Don't be a jerk
Recently someone asked a question here on HN. I answered, and while it didn't take long, it did take a moment or two of my time. Freely given.
Then the question was deleted. No thanks, no acknowledgement, no reply. Just summarily deleted.
In the grander scheme of things it's small fry, but it irritated me. They probably don't care. After all, who am I to them? But still, it rankled a bit.
People - don't be a jerk. If you ask a question and someone answers, say thank you. They've taken the time, does it cost you too much to be polite?
Or am I just completely out of touch with reality?
134 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadAlso that whole thing about the best way of finding good answers on the internet is not to ask questions, but to post wrong answers. I use that one a lot. It makes me look like an idiot, but golly do I learn a lot fast.
OTOH, it takes a certain confidence to let your mistakes hang out in public. There is this feeling that everyone on HN is constantly judging all other people so we need to "look smart." When I was younger I tried to hide mistakes to look smarter. It's a bad habit in general.
As a community I think we should encourage some kinds of mistakes.
Words to live by.
That's not an excuse. It's a total failure that I forget to say thank you properly whenever it's deserved (and even when it's not). It's something I am working hard to fix, but I still frequently mess up.
I don't expect people to say thank you when I answer a question. I used to, but that expectation was beaten out of me a long time ago. But I definitely appreciate it — it's a nice surprise — when someone does bother to say thank you, and I try to remember to always say thank you myself.
If I didn't say "please" or "thank you" every single time it was called for, my mother would have taken me out of this world (you know, since she brought me in to it) years ago.
I've noticed downvotes are trending now. The downvotes do correct themselves... most of the time. But there's a lot more frivolous downvoting due to the influx of people that have attained downvote privileges but haven't really shunned the mindset of other community sites that encourage that sort of thing. Eight years ago, pg wrote about a problem that may be happening here now: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/15n2/the_incontr...
It used to be that you could hold a contrarian opinion and not be at risk of being jumped on by the community or your position being misinterpreted. That seems no longer the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8143432
The person you responded to may have deleted their question because they're worried about how people might judge them for merely asking the question. Since HN consists of people you may be working with in the future, people have to be more concerned about choosing their words (and questions) carefully. It's not so easy to just speak your mind or ask innocent questions anymore when your identity is tied with your handle.
I don't know if there's a solution. There may not be another vibrant community of developers for another decade, for the same reason there isn't a second vibrant online auctioning site. Smart people are on HN because other smart people are on HN. The only solution I can think of is to resist letting irksome things irk you. Easier said than done, but it beats giving up.
I read the article and quoted exactly showing what I was talking about down voted again so that maybe people wouldn't see that they were actually wrong.
My favorite community right now is Google+ for R and VIM. Down votes are focusing on disagree and not constructive.
Personally, I upvote comments that I strongly agree with, and I don't think someone downvoting ones they disagree with is that big a jump.
I'd really like to see a list of controversial posts (many votes in both direction) to determine whether they are mostly matters of agreement/disagreement or if there is usually some less personal ground (e.g. expressing a factually wrong but popularly held belief, differing opinions on what adds to the discussion or not etc.)
This is a new account and I've found that it's surprisingly liberating to not have a downvote option. When I disagree with someone, I can either reply or I can just ignore the comment. Good content will sift to the top anyway through upvotes. I would be interested in discovering any issues behind such a system.
Maybe it'd be a good idea for the site admins to check the first 5-10 downvotes of someone who just received downvoting privileges, and if they're inappropriately used, take the downvoting privileges away from that person.
Now, at least there are plenty of HN users that are active looking at downvoted content, and bringing it back up if they think the downvote was unfair. This behavior could be used to evaluate frequent downvoters: If someone consistently downvotes comments that end up in the positives, then maybe their downvoting privileges should be revoked.
An algorithm like that should be pretty easy to tweak too: Start with removing, say, the bottom 1% in ranked downvoting quality, and alter it as needed.
The commenting ecosystem on the internet has always been a coarse and insensitive place, and it always will be. This is not a new thing.
There may have been an instance here or there of HN being coarse or insensitive, but it was the exception and not the rule. Evidently, that has reversed.
Basically you are asking for evidence of a counter theory that has never been required of the prevailing one.
Go to the early days of IRC, BBS and Mailing Lists and see what kind of flames flew around for just asking what other people considered lame.
HN community is really polite!
I'd recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKYJVV7HuZw
Then, if you liked it, listen to the entire speech that was the inspiration behind it (the video above is only a small section and I don't really like it but I put it first because I think it's more accessible than the entire thing for the uninitiated): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
I've never seen anyone used a "reprimand" yet, but rewards are used generously. Also, I periodically gives out a number of reward tickets that people can use to reward people, they're far superior than reprimand tickets, so I guess people think twice before reprimanding someone and losing the chance to reprimand someone else who really deserves it.
It's a smaller community so I don't know how it would do on Hackernews, but the power of words, etc...
ps: to give more info about how I do it, I also don't use upward/downward arrows. They would suggest a sorting of some sort. You can also reprimand multiple times someone, but he will only lose 1 point of karma. So you won't lose 20 points because of a comment.
It was so bad that pg even introduced a downvote floor (-5) to keep people from shedding hundreds of points of karma when the downvote brigade inevitably pounced. This simple change really helped with user engagement and breaking up some of the more fantastic group think here IMHO.
We're just seeing a different form of what HN has always had, but just on different topics. Just like the karma floor "fixed" the old downvote brigades, some kind of adjustment will probably fix what's going on these days.
Also see: Snowden is not a hero, Piracy is not ok & The NSA snooping is not so bad.
Would be nice if heavily downvoted comments (even if they were countered with even heavier upvotes) were reviewed once in a while and if they contained no 'bad' material the downvoters downvoting privileges would be rescinded.
- Snowden is a traitor: all hail secret laws! Burn the dissidents! All hail totalitarism! We should never be able to say to anyone what's wrong when we discover illegal and illegitimate actions!
- Piracy is not okay: leads to "we should stop piracy", which leads to horrible things like either "trusted computing" and willingly or not willingly executing malware on your own machines, or censorship and total global surveillance.
- The NSA snooping is not so bad: you discover that some government agencies have more power than the president of those countries (the intelligence community have the ultimate power to blackmail anyone and their mother), but it's not so bad, they are obviously "good people" so they don't misuse it.
When you are a hacker, you know that anything has flaws (especially humans) and that we don't live in the teletubbies world, so you can't trust an entity that has so much power.
Yeah, no wonder those opinions are shunned on HN.
I know I've been downvoted in the past for various innocent comments and have no idea why the groupthink thought that comment in particular had to die.
As has been observed here before, downvotes are often a normative function of the groupthink. But unless corrective action is suggested with the downvote, nothing normative can come out of it other than to not participate at all.
I don't know whether requiring comments for downvotes would help though - presumably if someone were willing or able to articulate the reason for their disagreement they would have done so. The last thing we need is for downvotes to be accompanied by threads full "idiot" and "shill," etc.
I don't think requiring a comment to downvote would work either. Of course if people did comment things like "idiot" and "shill", then those comments would rightly be downvoted for name-calling and personal attacks. That would just be a mess.
People care about this community, and they're sharing their opinions in good faith -- they're putting themselves out there. So I think a downvote should require at least an equal commitment -- maybe a downvote with an (anonymous?) comment of explanation....
Maybe the downvote-with-comment could also be downvoted (with that new downvote affecting the karma of the original anonymous down-voter?)
I do think it should start at -1 points and not 0 points, however.
Heaven forbid you treat Internet routing and content delivery like a business and try to align profit incentives with societally desired outcomes - the HN opinion seems to be that all Internet peering and access should be free to everyone (nevermind that a lot of companies make a lot of money off of it).
I'm of the opinion that posts should be upvoted whether you agree with them or not - if it's a well-spoken argument, it adds to the discussion. Good arguments strengthen everyone: if someone replies to your post with a well-worded argument that you have no answer for, someone else with more knowledge on the subject or a different perspective might have one that reinforces your position.
IMO there should be a "mod override" that allows moderators to set the floor on certain controversial posts to 1. This could ensure informative posts don't get buried just because the majority happens to disagree with the opinion presented. HN as a community is pretty good at encouraging discussion and avoiding groupthink, but it's still a problem on certain topics.
Asking a question many times ("what law has been broken?") is a form of trolling. You may not have meant it as such, but that may well be how it's seen. Since the EU privacy directive is explained in very many places across the Internet just asking questions is effectively concern trolling.
Most people (as far as I understand) downvote for a huge variety of reasons. Some are not acceptable by others. I trust the everybody knows WHAT a downvote is, so they are using it as best as they can.
I've been downvoted for my answers, when they were either politically different from some people OR they contained some form of bad language (e.g. irony). So all in all from I've seen, the downvoting system works fine as far as I can tell. If we had more options then might be better.
It's interesting to look at the group psychology of downvoting. The second something appears grey, a threshold has been crossed. A signal is raised. Everyone else who swings by sees a sort of implicit permission to downvote the comment, because it's already been downvoted, and hence, something about it must be worth downvoting. Before someone even reads the comment, they approach it with a downvote-ready mentality. You're conditioned to react negatively to a grey comment even before you read it, and that's a very powerful prompt.
HN self-corrects in a lot of cases, and that's interesting not only in the context of the Internet at large, but also in the context of human psychology. To read a greying comment with an open mind, and then go against the evident grain to re-upvote it, requires conscious and considered thought. It requires the activation of what Kahneman would call "System 2."[1] Most people don't vote in System 2; they vote in System 1.[2] HN seems to be different, and that's no small feat. It gives me hope, even if the trendline appears to be getting worse.
At the same time, I'm wondering if it's time for HN's admins to raise the karma threshold required for downvotes. Perhaps 500 (the commonly assumed number) is too low?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory
[2] I'd love to see a psychology study of internet commenting, whereby the study uses eye-tracking to determine if people actually read comments before casting a vote. My hypothesis is that upvotes usually follow the reading, while downvotes often precede the reading. Particularly if something is already grey.
Before that, only the most egregious comments would go below -2.
I guess that having a negative score was seen as a sufficient punition.
As far as I am concerned, "Do you want X? This is how you get X."
If Hacker News wants to have people care, it has to allow differing and terrible opinions. This is the very basis of the notion of freedom and free speech. When you censor the community, the community will suffer.
Note that upvoting and downvoting, especially when done via groups of people determined to make their comments be heard, can itself tend to become a type of censorship ( mass downvoting ). Votes should be purely for the benefit of the original authors of the comments being voted on; not to move content around.
It also seems to be the case that there are a lot less bans since dang became a public moderator, I only see them hitting new accounts that get mistaken for spam.
You're not completely out of touch, but it's unfair to put conditions on your answers. I recommend letting your kind deeds be their own reward and get on with your day.
Also, if it's a 1on1 discussion with someone via e-mail, skype, or some form of private message, I'll almost always say thank you. But if I put a question up on an open forum and one or more persons happen to respond I tend not to say thanks. I dunno why, it just doesn't seem to be common internet etiquette to do so. A quick google search on a couple big name technical help question sites shows that it's not very common for people to say thanks for open ended questions to the community.
Say thanks by upvoting.
this is why i am in the habit of top-quoting my replies if i put any effort or thought into it. when people are wrong, embarassed, or let something slip they shouldn't have, they're likely to delete. it's just human nature.
When you click the down arrow, it wouldn't apply immediately, but would first show you a text box for explaining the downvote (this would be just like the "Add Comment" page).
The explanation would not be publicly displayed anywhere, but would be accessible to moderators. This could be an effective filter against frivolous downvotes.
Also name calling everyone that doesn't adhere your cultural rules is quite mean from my perspective.
Maybe they erased the post by accident? How do you know that your answer solved their issue or was relevant? You might think that was the case but it might not be.
In general, I think this is a extremely silly.
I had instances where I would post about cloud infrastructure and somebody would crawl out of their hole to 'educate' me on colocation, thinking they are solving a ground breaking issue.
Someone is gently, politely, pointing out that the line "welcome to the Internet" is going to cause you problems and your response is to bicker?
There is absolutely nothing serious about the first line. The rest of the post clearly indicates it.
Reminds me of people who will show up to threads featuring proof of concept implementations and comment on how the code lacks unit testing.
Sorry, human beings do not work that way. If you have anything worth saying, you can say it nicely.
Maybe you shouldn't have included that line, then. The comment would not have suffered in any way from being shorter.
I think in many senses, HN is a first generation response to how to get a bunch of people who don't really know each other to have a decent conversation in a low context environment.
But that shouldn't be an excuse for any of us to refrain from providing feedback, insight, and advice online. In fact, we should continue to do so with the understanding that our time in producing that comment/content is volunteered.
And of course, on the other side, we should strive to retain the record of the communication chain if we are the original posters. Deleting a comment is your choice, but it's probably good practice and behavior not to.
While you might think your advice is 'good', other people might not. Nobody will thank you for bad advice.
There are way too many factors when it comes to communication on the internet.
Not everything falls under 'he did not thank me BECAUSE he is a jerk'.
Etc.
As for downvotes, I reserve that for obvious trolling and overly snarky comments that just seem to be aimed at stirring the pot. I have noticed that some genuinely funny comments or puns based on the discussion get downvoted, which I disagree with. It may not add to the intellectual value, but I enjoy a good laugh as much as I enjoy learning.
I would agree with some of the sentiments here that the person probably deleted their question out of fear that they would "look dumb". I think experience has taught me that while Im not the smartest person out there, when something doesnt make sense to me, there is usually someone else that doesnt get it either. Ive also learned that people that react poorly to "stupid questions" are probably feeling defensive of their own knowledge/incompetence.
Anyway, I agree Colin, there is basic courtesy that if you are asking for help, it should be acknowledged and thanked when its provided. Nobody knows everything, and asking for help isnt a bad thing. So OWN your questions folks!!!
I suppose it's a challenge to maintain this sort of pattern as a community scales, which is why sites like HN, Reddit, StackExchange, etc. all try to incorporate incentives and constraints into the mechanics of discussion to attempt to reinforce certain styles of participation, with varying success. In this situation, a simple mechanic to prevent people from doing what OP is complaining about would be to prevent comments from being deleted once they've been replied to.
It bugs me when I see long streams of deleted comments on Reddit, too - it'd be an interesting experiment to treat posts and comments in a discussion forum like wiki pages - freely editable at any time by the poster, but with the full edit history always available to see.
I used to constantly crack jokes to one of my work colleagues, yet she hardly ever laughed at them. One day I uttered a joke which she merely scorned at, a few minutes later another colleague uttered exactly the same joke and she started giggling. At that I moment I realised that she was deeply prejudiced towards me. It would explain why she would often shout at me, insult me and even threaten me with violence.
My humour served a very serious purpose, it exposed someone as being an emotional sadist.