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Comment by akkartik | Hacker News Reader

I see irrelevant but funny/praising/criticising comments upvoted to +4 or even +14 all the time.[1]

The assumption that bad comments will get less votes is a canard. As the community grows, the same people adding comments also add their votes. If anything, they're more likely to vote since it's just a click, and so noob votes will drown old users even more. It's not just downvotes but any votes that have negative social consequences.

Update

[1] Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021157

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This is an important point.

>It's not just downvotes but any votes that have negative social consequences.

Upvotes also tend to select for popular modes of thinking. In the end, a system of only upvotes makes people want to only post things that will be perceived as popular by the community.

Yes true, but it is at least positive reinforcement, whereas downvoting is negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is conditioning through fear. So ignoring the potential ethical problems of conditioning through fear, there have been studies to show that positive reinforcement is better: https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/4924/1/V63N02_087.p...

That's a bit alarmist, but I can't really think of a better way to put it I guess.

Positive reinforcement does have the advantage of encouraging more participation.

I can say, as a new guy, that I would participate more if that were the case.

> [1] Exhibit A: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021157

This is one of the rare cases where humor bought upvotes. I'd say for every 10 evenly mildly humorous comments, 9 of them are voted down.

I agree. And the upvoted humor needs to be relatively good to get past our collective restraint. A few days ago I instinctively clicked on a funny comment before regretting it; that prob happens to a lot of folks.

But a) I see a couple of upvoted funnies everyday, and b) things are worse than they were a year ago. I'm joining in the fuss about it in hopes that we can stem the rot.

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