Ask PG: Could you please reduce multi-downvoting by same person? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: Could you please reduce multi-downvoting by same person?

6 pointsamichail19 comments

Multi-downvoting here refers to downvoting a comment and then looking for other comments made by that person and downvoting those also.

Perhaps there could be a time limit for voting on a comment?

Another possibility is to show a record of recent voting so that this practice can be more easily identified and others could upvote to negate the downvotes.

View on HN

Would you stop to consider that a trend of people downvoting each of your comments in a thread is more reflective of your behavior than theirs? You have the lowest batting average by far of anyone on the leaderboard: 0.48! Your comments are downmodded more than they're ignored!

I can remember having downvoted you in this manner several times in the last few months, and I wasn't alone in doing so at the time.

You troll this site pretty frequently, usually in deep threads where you make a bunch of comments expounding upon differently disturbing facets of the same churlish idea. The way you go about doing this is naive enough on the surface that it's believably undeliberate -- you're either completely unsocialized or an expert troll.

There's nothing wrong with you downvoting comments you disagree with.

However, there are people who will downvote a comment and then downvote comments that have nothing to do with the one they disagree with.

I would ask: do you have proof of this happening a lot? (or at all)

it could be that lots of people just disagree with your comments... I know I've read occasional threads in the past and down voted pretty much all of your comments on their own merit.

I think he's merely asking for access to data that might potentially either prove or disprove his hypothesis.

I think he actually means well. Sometimes his ideas are interesting.

I don't think that precludes him from having to follow the same social mores as everybody else, does it? He shows an amazing lack of empathy, and just about zero ability to comprehend what other people are saying. His comments on this very entry are further proof of that.

I accidentally upvoted you, so now I have to comment (I hate that)

I don't like publicly talking about people's behavior on HN. If you have to criticize, at least do somebody the decency of generalizing your comments first.

I'd probably disagree there: dancing round a potential issue always frustrates me. One thing I like about HN is it is a little more direct in it's criticism. Though the OP is probably a little more stinging than is probably necessary.

(If I'm ever being a douche please take this as open invitation to tell me :))

It wasn't me that made this about Amichail, it was him.

The same social mores as everybody else? Let's consider amichail a poignant test of groupthink.

I thought there already were controls on multi-downvoting. You can't downvote anything other than the most recent comment by looking at the user's Comments page. [Edit: it looks like it's time-based, probably 24 hours]. Moreover, if you follow the links from the comments page to the actual posts, you still can't downvote them.

I believe there're also rules in the software against downvoting responses to your own farther down in a thread.

There already is. If you go back and look at people's submissions you'll notice that you can't downvote them.

What's the time limit?

Maybe it could be reduced to two hours say?

That seems a ludicrous suggestion. I for one don't read HN every hour, why should I be prevented from downvoting something just because I'm not an obsessive reader?

And any suggestions such as

    "You can only down-vote for up to two hours after
    your first activity that follows a pause in your
    activity of up to three hours, unless ..."

are too baroque to be worth considering.

So ask - why are people down-voting you? Are you saying bad things? Are you saying things of no value? Are you saying things of value and people don't appreciate how insightful you really are?

If you think it's the latter, perhaps you need to learn how to express yourself clearly for your audience. There was a discussion very like this elsewhere recently, and here's something I wrote:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021504

The more direct response to the OP would be to limit downvoting based on whether a user has already downvoted another post of the same user already. But even that gets silly.

The system will never work perfectly for all people. Suggesting ways to improve it is fine, but in this case, I think your situation is too specific, and your suggestions would just complicate things.

Personally, I think complaining about karma is worse than the issue you're unhappy about. You often post questionable content, and I don't see people jumping all over you, so a few downvotes that you don't agree with doesn't seem to be a big issue in the grand scheme of things.

I'm happy to downvote every comment someone makes in an out-of-order thread exchange. I'm not going to look for your comments elsewhere, but if two people get in an argument 6 levels deep, that's going to be 6 downvotes.

Why don't I even see an option to down vote?

There is a karma threshold for downvotes which your currently below.

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