days inactive. Dang can you post the result please:
SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100
My old handle has 25k. It has been inactive since I moved to this one.
Ah, Hacker News is too cool to use something as pedestrian as a database ;)
But there is a Google BigQuery dataset[0,1]. I don't know how up to date it is.
[0]https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-...
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502
I still visit daily because HN does a good job of surfacing interesting articles, but I used to find the comments more interesting than the stories themselves. That has changed in the last few years, as identity politics have taken hold. I can now accurately predict the content of many of the comments on a given story by simply reading its title. It's sad to see.
I was reading a somewhat controversial comment from you and then visited your account page probably to check for sibling comments in the same post. Your about me definitely changed how I feel about your comments and probably the source of your recent experience.
Beyond that, there's the relative difference between HN and places like 4chan. Nuance is helpful.
Something to consider; is it a harsh rebuke or just other people calling it as they see it?
I have stopped being offended by downvotes -- I am better at accepting them as opposing my viewpoint without having a better counter-argument. If a topic is controversial, I know it will attract downvotes, and I'm fine with insulting people who hold abhorrent views.
If you tone down the hyperbole a little, and write with less of a conspiracy minded tone, I suspect you will have far fewer downvotes; HN is rather libertarian leaning overall.
I also think reading the comments is rarely a good use of time. Just feels like the median discussion site in that regard.
That could well be because a lot of the downvotes I saw in your recent comment history were on outright political topics (Parler/Trump‘s ban from Twitter/…) It might help if you just stayed away from those if you otherwise enjoyed being active here?
I see a lot of "Why am I getting downvoted for this?", "Group think, downvotes, blah blah blah.", "I'm going to get downvoted for this but...", all of which are just magnets for more downvotes.
I think if you just stopped commenting on the downvoting, well, you'd still get the odd comment downvoted from time to time, because hey, you say things people don't like, you're going to get the downvotes, and yeah, people don't always explain why, which I know is annoying ... but you'd at least no longer be compounding it with the three or four follow-on comments that also all get downvoted, and your net karma would probably be fine.
It’s appropriate to talk about here because the voting system is the topic of this article.
I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. If this is allowed to go on, people will be afraid of making controversial (but intelligent) posts, and this place will become another reddit.
Every tool will be abused sometimes.
I think the voting system mostly works extremely well - the system needs to be viewed as a whole with all the compromises that includes, rather than drill down on one particular failure.
Sometimes people use voting for bad reasons — I know I have (though I am quite conscientious to try and learn to vote more carefully).
It is not possible to download posts on HackerNews, no matter how many karma you have. Did you mean comments? Because I think that actually one of the strongests points of HN that all posts will get equal footing. (they can be flagged though)
The best thing to do here is for the community to step in and actively up-vote unfairly downvoted comments.
It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal. Maybe give less weight to someone who rapid-fire downvotes comments faster than they could possibly read them?
Perversely, downvotes aren't available on comments older than 24 hours, but upvotes are, so comments that attract a mixture of up- and down-votes get a strong upward bias on votes they attract after a day (since the upvotes happen and the downvotes don't).
Not sure how relevant that effect is to more short-term issues, though.
Oh certainly, it's just that this seems eqally applicable to upvotes, hence why the asymmetry seems perverse.
Flagging operates similarly; as there is no reason attached to the flag it is simply 'dislike'. Slashdot's tags were much more nuanced.
This is insidious because it encourages people to be the first to say the least interesting thing in order to get rewarded with comment karma. Those comments bubble up to the top of the thread, where they're held aloft by more and more people who see their existing opinions restated.
Ultimately the reward structure encourages discussions where people are indulged, in the same way the punishment structure discourages people being challenged.
I'd say this effect is more pronounced on Reddit than HN, but you can see it here too.
I'm not looking for "edgy" comments, I'm just saying that it's more useful in the long run to upvote comments that provide new information or perspectives, or at least state a common sense position in a different, compelling way.
Partly this is a first-poster thing. If you post early, then you'll either get a lot of up or down votes. Take time to post, and well, might get nothing.
Slashdot's commenting/moderation system was exceptional.
Grateful to HN for the excellence of theirs.
I learned my lesson and try to only inject humor into otherwise useful comments on HN.
That is very real truth that according to the current narrative taking place in the comments here, many of you will downvote what I am saying because you don’t like... whatever it is you don’t like.
I have had children and paid off two mortgages since then. Explaining my point of view to the mob no longer has value to me.
When I gave up on slashdot I put a call out to my social circle for a replacement, and that's how I learned about HN! That was nearly a decade ago, and I'm still grateful!
They started a really good thing with the user moderation, I think meta-moderation and the vote-category dropdown are very smart, but they locked it down too hard and moderation was largely ineffective.
Incidentally at some point I stopped getting moderation points even though I was a frequent meta moderator. Whether that was due to meta moderation of my mods, I don’t know.
There were rumors of a blacklist and there was a thread which was closed down critical of either an admin or the site. I participated in the thread rather moderately IIRC, but that was around the time I never saw another mod point.
At least on HN, dang will tell you what he didn’t like about your behavior. dang is also outwardly cool with disagreeing with him, which isn’t true with everyone.
Rob Malda had a very strong pro free-speech stance and so the site developed this odd sub-culture early on that was very self-referential and filled with Slashdot specific memes. In fact Slashdot had memes before memes even became a widely used word. Natalie Portman+hot grits etc.
I think it attracted people who enjoyed the thrill of being able to "publish" anything at all. I am very skeptical those people actually said those sorts of things or even believed them in real life, because most of the racial troll posts were almost entirely template and extremely repetitive in meme-like ways, most of them were barely coherent: they weren't people genuinely trying to convince anyone of anything.
There was a second factor that I suspect was also 'encouraging' trolls at this time: Slashdot's combination of "We never delete a post for any reason", allowing anonymous comments and a very sophisticated moderation system turned it into a game for some people. There were people who just enjoyed trying to break the site by doing things that you don't see on any other forum. For instance there was a period where people kept coming up with creative abuses of Unicode to construct page widening posts, stuff like that. You had a lot of creative programmer types faced with something that was an utterly pure system, designed to stop abuse with no human-level decisions to beat, and no legal penalties for trying. So it turned into a form of lightweight hacking practice, both machine and social, without any actual legal risk.
These days people who enjoy finding exploits in computer systems for the sheer thrill of it have plenty of more profitable outlets, like the zero day hunt programs run by big companies. If someone were to try creating a new Slashdot and recapturing the glory days I think they'd be faced with a totally different set of problems.
You've quite well described my latest experienced with StackExchange sites that are very popular (like Stack Overflow). The downvotes rain for any question without feedback. A comment provides an answer, but not an "Answer" that can be pinned. Vague "Opinion based" flags are sometimes levied, but similar questions for different regimes are upvoted and given quality answers.
I suppose it's a kind of power trip to go around and mark questions as "duplicate" for even the most superficial nonsense-- I am looking at you, @gnat !
HN having a reasonably high karma threshold for downvoting was a great decision that guards against a lot of common problems. I think that feature, along with the community as a whole being very mindful about protecting the forum quality, plus Dang being an excellent moderator, have greatly contributed to keeping it strong for many years.
As for the thing you were banned for, do you feel like HN owes you the ability to make an account per comment?
For some people, simply rebooting their router gets a new IP. Others have to explicitly tell it to release the IP and then renew it. Others have to change their router's MAC address.
I know that personally, if I release it and renew it, I'll get assigned the same IP. Though my IP is technically dynamic, it hasn't changed in the 5 years I've been in this house. I haven't tried changing my MAC address, but with a previous ISP, I had changed my router's MAC and it wouldn't even get an IP at all until I changed it back. Makes me wonder what would happen if I had changed it to the MAC of a router being used by another customer...
On the other hand, the absence of upvoting keeps the comment at a neutral level. Its speed of losing visibility can't be unfairly accelerated, and so it has a chance at competing with comments of the same level.
You're not allowed to do that anyway. You can only upvote direct replies to a comment of yours.
I've been here for well over 10 years and this place has always been filled with complete buffoons and parasites.
The bias in favor of Apple is extreme. I genuinely don't know if the mods are actively paid off, if Apple astroturfs, or whatever. But it seems those threads are disingenuous. It's impossible to form evidence because good criticism of Apple is often deleted.
Meanwhile other threads are dumpster fires.
What's odd is how common it is, and how absolutely people are convinced that their particular strain of these contradictory generalizations is the accurate one.
I see political topics better debated and I'm radical.
It's just Apple comment threads. You know dang.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26794228
If you want to disagree with someone you can start your own post and many of the same people will “protect” your post from disagreement as well. It’s basically impossible to have an actual discussion in that environment.
[0] - Stupid as in the answer to their question is literally in the text of the post they’re responding to in the first place.
But that's not what they get, not even here on HN.
The high karma threshold is helpful, but I doubt raising it further would do much. Some qualitatively different vetting mechanism is wanted. Thought about the problem a lot, but so far reached only a few inchoate notions.
Hello Reddit. Unfortunately now I basically just use Reddit to browse and don't comment much, because of that behaviour
Having one upvote and 100 downvotes is the same as having 401 upvotes and 500 downvotes. Isn't that odd? One is a comment everyone hates and the other is a comment almost half of all people like.
This reads to me like charging people to pick up trash while they're out walking. Voting is a mini-act of trying to improve the site for others by sweeping trash comments down and out of others' way and lifting good comments up to prominence; who would pay to do that? Who would think it reasonable to expect people to pay to do it?
***FAQ***
What does this mean?
The amount of karma (points) on your comment and Red-I mean "hacker" "news" account has decreased by one.
Why did you do this?
There are several reasons I may deem a comment to be unworthy of positive or neutral karma. These include, but are not limited to:
*Rudeness towards other Posters,
*Spreading incorrect information,
*Sarcasm not correctly flagged with a `/s`.
Am I banned from the HN?
No - not yet. But you should refrain from making comments like this in the future. Otherwise I will be forced to issue an additional downvote, which may put your commenting and posting privileges in jeopardy. If you accrue enough down-votes, dang will be forced to hellban or IP-ban you, which will completely and permanently prevent you from using the website whatsoever (until you get another account and IP which takes like 2 minutes).
I don't believe my comment deserved a downvote. Can you un-downvote it?
Sure, mistakes happen. But only in exceedingly rare circumstances will I undo a downvote. If you would like to issue an appeal, shoot me a private message explaining what I got wrong. I tend to respond to PMs within several minutes. Do note, however, that over 99.9% of downvote appeals are rejected, and yours is likely no exception.
How can I prevent this from happening in the future?
Accept the downvote and move on. But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated on news.ycombinator.com. I will continue to issue downvotes until you improve your conduct. Remember: HN is privilege, not a right.*
>Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...
Why? He saw that users were too hesitant in downvoting which allowed bad content to grow and further degraded the site. Changing the downvoting mechanics fixed that.
(I don't know if there's been an update since 2011 to the downvoting system and incentives.)
I think the thing is though, HN and reddit don't give you options to remove these numbers because they have an effect. It's the nudge they give to people to adjust their contributions to be something the community actually wants. No shock these services are not offering options to turn that nudge off.
It might be nice of them to give the tally as class to make it easy to filter with a userstyle, though.
1: I really wish I could downvote Hacker News articles.
2: I really wish there was some friction to downvoting. Perhaps something like choosing among: disagree, factually wrong, mean, incoherent
Regarding the downvoting of articles: For awhile I used to see a regular pattern of weird articles on the front page. The discussion would then predictably involve a mod defending the article. IMO, I think downvoting an article would help in this situation.
It almost goes without saying, but that's how just about all online communities say the upvote/downvote buttons are to be used. Unfortunately no online community can be trusted to be mature enough to actually follow the rules. Not even HackerNews manages to robustly resist the downvoting of dissenting opinions.
> Keep a separate agree/disagree count for users who are curious.
That's an interesting idea, to my knowledge SoylentNews doesn't implement this. Having a two dimensional score, one for quality and one for popularity, might be effective in getting people not to abuse the quality feedback system.
I think it still has the feature... I just haven't used Slashdot enough over the past few years to moderate.
But, one of the things I like here is that you can vote in the same thread that you're posting in. (IE, I upvoted you because you reminded me where my idea came from.)
Just don't grey out comments for 2 hours or so to allow people to vote. It's fine to greyout comments after that.
I very often see the top comment on the page to be a thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong nor easily disagreed with, and thus incurring the most upvotes from simply being quick to read.
It serves both to manage the S/N ratio and to provide feedback to commenters on what the community sees as signal vs. noise.
> I very often see the top comment on the page to be a thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong
I don’t see that often on threads with substantial discussion. I suppose if that was a real problem, weighting upvotes by some measure of how relatively unfavorable the comment’s position is at the time upvoted would mitigate it.
No, it provides feedback as to what the community wishes to see as to better help those who care conform to it.
Absolutely useless, unimaginative comments that contribute nothing and state the obvious are seldom downvoted, so long as they not voice anything that disagrees with the voterbase, and may even be upvoted.
> I don’t see that often on threads with substantial discussion. I suppose if that was a real problem, weighting upvotes by some measure of how relatively unfavorable the comment’s position is at the time upvoted would mitigate it.
I went through your own list of comments and could find some greyed out comments that really had no business being greyed out and downvoted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815734
This is not noise, this is something someone disagreed with, for reasons I don't understand.
I've seen quite a fair bit of greyed out comments on H.N. that were accurate and informative, as the comments that truly do not belong are most likely removed by the moderators to begin with.
I believe that comments are most likely to be upvoted by users when they say something the user already agrees with without thinking, as such something that tells him nothing new. — the end result is that the least informative, most obvious comments tend to be the most upvoted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Scottopherson 5 minutes ago | unvote | parent | flag | favorite | on: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets ...
Don't feel bad that you didn't notice - I was reading HN for a long time before I realised that un-upvoting was possible.
Regarding anything else about how Hacker News works, I found this quite useful:
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...