Ask HN: Is it fair game to downvote someone's comments indiscriminately?
I have noticed comments on another HN account being consistently downvoted, once or twice, about 24 hours after they were posted, regardless of the comments' content and the subject matter of the OP. This has been going on for several months.
There may be a number of reasons someone or some group of people would employ this tactic, but is it "fair game" with respect to HN's policies and the sensibilities of HN's readership?
53 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadPerhaps the threshold whereby you are permitted to downvote should be raised.
Perhaps HN could allow karma to be 'spent' as downvotes. The act of downvoting would be something that costs you, and unless you're a top 100 commenter that's probably going to make you hesitate.
HN probably already check for and punish the malicious downvoter, i.e. so-and-so said something that I didn't like and so I'm going to go through their historical comments downvoting all. That stuff is really easy to detect.
HN could probably check whether downvotes given by a person occur on a few topics, or for a few individuals. These are probably slightly angry downvotes, they could be reversed.
Ultimately though they'd hit a grey area. There are obvious and easy things to deal with, and once those low hanging fruits are grabbed then everything else is nuanced, it has context and requires understanding to moderate fairly.
Examples of users currently on rankban include larrys, eli_gottlieb, thinkcomp, DanielBMarkham, etc.
This is verifiable quite easily if you go into the comment history of these users. Take eli_gottlieb, for example. Sure, he often voices quasi-Marxist views, but why do his posts on technical things fall down so rapidly? Even below heavily downvoted trolls? Why did his post in 'Who wants to be hired?' so heavily sink to the very bottom?
Lastly, some users who have engaged with HN moderators via email were taken off of rankbans, so they have never denied that these rankban mechanisms exist, they generally remain silent when this is brought up, and try to force the conversation surrounding it to a private medium ("please email us at support@ycombinator.com", etc.)
Okay.
Let's agree on one assumption: largely, comments on HN will be voted upon fairly. That is to say, trollish comments will be downvoted (and I'm sure you know of the basics, that heavily downvoted comments will sink down). And going further in this continuum, HN voters are intelligent enough to distinguish between good-faith, substantive posts from content-free, low-substance posts -- and vote as such.
By this logic, eli's more substantive posts in a certain comment thread should be higher than its sibling-level posts. But they're consistently not. They're either at the very absolute end, or one above the absolute end.
Examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9430757
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9421905
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9402551
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9370954
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9371219
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9358256
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9346313
Do you really want me to keep going? Because this is too easy. All I'm doing is going in his comment history page, picking out comments that are substantive, good-faith, clearly non-trollish, clearly non-partisan... and I assume they should be ranked above comments that are better than his by any reasonable criteria, and consistently you find they're either not or only barely above the negatively-scored comments. You can do this exercise for any other user on rankban.
Perhaps some of these are "vendetta" votes against the individual, but I think most downvotes are based on the content and tone of each individual comment. While there are sometimes extreme short-term swings to the negative, I think the process tends to balance out with extra upvotes for comments the majority considers (rightly or wrongly) unfairly grayed out.
But in my opinion, the result is majority rule, rather than anything universal or conspiratorial.
I was going to make an edit note pointing out this change since having made my comment, but chose not to.
Trust me, the rankban mechanisms exist, some really smart users did some tests to confirm it, and a lot of people are in the know by now. We had this dispute about hellbans, shadowbans, and slowbans, that was much easier to prove. Rankban has been studied pretty extensively at this point, and everyone has been convinced of it. The current effort is to study the downvoteban and policy changes.
That happened?
Ok, look, I don't count it a good thing, but I'd been assuming it was an automatic mechanism that kicks in when you take too many downvotes to one post. And my views are outright Marxist, not quasi-Marxist, but on some level, figuring out how to speak clearly across the massive inferential gap of "everyone else thinks Elizabeth Warren is solidly leftist and hasn't read all the same background literature as me" is my problem.
And besides which, I did get a number of emails based on that "Who wants to be hired?" post, and based on the "Who's hiring?" post for April I responded to an ad that ended up finding me a very nice new job.
So, overall, thanks for being angry on my behalf, but HN is really here for the business and technical stuff, for which it works well for me, and it really is my job to make my own points clear in a discussion.
That being said, downvoting due to disagreement is currently deeply harmful to this site, but the mods seem to be fine with it. Since that's their stance, I've taken to being quite liberal in my use of downvotes. If that's the way it is, it's dumb not to do the same.
Well, now I kinda do mind.
If there is a pattern what makes you think it's dang vs some other group pushing the opposite viewpoint?
I've probably emailed him a couple dozen times with reports of hinky stuff and never felt like he was protecting anything, I would give him the benefit of the doubt and ask him what's happening.
If as you postulate, there is an identifiable faction with a political agenda, then either user, moderator or software intervention would hardly be surprising. There are plenty of places on the internet where promoting a political agenda is considered fair sport. HN, for better or worse, is not among them.
Anyway, if it is Dang, then you can live with it or find someplace else for politically partisan posting.
Huh, and here I just thought I took too many downvotes for expressing Marxist views on a site where everyone's supposed to want to be an entrepreneur (ie: petite bourgeois).
I'm just a casual reader, and I have no expertise on HN's policies, but it definitely offends my sensibilities to see anyone gaming this system.
May I ask whatthe username is? (Feel free to email me if you don't want to make it public).
Seem contradictionary with:
> This is why there are so many people who post with one off accounts. Every post is a risk and there are no controls, no safeties.
> Every post is a risk and there are no controls, no safeties.
A few people have the ability to downvote. Everybody with an account has the ability to upvote.
Restated: who cares?
If any prospective hire told me their handle under the notion that karma indicates anything useful, I'd show them the door.
EDIT: Exactly.
EDIT: My point is this can be a bad idea.
I know this is all rather meaningless, but something about it is very upsetting to me and I always upvote such comments.
On that note, I like the Stack Overflow model: you have to pay reputation to downvote.
Statistically, the way to avoid downvotes and earn upvotes is with thoughtful well-written comments that contribute to improving or maintaining the quality of HN.
What HN does have is a number of mutually opposed consensuses each believing the others are destroying the site by astroturfing and posting irrelevant nonsense. So yes, if you criticize angular.js and communism, you might be punished. But if you criticize capitalism and praise front-end frameworks, someone else will have their knives out for that as well.
Although what you describe might expose some flaw in their brigade/voting ring detector, the site and the culture appear to be far more concerned with stopping indiscriminate upvotes than downvotes (which is understandable, given the financial incentives for startups and entrepreneurs to want to game the system.) With downvotes, the more the merrier.
Edit: reading this thread, i'm wondering whether being able to delete posts after they've been replied to isn't a bigger problem than downvoting. That and drive-by edits.