Thank goodness we don't have downmods on HN
And then it hit me: downmodding is not ignoring. Neither is upmodding everything else. Sure, there's some imaginary value of pushing it off the front page quickly, but if people naturally upmod the things they like, it will drop off the front page in due time.
Trying to accelerate that process for things I don't like is getting emotionally invested in them. Why give them the time of day? The very best use of our time is working on the things that matter. Downmodding stuff is not working on things that matter.
Thinking about good posts isn't either, but it's a lot closer to things that matter.
I'll stop now. My thesis is this: not having a downmod button is a good thing if you believe that you should be channeling your time and energy into things that matter.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadI suggest that if the library has a few titles you don't like, going without a downmod button is a good thing, just ignore them and move along.
But if the library is overrun with bad titles, giving everyone a downmod button won't solve the problem, because the problem is caused by the librarians.
What I do believe is that content can get better if people actively submit more articles (so spending a little more energy in the site), not only by voting the articles in the new queue.
Anyway I have the feeling that the quality of articles in the site isn't always getting worse... these days I'm quite happy about it.
There is a parallel in behavioral psychology: punishment can be a powerful tool, but can often backfire. So positive reinforcement is seen by many as the preferred tool.
Apparently a lot of this has been addressed on reddit with some clever code. I think it's far cleverer to just leave the feature out!
At first this would cause a karma hit, so I tried a workaround: after my submissions peaked, I would delete them and this would present a smaller surface area for revenge attacks.
This turned out to be a bad idea because it deprived reddit of the history. So I switched to a new tactic: I simply stopped participating in the forums and started submitting things under a nom de plume.
I think that they have changed things so that revenge downmods do not affect karma, but it doesn't matter to me. I stopped one day and asked myself why I was bothering to worry about my reddit karma?
Then I asked why I was bothering with reddit?
Then I closed up the nom de plume and HN is the only such site I visit. And let me tell you, I am a far, far happier man for it :-)
Between P and P + H, where P is when the submission was Posted and H is some (constant?) number of hours, any downmods on the submission increment the downmod count but this has no effect whatsoever on the ranking. When we hit P + H, the downmods are made effective. An upmod on a story cancels a downmod.
Then if a story has lots of inappropriate early downmods but is actually interesting, it will get high on the front page and the mass of legitimate upmods will cancel the illegitimate downmods.
Showing the number of effective downmods (abs (- downmods upmods)) on a story might or might not be appropriate.
Let's look at the ability to upmod a submission. Upmodding a submission expresses approval of the submission, and signals to other users that it might be something that they would find interesting. Ultimately, the goal of upmodding is to increase the perceived quality of the site.
Downmodding expresses disapproval of a submission, and, again, its ultimate goal is to increase the perceived quality of the site.
While downmodding is vulnerable to a certain amount of gaming, that is a problem with its mechanics, not its principle, and upmodding is vulnerable to the exact same form of gaming.
If poorer quality items tend to get upmodded, and if there's no way to counter that, then the site's quality falls and eventually the site itself becomes the sort of waste of time that you're talking about.
Regardless, downmods aren't likely to be implemented at any point in the near future, and this entire discussion is a waste of time. I'm a little annoyed at myself for participating, but ... y'know ... someone on the internet was wrong. [http://xkcd.com/386/]
[Edit] P.S.: You miss your blog, don't you? :-)
As to convincing myself, I am now convinced :-)
No. Exchanging ideas like this is not the same thing as blogging, no matter how much Web 2.0 people call the Internet a "conversation."
> Downmodding expresses disapproval of a submission, and, again, its ultimate goal is to increase the perceived quality of the site.
Don't have much experience with people, do you?
People have multiple, often inconsistent goals. Improving someone else's site may be one of them, but it's rarely the highest.
Fun property of a system with upmod and downmod: If every user mentally assigns a target score to a post (eg.: that comment should be worth 7 points) and votes always in the direction to reach the target, then the resulting score will be the median of all the targets. Statistically. That seems like a desirable goal, so maybe one should encourage people to vote that way.
I have this experience too, even for comments. On reddit, where downmodding a comment makes its down-arrow blue, it increases my attachment to it (partly because it makes them more visible - unlike HN's greying out).
Every so often on reddit, I'll downmod to express my frustration, but then later put it back to neutral, because I don't want to be attached to it. I rarely downmod - and it even more rarely stays. I think this approach is not common.
Is the issue of downmodding front-page because of the quality of recent HM articles? I'm finding HN less interesting over the past week or so (one symptom is the many recent meta-comments - including this one, unfortunately). I was thinking it's due to the US holidays...
[thesis]: not having a downmod button is a good thing if you believe that you should be channeling your time and energy into things that matter.
I agree. It's a bit like positive thinking, in that by attending to things that can help you, when you need something you have at your fingertips useful things - as opposed to filling your mind with things you don't like, when you reach for something, all you have is rubbish (or worse, arguments for why something isn't worthwhile).
But then there's the problem: what if HN starts suggesting many articles that don't help you?
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He's talking about "inappropriate for the site" submissions, not "poor quality" submissions - but I think the same reasoning applies.
Perhaps the solution isn't a downmod button, but for the community to change its response? To ignore bad submissions instead of commenting on how bad they are. Commenting just draws attention to the submission and contributes to the problem.
I think there's a deeper philosophy here, that it would be worth hearing more about...
Their motivations are probably different, at least, and comments are moderated by other people interested enough to read a particular thread's comments, while front page posts affect everyone equally.
I probably would have written it up as a draft, left it for a few hours, then deleted it as not being a net positive for what I was trying to accomplish.
And about up and down buttons, current social news system are still inefficient and primitive. Consider this scenario: HN has two non-overlapping audiences, one English-speaking and the other Japanese. Now consider every front-page being equal parts Japanese and equal parts English, with the same articles but in both language. Can you provide a good reason for having up/down buttons or not having any? Any group of a considerable size will find itself coalescing into mini pools of interest, no matter how narrowly you define the group interest (Hackerese, in this group's case). The most desirable scenario is probably one that has the right balance of topic diversity, excluding irrelevant (unless you are interested in learning Japanese) ones. In that case, we are talking about some form of personalized news...so yeah, up and down vote buttons in their current state are like the reply button when browsing using an email client.
Well, I have never stopped "transmitting information," there is just a change in my strategy.
The benefit of Hackers News is the /users/, one only has to look at Digg to see where that goes once you open the flood gates beyond the social geek core.
i rarely use point because it's an easily gamed metric
nowaday i filter news based on #comments (and title)
and only follow comments with <= 3 levels deep (5 if interesting)
and start searching /pg /paul /nickb if it's a >50+ comments
Maybe I'm alone in not finding a lot of value in meta-discussion unless pg initiates it, though, because I see the parent post has quite a few points.
I know it is true for me, there are lots of popular posts that suprise me. That being said, I have no problem whatsoever with adding your suggested rule to the HN rules.
It would be much easier to understand than the curent "piques your intellectual curiosity and is not limited to hacking and startups."
If a terrible idea/post/rant makes it on to the frontpage there are obviously some people that need the wisdom of this crowd to set them straight.
I love that HN is about positive energy. We don't downmod we explain why something shouldn't be upmodded any more.
(But spam does still get to the front page of HN)