From the article: "Cheng and co began by compiling a dataset of the comments associated with news articles on four online communities: CNN.com, a general news site; Breitbart.com, a political new site; IGN.com, a computer gaming news site; and Allkpop.com, a Korean entertainment site. The data includes 1.2 million threads with 42 million comments and 114 million votes from 1.8 million different users." I would respectfully suggest that the comments from news readers on news sites may not be a dataset that generalizes to discussion and news aggregation sites like Hacker News, especially because Hacker News starts us out with a set of user guidelines[1] particularly geared to encouraging sustained user participation in thoughtful discussion. There is also a welcome message for new users here[2] (I forget how it is implemented, as I am such an old user that I think I joined HN before it was implemented) that packages the rules in a slightly different format.
In other words, most of the time when I am downvoted here, what I ask myself is, "How could I have rewritten that comment to make it more clear or more persuasive," or sometimes, "Was that really a constructive addition to the discussion here?" I'm not generally spoiling for a fight or crushed in my self-esteem after being downvoted here. As far as I know, that happens to almost everyone here sooner or later. It sure has happened to me over the years
On my part, I downvote some comments, for reasons suggested in the welcome message, but I try to make sure that my upvotes predominate over my downvotes. And I don't keep an enemies list. If someone makes a thoughtful comment, they get an upvote, period, even if they disagreed strenuously with me just hours before. The idea here is to help good comments gain enough attention to promote thoughtful discussion in all good senses of the word "thoughtful." Maybe Hacker News is just plain different from most news discussion websites.
Although the level of discourse on HN is (in some ways) better than your average article-comment-section, I think the reason negative feedback cycles don't happen as much here as they might elsewhere is just the minimum number of posts before you can even downvote. You have to carry a grudge a long way to get to act on it here.
The low volume of users on this site also makes it unappealing to children, so you are far less likely to interact with them. Places like reddit and IGN have very different demographics. Who you expect to read your comment and who actually is reading it are very different in larger communities.
One thing that probably helps here is that HN doesn't use avatars and visually de-emphasises the username - if I don't specifically look for it I usually have no idea who I'm replying to.
Perhaps a better way to make upvoting/downvoting work better would be to use rules such as some of the ones described on r/NeutralPolitics [1]. Here's the summary:
> Downvoting: reserve downvotes for posts that are explicitly breaking subreddit rules. Do not downvote someone simply because you disagree with them.
> Upvoting: legitimate evidence, solid reasoning, or respectful discourse; Upvote someone admitting that they are wrong. Upvote outstanding use of logic where evidence can’t be had
That seems to prevent - at least in theory - the whole hivemind behavior. You don't upvote/downvote because you agree, but because you see that there's something good about it, whether or not you share the same point of view.
> That seems to prevent - at least in theory - the whole hivemind behavior.
It might, if "legitimate" evidence, "solid" reasoning, and "respectful" discourse weren't all subjective terms where people's subjective impression will be substantially influenced by agreement/disagreement with the thesis of the post.
I think the reason this behaviour disagrees with traditional ideas about negative reinforcement and punishment is because those theories were built on hierarchical relationships (someone's in charge and doles out conditioning action). If the person receiving the punishment accepts the right of the person doling it out to do so, even if they resent it, they will accept its validity more readily. Also, if they feel unjustly punished, they will focus their ire on the authority rather than the community as a whole. This kind of thing can easily be seen in forums where there is a hard line between moderators and moderated.
When people feel attacked by their whole community (which is what a slew of negative votes feels like), it seems like they'd be far more likely to lash out at that community as a whole, and that means throwing out increasingly antisocial posts and attacking people with downvotes themselves.
> Curiously, authors that receive no feedback, are more likely to leave the community entirely.
Ding ding ding.
I think, aside from the issues with downvoting, upvoting by nature slowly creates hivemind, circle jerk communities that quickly start to lack any real critical thinking.
Go check out just about any subreddit and it becomes very apparent what illogical silly ideas dominate. If you are logical but uncontroversial you'll get ignored which is just as bad as the controversial opinions which get downvoted to hell. You start to wonder if the confirmation bias we are all building towards is more dangerous than just being uninformed.
There's lots of research on voting behavior in political science, I'm slightly surprised more hasn't been down with it.
Why go to a different site? You can see the "hivemind, circle jerk communities" phenomenon right here. I'm not trying to be cynical but HN certainly displays the same criticism you levy on reddit (as does apparently any community that allows voting).
Absolutely. But if I had said that I wouldn't be getting sweet Internet points right now.
I joke. Reddit is the best example, I think because of how subreddits usually follow a very specific cycle of creation to focus on a specific topic, then the upvoting dynamic creates a strong hivemind, then the dissenters leave and create their own even more narrowly focused community (see /r/politics to /r/conservative), and then it starts over.
It's destructive. HN is a little better because there are actually some limits on democracy if you will (thresholds, flagging, etc), which goes back to the heart of my mention of political science. Different political philosophers have been discussing the dangers of overly simple voting scheme since Plato or earlier.
> But if I had said that I wouldn't be getting sweet Internet points right now.
Yes, you would. Criticizing and complaining about HN is popular on HN.
I think you nailed it though, it's the "points" thing. You're creating an incentive for people to desperately say witty things to get more points, but when people forcefully try to be witty or helpful they end up being formulaic in the worst way ... they find patterns that people almost always approve of and use that.
I wonder what would happen if you actually hide all the numbers ... all karma/etc is still there, just not visible to the user.
I think for one thing it would cut down on the phenonenom I've noticed here where slightly controversial comments are immediately downvoted, but which then are upvoted back to full visibility. There seems to be a dedicated core of HNers who zealously and frequently downvote any comment that's not directly related to hard-core technology issues (there may be other motives, I've not examined the patterns carefully). These quick dowvotes are often enough to cause some feelings of ill-will that persist through the rest of the exchange.
I think limiting the number of available downvotes would drastically reduce these quick downvotes, which would be a good thing.
How about downvotes costing you karma? Warm fuzzy upvotes wherever you like (limited only by how long you want to spend doing so), but harming someone else via downvote only available if you're committed enough to lose a karma point of your own. The "pile on the crappy post" is easy when it's free, but sometimes downvoting is personally important enough to do even if it costs something.
what it comes down to is people here don't present easily dismissible notions for my above average intelligence to ignore; those on reddit do.
Not having a downvote is valuable.
Limiting max score is valuable.
but people still abuse overrated/troll/flamebait on Slashdot.
the core of the problem is that truly intelligent people have moved on to greater aspirations than internet posting. Also, the dumb people on forums these days are a lot dumber than they were 15 years ago when I was getting started. And no, that's not just my perception in hindsight. The noise has gotten bad enough that I just don't participate in them. People don't see clearly like they used to, so it's not worth pointing.
Can you point out some "hive mind" ideologies here on HN?
I think we actually strike a pretty good balance. There are clearly large contingents of Apple, Google, and Microsoft fans/employees, all of whom tend to balance each other out. Then there is a large group of younger civil libertarians/libertarians as well as a large group of liberals. And then there is a large group of older, traditional "MIT-style" hackers.
I guess that there is some technophile group think that goes on, and it's true that among the SV contingent, there's a certain amount of ignorance about the state of the country outside of Silicon Valley. But all in all, I think there are enough counterbalancing ideologies and interests here on HN that the hive mind tends not to occur to the same extent as on subreddits, which are by definition single-interest groups.
I'm not sure why you say that. I see that a few comments you made about the paleo diet were probably unfairly downvoted. But some of your more controversial comments, like on H1Bs, were rigorously debated, with lots of people on either side.
Why would you make a comment like that seeking to make fun of what I wrote? It definitely doesn't further the conversation. Are you hoping to shut it down?
And if you disagree so strongly, tell me why. I'd like to know.
Edit: Seriously, what are you laughing at? My criticism of Silicon Valley or my defense of HN's relative balance?
> Can you point out some "hive mind" ideologies here on HN?
Sure. See any comments relating to "idea guy" vs "hacker" or "founder" vs "employee."
The hivemind attitude that I see on HN could be summarized by "People who can write code should be given preferential treatment."
Which makes sense, given by and large, people who participate here have some sort of coding capabilities, so that mentality is clearly self serving. But hardly makes this balanced, and not hive-minded.
I think this[0] thread is a pretty good example of a hive mind in action. I disagree with a lot of those comments but I would have had to put a lot more effort to write a dissenting comment than most other commenters just to have a chance of not being downvoted into oblivion. But I can easily imagine lots of one sentence comments I could have made that would have been at worst ignored.
Frankly, people concerned about surveillance and civil liberties is a hive mind I'm proud to be a part of. We're definitely a very small minority in our respective countries, so no argument can be made that we're part of some oppressive majority.
Your description of balance illustrates the problem.
Lets say you have two groups of people, one of which thinks you should put sugar in bread, and the other which thinks putting sugar in bread is blasphemous. On the issue of sugar in bread, you will get a rigorous debate for the affirmative and negative.
However, if someone posts something to the effect of "Humans shouldn't be eating bread", both of those groups of people will vote that comment down, regardless of the argument presented.
Apple, Google and Microsoft fans all agree that computers and software are 'good things', it is the implementation details where they disagree, so any dissenting opinion to common ground that those groups share will be prejudicially downvoted into oblivion.
It is this common ground where group think is created and reinforced.
That's a pretty fair criticism, and I have to agree with everything that you write here. But I don't see any way around that. I can't imagine a general interest site could possibly function like HN.
About 18 months ago I stopped posting regularly on HN after my former account was downvoted into a type of purgatory that was impossible to escape from. I still read the interesting articles and the occasional interesting discussion, but something I discovered in the intervening period of participating in unmoderated/uncensored forums is that trolls make you THINK.
There are some exceptional trolls out there on the interwebs, some of whom do it as a day job. They post articulate but specious arguments that are very difficult to debunk unless you do meticulous research, double check your calculations, edit your reply for succinctness, remove any possible semantic ambiguity.
I think there is an argument to be made for the stimulating effect of trolls on the rigour and effort of the opposing participants. I agree however that trolls can and have destroyed valuable forums of discussion, but so has lack of interest.
>something I discovered in the intervening period of participating in unmoderated/uncensored forums is that trolls make you THINK
Some trolls make you think. Some trolls only hope to destroy online communities, and they are usually very good at it. It can be very hard sometimes to differentiate between the two.
Also, it's entirely possible to make people think without trolling (and I know you weren't claiming this). For example, your response to my remark made me think without being trollish. I personally prefer to participate in communities that promote your type of provocative comment, and not in ones where trolls are given free reign. But that's just me.
I agree with what you say. There is a fine line, however, between censuring trolls and suppressing dissent. I think anonymous downvoting and no right of reply, risks the latter to gain the former.
Exactly. I spent a couple weeks building up my little HN points once. Then I made a comment like "That was a very interesting article!" and was downvoted to hell. I asked why, and that was downvoted to hell. Negative karma after working on positive for two weeks.
So fsck you very much you guys. Every last one of you with your little down vote button. Now when I feel the urge to post here, I create a single use throwaway account, say whatever I feel like, and then log out.
HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.
I'm sorry you were downvoted with no explanation, I'm sure that sucked after gaining positive karma.
As you may know, what you ran into there were two foundational ideas in HN culture, which are:
1. Don't post "trivial" comments that are common on Reddit, like "+1", "thanks for that!", "interesting article!". HN tries to maintain a very high signal to "noise" ratio by discouraging these kinds of comments, and I actually appreciate it, since reading through lots of those types of comments makes it difficult to focus on comments meant to foster further discussion, or to inform.
2. It's an official guideline not to complain about being downvoted. Your comment asking why you were downvoted may have been interpreted as complaining about being downvoted. If you were just asking why, I'm sorry you were downvoted and that no one bothered to explain.
Every online community has its quirks, and you just happened to run into two of them with your comments in that post. Personally, I've never worried too much about accumulating points on HN. I just try to post informative comments, or comments meant to provoke discussion, and things have gone well.
Again, sorry you were downvoted for asking a simple question. I'd not do that.
> Negative karma after working on positive for two weeks...I create a single use throwaway account, say whatever I feel like, and then log out.
> HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.
The problem isn't HN and the hivemind. The problem here is you. You still care about the points (or rather the consequences of them) because you take the trouble to create a throwaway account, so that when your post is upvoted, or downvoted, you don't feel tied to it.
If you truly didn't care you would either:
1) stop posting on here altogether
2) not care about what others thought of your comments, and stop using throwaway accounts.
> Can you point out some "hive mind" ideologies here on HN?
I have a problem with HN voting conceptually, compared to Slashdot - on Slashdot, you were supposed not to downvote a comment that you disagree with. The purpose of upvotes and downvotes was to facilitate discussion. On HN, the policy seems to be - if you agree/disagree, upvote/downvote (although I am not sure it's official, that's what I have been told, I may have been trolled :-)).
I too prefer your the Slashdot approach, and there's quite a few of us on HN who vote in that way. However, since there's no official policy on that, it can go either way (even though PGs writings seem to strongly support your approach).
> I think, aside from the issues with downvoting, upvoting by nature slowly creates hivemind, circle jerk communities that quickly start to lack any real critical thinking.
I don't think voting has anything to do with it. I think that people's natural tendency to (1) imitate others that they respond to positively, and (2) seek out communities where there are people they respond to positively and where people respond to them positively, and avoid other communities, tends to lead to communities of likethinkers, especially when the cost to leave or join communities is low the way it is online.
This is certainly true, but it is exacerbated by how these systems are designed. Flat text forums, which have problems of their own, don't specifically discourage you (your post sinks to the bottom) if you have an opinion which doesn't fit the community's "correct" mindset.
It doesn't happen mechanically, but I think you get about equivalent social behavior - for example Metafilters orders posts by time rather than popularity but there's a great deal of social policing that goes on there and piles upon opinions that are at variance with community norms.
Yep, definitely noticed that on reddit and here. I'd say having votes is positive overall for bigger communities but when everyone's optimizing for votes, it subtly changes the nature of the comments. That's not neccessarily negative but it sometimes seems to have a similar effect as when people are in front of a camera.
I visit one community website about linux (non-english) that doesn't have voting and I really like the natural, down-to-earth discussions and arguments (usually about current issues, politics, etc.).
I think the concept of being able to see your "points" at all is non-constructive for communication. Why should it matter to you if other people up or down vote your comments and submissions? So through a knee-jerk feedback mechanism you can best mold your future communication to fit with what will get you the most points?
If the purpose of commenting and submitting is not to amass the most "points" possible then they shouldn't be displayed.
On that topic, I wonder how difficult it would be to make a bot which used machine learning to scan through comments to pick up phrases or words which were highly voted, then have it put together comments based on those.
I can't find it right now, but there was a link a few months back that did some kind of text analysis for the most-"popular" HN users or so. Anybody else a clue what I'm thinking about?
Forums with good moderation solve those problems. A nice example is rpg.net.
Traditional linear forums are still the best format for in-depth discussion, IMO. Threads actually stick around for more than a day or two. Just compare gamedev.net to /r/gamedev.
It felt like there was an inflection point around '96 or '97 when Usenet really dried up and web-based forums became the most common way to discuss things on the Internet. I blamed it on Slashdot at the time but I think it was inevitable as more and more people got on the Internet.
I really feel like we lost something though. Newsreaders provided a much better way to engage in the kinds of conversations that people have on place like HN or even Reddit. To this day I don't know of any web forums that offer the conveniences of newsreaders like tin or slrn. I miss killfiles (and plonking!) and really, really, really well-maintained FAQs on just about anything.
I'm not sure how much of my Usenet nostalgia is just remembering the good stuff. It may not have been as great as I remember, but it sure seemed like it at the time. I learned so much from it, from so many people in so many different newsgroups. Maybe that's what places like HN are to larval hackers today.
Well, discussion forums incite somewhat different types of posts than news sites (which are the primary case for peer-vote moderation for whatever reason). And top-down moderation is also quite different. So yeah, I agree those don't have that specific problem.
i agree with both you and stormbrew, if only there were another way. i personally dont like HN's system much either, one that ensures submitter can downvote those who disagree with them while the majority of readers cant down-vote back. also on HN, you commonly get down voted simply because they disagree with your opinion.
maybe the best way is to simply ditch the whole karma/popularity system all together. you can up a comments contribution to an article, but it ends there.
The person who got downvoted isnt stuck with a scarlet letter and put on probation to repair their 'karma' simply because they had a different way of looking at things.
I work for a gaming website that lets people vote on the games and comment. It's mostly a younger audience (under 18) but there's still a good amount of all ages.
Anyway, we released a game one day and some of the first comments were really negative, even though the game was objectively a pretty darn good game. Knowing the game was good I was awaiting the nice comments to show up, but they didn't. It was just a flurry of negativity.
I talked to some other employees and they agreed the game was good and something felt off. We all jumped into the comments, gave good reviews of the game and started discussions with all the negative reviewers. Then the positive reviews started showing up, and the games rating did a complete turn around to overwhelmingly positive.
I feel like if we hadn't intervened, the game would have continued to have negative reviews and end up with a bad rating. There's a kind of hive mind mentality going on, and the first public comments have some sort of psychological effect on the rest of the players.
Just a thought: understandably, with a younger audience, I imagine that most of your users are not going to be conscious or care about conflicts of interest. I am curious though, did you and your fellow reviewers disclose your roles in your reviews?
I don't think that your case is particularly malicious or anything, but it makes me wonder how easily similar tactics could be used in larger websites or about more serious topics. Thinking along these lines, it feels very "real" how quickly things like payola came about in past media formats, and how what was old is new once again.
As much as the other comments here might disagree, HN is subject to the same situation.
Early comments dictate the tone and focus of the conversation.
For example, its trivial to highjack any thread about security with a well written comment about the connection (however fleeting) to the NSA/snowden leaks.
I have frequently seen a thread begin with ill-informed, substanceless dismissal, and then turn around and produce a well-reasoned and informative discussion. That's one of the reasons I visit HN regularly, but not any other discussion site.
Whenever I comment here, I usually consider a bunch of different factors:
Is my comment necessary? Will it teach anybody anything? Did somebody else already make my point?
All in all, I try my hardest _not_ to comment. As a general rule, I won't participate in communities that value one-liners. A basic respect for thought is enough to make one community far better than another.
Just today I was over-listening a conversation about body hair that essentially amounted to "hair is there for protection," and all I could think was "what does that mean? What 'protection'? Do you even know what you're talking about?" It seems like the _entire_ point of that conversation was to find something to laugh about, and that the thoughts didn't even matter. They could have talked about anything. As soon as laughs were had, subjects changed.
If only voting represented quality and usefulness. Unfortunately, it's most of the time emotional. Throw in conformity and political correctness, and you have a powerful tool serving both.
Slashdot's metamoderation system is a pretty good approach to preventing users from mis-using their upvotes and downvotes. (Unfortunately, Slashdot's comment moderation system is flawed in other ways, so the benefits of metamod are hard to evaluate objectively. Also, metamod probably won't help for any site where trolling is the dominant culture, which describes most "comment sections" you'll find on the Internet.)
I'm a math teacher and I saw a weird hivemind effect recently. A student was showing a proof, but I felt one of the steps seemed wrong (I wasn't sure). So I asked everyone else if it was right. They responded with a chorus of "yes" "of course" and a little laughing. Eventually the proof ended up showing something that was not true. So I went back to that step and again asked for confirmation. Again most of them agreed. I wrote the formula to be sure: log(A+B) = log(A) * log(B). Eventually one student with a different text book had looked it up and found it's wrong after all. How had most of the others been so confident that it was right? Surely they hadn't actually learnt it wrong. They must have been making their decision on some other factor, perhaps the fact that all their vocal classmates agreed.
At least they weren't giving negative feedback to the one who made the original mistake though. So I guess he won't continue to make worse mistakes as this article suggests.
The students were conforming. As this paper [1] explains, people -- especially young people -- will often answer incorrectly in order to gain social acceptance:
"...the group answered incorrectly on purpose; it appears that when we are unsure of how to perform a task or how to behave, we may take comfort in agreeing with a large number of other people."
Not only do authors of negatively-evaluated content contribute more
So empty vessels really do make the most noise.
That points to an obvious strategy for improving the quality of comments on any social network site. Clearly, providing negative feedback to “bad” users does not appear to be a good way of preventing undesired behaviour.
I'm not seeing such a strategy from the paper's findings. It suggests several ways to limit bad behavior, but since positive feedback doesn't seem to improve quality of comments or posting frequency, I'm getting the strong impression that the overall tone of an online community is set early on in its life, and while it can easily degrade over time there is not a whole lot you can do to improve it.
So how can unwanted behaviour be stopped? “Given that users who receive no feedback post less frequently, a potentially effective strategy could be to ignore undesired behaviour and provide no feedback at all,” say Cheng and co.
This is pretty difficult to implement, though, since it only takes two people to start a flamewar. All I can think of is very proactive moderator pruning, which would a) become a full-time job and b) creates problems of its own as people start howling about censorship.
I've seen this in the "social network" of code reviews where I work. A "downvote", i.e. a negative comment, often has the opposite effect of the one intended by the reviewer. The code author will dig in their heels and over time contribute lower quality code. Alas, I don't have the luxury of simply ignoring lurking bugs.
> “We find that negative feedback leads to significant behavioural changes that are detrimental to the community,”
I really hope the sites that have downvotes don't take this to heart. There are massive benefits that the authors completely overlooked.
It allows the community to rapidly bury garbage content, and because of this, the pool of potentially good content (with few upvotes) is much smaller and less daunting for the users to sift through, which allows more good content to rise to the top.
Although downvotes don't help provide feedback to the users, allowing them can provide an immense amount of feedback for the operators of the community.
You need a certain amount of positive feedback relative to negative feedback, and if you monitor that ratio, you can have a good pulse on the quality of your community. If you are not maintaining a high ratio of positive to negative feedback, you can take action to increase positive feedback in meaningful ways. You can also use provided negative feedback to tailor interactions. Someone downvotes a particular thread? Don't notify them of any future discussion on that thread if you otherwise would have, etc...
Online arguments tend to be long, degenerate, and quickly form opposing camps that will war in other threads too. I think that's (informally) very well known. And a down-vote is a potentially significant indicator that an argument is taking place.
But I think the authors are a little naive if they think the site-owners are not aware (and in some cases, counting on) this.
For many sites, it seems to be the arguments and battles that drive activity. As if to the site-owner, a (moderate) ding-dong battle is "increased engagement, even from the people who disliked the content" rather than something they necessarily want to stamp out.
Voting is basically used as a form of censorship in almost every community on the Internet, including HN. If you go against the grain, you will be removed and ignored.
I guess it's a mirror of real life: people generally only want to be around people that think like they do.
I don't buy it. They just found a correlation that users with a downvoted comment happened to also make other bad comments (what a surprise.) They didn't actually downvote or upvote comments on randomly picked users and see what effect it had, which would have been way easier than the machine learning approach they used.
This was fascinating. One of the interesting challenges with feedback that I have observed is that often separating feedback on the comment/post/idea vs feedback on the author is hard to distinguish.
I have this thought that instead of 'up' or 'down' a less directed 'agree or disagree' might be less painful on the poster.
85 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadIn other words, most of the time when I am downvoted here, what I ask myself is, "How could I have rewritten that comment to make it more clear or more persuasive," or sometimes, "Was that really a constructive addition to the discussion here?" I'm not generally spoiling for a fight or crushed in my self-esteem after being downvoted here. As far as I know, that happens to almost everyone here sooner or later. It sure has happened to me over the years
On my part, I downvote some comments, for reasons suggested in the welcome message, but I try to make sure that my upvotes predominate over my downvotes. And I don't keep an enemies list. If someone makes a thoughtful comment, they get an upvote, period, even if they disagreed strenuously with me just hours before. The idea here is to help good comments gain enough attention to promote thoughtful discussion in all good senses of the word "thoughtful." Maybe Hacker News is just plain different from most news discussion websites.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
One thing that probably helps here is that HN doesn't use avatars and visually de-emphasises the username - if I don't specifically look for it I usually have no idea who I'm replying to.
Parenthetically, I'd go even farther than HN has gone and make the reader navigate to another page to see the username.
> Downvoting: reserve downvotes for posts that are explicitly breaking subreddit rules. Do not downvote someone simply because you disagree with them.
> Upvoting: legitimate evidence, solid reasoning, or respectful discourse; Upvote someone admitting that they are wrong. Upvote outstanding use of logic where evidence can’t be had
That seems to prevent - at least in theory - the whole hivemind behavior. You don't upvote/downvote because you agree, but because you see that there's something good about it, whether or not you share the same point of view.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/ptgxf/meta_...
It might, if "legitimate" evidence, "solid" reasoning, and "respectful" discourse weren't all subjective terms where people's subjective impression will be substantially influenced by agreement/disagreement with the thesis of the post.
When people feel attacked by their whole community (which is what a slew of negative votes feels like), it seems like they'd be far more likely to lash out at that community as a whole, and that means throwing out increasingly antisocial posts and attacking people with downvotes themselves.
Ding ding ding.
I think, aside from the issues with downvoting, upvoting by nature slowly creates hivemind, circle jerk communities that quickly start to lack any real critical thinking.
Go check out just about any subreddit and it becomes very apparent what illogical silly ideas dominate. If you are logical but uncontroversial you'll get ignored which is just as bad as the controversial opinions which get downvoted to hell. You start to wonder if the confirmation bias we are all building towards is more dangerous than just being uninformed.
There's lots of research on voting behavior in political science, I'm slightly surprised more hasn't been down with it.
I joke. Reddit is the best example, I think because of how subreddits usually follow a very specific cycle of creation to focus on a specific topic, then the upvoting dynamic creates a strong hivemind, then the dissenters leave and create their own even more narrowly focused community (see /r/politics to /r/conservative), and then it starts over.
It's destructive. HN is a little better because there are actually some limits on democracy if you will (thresholds, flagging, etc), which goes back to the heart of my mention of political science. Different political philosophers have been discussing the dangers of overly simple voting scheme since Plato or earlier.
Yes, you would. Criticizing and complaining about HN is popular on HN.
I think you nailed it though, it's the "points" thing. You're creating an incentive for people to desperately say witty things to get more points, but when people forcefully try to be witty or helpful they end up being formulaic in the worst way ... they find patterns that people almost always approve of and use that.
I wonder what would happen if you actually hide all the numbers ... all karma/etc is still there, just not visible to the user.
That's a pretty interesting idea. I like it. I don't know of any community that has tried this.
I think limiting the number of available downvotes would drastically reduce these quick downvotes, which would be a good thing.
Edit: I'm new here and I still don't see the points.
Not having a downvote is valuable. Limiting max score is valuable.
but people still abuse overrated/troll/flamebait on Slashdot.
the core of the problem is that truly intelligent people have moved on to greater aspirations than internet posting. Also, the dumb people on forums these days are a lot dumber than they were 15 years ago when I was getting started. And no, that's not just my perception in hindsight. The noise has gotten bad enough that I just don't participate in them. People don't see clearly like they used to, so it's not worth pointing.
Probably correlated with more internet connectivity than 15 years ago.
I think we actually strike a pretty good balance. There are clearly large contingents of Apple, Google, and Microsoft fans/employees, all of whom tend to balance each other out. Then there is a large group of younger civil libertarians/libertarians as well as a large group of liberals. And then there is a large group of older, traditional "MIT-style" hackers.
I guess that there is some technophile group think that goes on, and it's true that among the SV contingent, there's a certain amount of ignorance about the state of the country outside of Silicon Valley. But all in all, I think there are enough counterbalancing ideologies and interests here on HN that the hive mind tends not to occur to the same extent as on subreddits, which are by definition single-interest groups.
Why would you make a comment like that seeking to make fun of what I wrote? It definitely doesn't further the conversation. Are you hoping to shut it down?
And if you disagree so strongly, tell me why. I'd like to know.
Edit: Seriously, what are you laughing at? My criticism of Silicon Valley or my defense of HN's relative balance?
Sure. See any comments relating to "idea guy" vs "hacker" or "founder" vs "employee."
The hivemind attitude that I see on HN could be summarized by "People who can write code should be given preferential treatment."
Which makes sense, given by and large, people who participate here have some sort of coding capabilities, so that mentality is clearly self serving. But hardly makes this balanced, and not hive-minded.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8838721
So yeah, guilty there.
Lets say you have two groups of people, one of which thinks you should put sugar in bread, and the other which thinks putting sugar in bread is blasphemous. On the issue of sugar in bread, you will get a rigorous debate for the affirmative and negative.
However, if someone posts something to the effect of "Humans shouldn't be eating bread", both of those groups of people will vote that comment down, regardless of the argument presented.
Apple, Google and Microsoft fans all agree that computers and software are 'good things', it is the implementation details where they disagree, so any dissenting opinion to common ground that those groups share will be prejudicially downvoted into oblivion.
It is this common ground where group think is created and reinforced.
Some trolls make you think. Some trolls only hope to destroy online communities, and they are usually very good at it. It can be very hard sometimes to differentiate between the two.
Also, it's entirely possible to make people think without trolling (and I know you weren't claiming this). For example, your response to my remark made me think without being trollish. I personally prefer to participate in communities that promote your type of provocative comment, and not in ones where trolls are given free reign. But that's just me.
So fsck you very much you guys. Every last one of you with your little down vote button. Now when I feel the urge to post here, I create a single use throwaway account, say whatever I feel like, and then log out.
HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.
As you may know, what you ran into there were two foundational ideas in HN culture, which are:
1. Don't post "trivial" comments that are common on Reddit, like "+1", "thanks for that!", "interesting article!". HN tries to maintain a very high signal to "noise" ratio by discouraging these kinds of comments, and I actually appreciate it, since reading through lots of those types of comments makes it difficult to focus on comments meant to foster further discussion, or to inform.
2. It's an official guideline not to complain about being downvoted. Your comment asking why you were downvoted may have been interpreted as complaining about being downvoted. If you were just asking why, I'm sorry you were downvoted and that no one bothered to explain.
Every online community has its quirks, and you just happened to run into two of them with your comments in that post. Personally, I've never worried too much about accumulating points on HN. I just try to post informative comments, or comments meant to provoke discussion, and things have gone well.
Again, sorry you were downvoted for asking a simple question. I'd not do that.
> HN is very much a hivemind. It's easy to see when you're not worried about your negative internet points.
The problem isn't HN and the hivemind. The problem here is you. You still care about the points (or rather the consequences of them) because you take the trouble to create a throwaway account, so that when your post is upvoted, or downvoted, you don't feel tied to it.
If you truly didn't care you would either:
1) stop posting on here altogether 2) not care about what others thought of your comments, and stop using throwaway accounts.
I have a problem with HN voting conceptually, compared to Slashdot - on Slashdot, you were supposed not to downvote a comment that you disagree with. The purpose of upvotes and downvotes was to facilitate discussion. On HN, the policy seems to be - if you agree/disagree, upvote/downvote (although I am not sure it's official, that's what I have been told, I may have been trolled :-)).
I don't think voting has anything to do with it. I think that people's natural tendency to (1) imitate others that they respond to positively, and (2) seek out communities where there are people they respond to positively and where people respond to them positively, and avoid other communities, tends to lead to communities of likethinkers, especially when the cost to leave or join communities is low the way it is online.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006....
I visit one community website about linux (non-english) that doesn't have voting and I really like the natural, down-to-earth discussions and arguments (usually about current issues, politics, etc.).
If the purpose of commenting and submitting is not to amass the most "points" possible then they shouldn't be displayed.
I'm sure you could be very successful.
If I'm not getting any votes or other feedback, I take this as evidence that I'm shouting into the void and wasting my time.
This codinghorror post explains it nicely: http://blog.codinghorror.com/because-reading-is-fundamental-...
Traditional linear forums are still the best format for in-depth discussion, IMO. Threads actually stick around for more than a day or two. Just compare gamedev.net to /r/gamedev.
I really feel like we lost something though. Newsreaders provided a much better way to engage in the kinds of conversations that people have on place like HN or even Reddit. To this day I don't know of any web forums that offer the conveniences of newsreaders like tin or slrn. I miss killfiles (and plonking!) and really, really, really well-maintained FAQs on just about anything.
I'm not sure how much of my Usenet nostalgia is just remembering the good stuff. It may not have been as great as I remember, but it sure seemed like it at the time. I learned so much from it, from so many people in so many different newsgroups. Maybe that's what places like HN are to larval hackers today.
maybe the best way is to simply ditch the whole karma/popularity system all together. you can up a comments contribution to an article, but it ends there.
The person who got downvoted isnt stuck with a scarlet letter and put on probation to repair their 'karma' simply because they had a different way of looking at things.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7760857
Anyway, we released a game one day and some of the first comments were really negative, even though the game was objectively a pretty darn good game. Knowing the game was good I was awaiting the nice comments to show up, but they didn't. It was just a flurry of negativity.
I talked to some other employees and they agreed the game was good and something felt off. We all jumped into the comments, gave good reviews of the game and started discussions with all the negative reviewers. Then the positive reviews started showing up, and the games rating did a complete turn around to overwhelmingly positive.
I feel like if we hadn't intervened, the game would have continued to have negative reviews and end up with a bad rating. There's a kind of hive mind mentality going on, and the first public comments have some sort of psychological effect on the rest of the players.
I don't think that your case is particularly malicious or anything, but it makes me wonder how easily similar tactics could be used in larger websites or about more serious topics. Thinking along these lines, it feels very "real" how quickly things like payola came about in past media formats, and how what was old is new once again.
Early comments dictate the tone and focus of the conversation.
For example, its trivial to highjack any thread about security with a well written comment about the connection (however fleeting) to the NSA/snowden leaks.
Is my comment necessary? Will it teach anybody anything? Did somebody else already make my point?
All in all, I try my hardest _not_ to comment. As a general rule, I won't participate in communities that value one-liners. A basic respect for thought is enough to make one community far better than another.
Just today I was over-listening a conversation about body hair that essentially amounted to "hair is there for protection," and all I could think was "what does that mean? What 'protection'? Do you even know what you're talking about?" It seems like the _entire_ point of that conversation was to find something to laugh about, and that the thoughts didn't even matter. They could have talked about anything. As soon as laughs were had, subjects changed.
At least they weren't giving negative feedback to the one who made the original mistake though. So I guess he won't continue to make worse mistakes as this article suggests.
"...the group answered incorrectly on purpose; it appears that when we are unsure of how to perform a task or how to behave, we may take comfort in agreeing with a large number of other people."
[1] http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/lumbert.removed
So empty vessels really do make the most noise.
That points to an obvious strategy for improving the quality of comments on any social network site. Clearly, providing negative feedback to “bad” users does not appear to be a good way of preventing undesired behaviour.
I'm not seeing such a strategy from the paper's findings. It suggests several ways to limit bad behavior, but since positive feedback doesn't seem to improve quality of comments or posting frequency, I'm getting the strong impression that the overall tone of an online community is set early on in its life, and while it can easily degrade over time there is not a whole lot you can do to improve it.
So how can unwanted behaviour be stopped? “Given that users who receive no feedback post less frequently, a potentially effective strategy could be to ignore undesired behaviour and provide no feedback at all,” say Cheng and co.
This is pretty difficult to implement, though, since it only takes two people to start a flamewar. All I can think of is very proactive moderator pruning, which would a) become a full-time job and b) creates problems of its own as people start howling about censorship.
I really hope the sites that have downvotes don't take this to heart. There are massive benefits that the authors completely overlooked.
It allows the community to rapidly bury garbage content, and because of this, the pool of potentially good content (with few upvotes) is much smaller and less daunting for the users to sift through, which allows more good content to rise to the top.
You need a certain amount of positive feedback relative to negative feedback, and if you monitor that ratio, you can have a good pulse on the quality of your community. If you are not maintaining a high ratio of positive to negative feedback, you can take action to increase positive feedback in meaningful ways. You can also use provided negative feedback to tailor interactions. Someone downvotes a particular thread? Don't notify them of any future discussion on that thread if you otherwise would have, etc...
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio In my opinion this ratio applies equally as well in social networks and online communities.
But I think the authors are a little naive if they think the site-owners are not aware (and in some cases, counting on) this.
For many sites, it seems to be the arguments and battles that drive activity. As if to the site-owner, a (moderate) ding-dong battle is "increased engagement, even from the people who disliked the content" rather than something they necessarily want to stamp out.
I guess it's a mirror of real life: people generally only want to be around people that think like they do.
I have this thought that instead of 'up' or 'down' a less directed 'agree or disagree' might be less painful on the poster.