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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

30 is the flag threshold and has been for years. I don't know how pg picked it. It works well, though, and we like that it isn't a high bar.

You'd be surprised at how different votes and flags are in effect. The upvoting system is a lot more broken than the flagging system is. People tend to upvote as a reflexive "me like" instead of a reflective "this is interesting". (That's not a criticism—it's simply the chemical reaction of the voting mechanism and human nature.) Flagging is much more reflective in practice. You can think of vouches as an experiment in seeing whether up-flagging can contribute as much value to HN as down-flagging has.

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> People tend to upvote as a reflexive "me like" instead of a reflective "this is interesting".

I do this for sure. I do a bit of both, using both semantics for different cases.

Thanks for the explanation. I wonder if somebody here would like to take a stab at analyzing user data to see if 30 really is the best karma for "unlocking" these powers.

It's a bit startling to read an acknowledgement that up/down voting conflates disagreement with lack of value, and that this effect is undesirable. Debate over this point continues to bubble up every once in a while on HN, with some commenters pointing to pg's casual statement from some time ago that he was okay with a downvote meaning "I disagree."

Is it important to the design of HN that the community engage with (i.e., not shun into oblivion) worthy points of view with which it disagrees?

If that is valuable to the design of HN, may we simply accept that voting registers agreement and let another mechanism such as the flagging system be the place to register a comment's value? Perhaps we can display the measure of agreement in a more subtle way than is presently the case and refrain from pushing those comments completely out of the conversation.

Oh dear. Nothing that I said was meant to express any policy about downvoting and certainly not any change in policy about downvoting. It's just a separate topic.

I didn't interpret it that way, and I apologize if it seemed that I did.

I was actually hoping for some read on the two questions I gave because I believe these are important issues, and your comment prompted an opportunity to raise them.

Please, no need to apologize. People have really strong opinions about this, as I'm sure you know, and I'm not sure yet how to comment on it in a helpful way.

I'm firmly in the downvote to disagree camp.

Suppose my click on the down arrow expresses the thought "you're wrong, fuck you". HN is better off when that's the end of it...whatever it was and regardless of if it was in the comment or in me or in both.

The main problem is that upvotes and downvotes are devalued because they are essentially unlimited. What if karma behaved more as a currency and the costs increased as you used it repeatedly in the same comment thread. First one is free, then it costs you 1, then 5, etc.

Variations of this have been suggested many times. I'd be curious to try it someday if we could figure out a way to do it that didn't put anything important at risk.

It would make me less likely to upvote more than one comment per thread. That seems like a downside - a good thread can have several comments worthy of upvotes.

A slightly tangential question that I have tried looking for an answer in the FAQs but couldn't: what is the required karma to earn the downvote privilege? Couldn't find this documented anywhere. I apologize if I didn't look hard enough.

501:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606199

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