Ask PG: What have I done wrong? | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: What have I done wrong?

tl;dr: Now my votes are broken, and I'm sad. (edited: "dl;dr" -> "tl;dr" - sorry.)

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I've seen this complaint made several times before, with people finding that their votes are apparently not having any effect. I've watched the discussions, not feeling I have anything to contribute, wondering what they may have done to trigger the secretive "vote-ignoring" logic that you tinker with.

I understand that you need to stay on top of the problem of people gaming the system, and that being too open just makes it easier for people to screw around and make the voting system less valuable.

But generally I rely on high-quality items bubbling to the top, so when I see a comment I think is valuable and yet which is low down in the pecking order, I upvote it. I take care, I try to add value, I invest time.

And now I've found that some of my recent votes haven't made a difference. The comments I thought were worth boosting continue to languish. The people I thought were worth rewarding haven't got the karma.

I've wasted my time trying to make the site more valuable.

So, while I'll continue to believe that things are partially random, but biased to having better stuff near the top, I'm no longer as confident as I was. I'll continue to scan the new submissions to see if there's anything interesting, and maybe I'll click on an up arrow, but I'm pretty disincentivized about bothering to spend time trying to add value.

The message is that my time isn't valued. You've encouraged me into taking without giving back. You've encouraged me to react without thinking.

If that's the message you intended, I think that's sad.

Here are two links to earlier discussions - there are more.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233460

View on HN

A few months ago, because of the mob feel that voting was starting to have now that the site has grown so big, I started experimenting with thresholds for which votes got counted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202). The best test I could think of was the average score of a user's recent comments, so I used that. Currently the threshold is 2. The reason your votes stopped counting is that you dropped just below that. Your average is currently 1.88. (Ironically, it's much higher now because of the comments on this thread, but comment averages are calculated asynchronously, so there will be a lag before yours is recalculated.)

I'm probably going to do away with the display of point totals on comments entirely, because thresholds haven't fixed the problem. In that case I'll just use points internally, e.g. to sort threads, and then I'll probably go back to counting most votes.

Edit: Since I was planning to toss the threshold when I stopped displaying comment scores, I just reset it to 1. Also, since users asked to see their avg comment scores in their profile pages, I just added that.

Doesn't that actually encourage more mob voting, as only people who the majority vote up are allowed to vote up? It seems like it would be a self-reinforcing mechanism, with people who often take unpopular stances unable to participate in determining what comments and stories get the most votes?

I didn't mean mob in the sense of groupthink, but in the sense of a volatile, easily swayed mass. The situation I'm worried is the one where voters end up being like a crowd egging on two people who are fighting.

Would pushing highly turbulent comments further down in the thread accomplish some of what you're going for? In a large thread the arguments would fall to the bottom. I would probably rather read an 8 point comment with 10 ups and 2 downs than one with 110 ups and 102 downs.

I would prefer the 110/102 comment. If it has that many upvotes, it's probably not rude or uncivil -- just controversial. Disagreement-downvoters have been nudging it down, but someone else always comes along an nudges it up. That makes it more interesting than a crowd-pandering 10/2.

(I think the up/down totals might be shown to good effect, not necessarily cluttering the main thread, but on the item detail/reply page.)

Total votes as well as up and down votes are just as interesting a metric to determine interest in a comment or post.

I don't understand how was thresholding related to this - at all.

RoG was getting more downvotes than average HN user (1.88 vs 2.0). How does inhibiting his power to rate help this "crowd egging" thing you are referring to?

It didn't use to be such a problem, say, a year ago, and my theory was that this was largely because there were fewer voters a year ago. Using comment average seemed like the best way to decrease the effective number of voters. But as I said, it didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.

This is just a wild idea without much thought, but I used it on an old web site I maintained that had social interactions. Perhaps you could make a similar system work by giving a salary of points to members. The longer they remain a member, the more points they get, but at the same time, you could make it so a portion of their points are transferred when they vote. This might encourage point hoarding, though, which was a problem that existed with my prior system. (In actuality, my system gave points for participation (visiting the site with some frequency) and removed points through a 'Karma tax' for not visiting the site, and then people could transfer points to each other.)

We use a system that is very close to what you describe on a very large site that I have helped to build and it actually works really well.

We're thinking of ways to allow people to turn their karma in to more tangible forms of rewards as well, such as one-shot functionality that you pay for with karma and physical goodies from a 'karma store'.

There was a similar thread on here regarding abuses of downvoting. One idea was to do the following:

1) Earn points by commenting and submitting. 2) Earn points by being voted up. 3) Spend points by voting someone down. 4) Loose points by being voted down.

I don't think I get many down votes at all. Out of interest I started tracking my karma a while ago to try to detect these sorts of changes and influences. I seem to get very few down votes.

The pattern seems to be more that I make a few contributions that are seen and well regarded. They get lots of votes. I make a few contributions that don't get noticed, or that no one likes. They get no votes. And I make a lot of contributions that cross-reference, location duplications, point people to other discussions, and generally try to help tie things up. I do that because my background in online communities is more in wiki technology, where house-keeping is essential.

Those many, many contributions get very little attention, and no up votes. The net result is that all the small notes that try to make things better drag my average down.

I think the use of the average karma is mis-guided. At least I can see what mine is, as I'm on the leader board.

>Out of interest I started tracking my karma a while ago

Geez, you are taking it seriously indeed.

I trust PG when he says using average karma didn't help solving the problem but I don't have an opinion myself simply because I didn't even understand what the problem is exactly (Is it people splitting their votes between two contestants in a verbal fight?).

From my limited experience in web communities, karma always ends up being: people upvoting when they agree, downvoting when they don't. As I see it, the only good use of karma are 1) to decrease the number of "I agree" comments 2) to isolate obvious trolls.

This said, I don't care about Karma. The only feature I wish HN had is a "save button" similar to what reddit has. The reason is that it would allow me to follow up better the destiny of all those guys who come here and ask "rate/review my startup".

  >> ... I started tracking my karma a while ago
  > Geez, you are taking it seriously indeed.

Not especially. I just pull my profile page occasionally to see what happens. I am, however, also in the process of building a site that will have some facets in common with this and other sites, so seeing what happens here is in my own interest.

For what it's worth, I completely support PG in his continuing efforts to improve things. I appreciate that he will continue to make changes to try to address the problems that arise in a large site, and I realise that not all changes can be made completely openly.

It's a difficult problem with no general solutions. Yet. I'd like to think that contributors here will play a part in keeping this site of high-quality, and perhaps finding methods that will work more generally.

An attempt to reduce the "swing" as a discussion unfolds, then? Interesting.

As someone who often tries to represent/defend the "unpopular" side of a topic, I see this dynamic in action a lot. The graph of my karma accrual over time must look like a yoyo sporadically wielded by someone walking slowly up a gentle slope.

Hehe, funny, just yesterday I was wondering to myself if you did that on purpose, it seems that answer to that one is 'yes'.

All in the name of good/elucidating discussion! I already know what I think, and why I think it. By slipping into the "devil's advocate" role once in a while, it forces you to think about your own views again from a different light.

I mean, we're mostly white collar upper middle class males here. The cultural overlap is huge. It would be pretty boring, not to mention unchallenging, if I just agreed with everyone all the time ..

Your modification actually encourages groupthink.

If people are going to be worried that their vote average is going to be negatively impacted by a controversial view then they will simply keep it to themselves.

I don't think it's controversial views that make your comment score go down. Popular views definitely have a positive effect, but I don't think it's the biggest factor.

My current average is probably a lot higher then usual because I had some relatively early comments on the Google in China thread. Those comments probably got read by 100X or 1000X times as many of my other comments.

Most votes are up, not down. The biggest factor (I think) is how many people read it. The second biggest is how many people care. The third is how many agree or otherwise like the comment.

If you are afraid to defend a view because your average karma on some website will fall below a certain level, then you are not the type of person that should be defending views.

Say what you believe in. Karma, comment average is unimportant.

I rarely vote anyways, so if I ever lost the ability (which I don't think I ever have), I would not care. I'm here to talk, not to vote.

> If you are afraid to defend a view because your average karma on some website will fall below a certain level, then you are not the type of person that should be defending views.

You must be new here :)

> Say what you believe in. Karma, comment average is unimportant.

Absolutely, but the general case will, at least as long as the leaderboard exists, be the opposite.

> I'm here to talk, not to vote.

Voting on articles is useful because it gives good stuff more attention. Voting on comments is useful to get rid of the trolls, and it allows people that have limited time to spend to browse HN articles fast to get the good stuff.

I really like seeing the number of points next to comments. When I come to a discussion late, it's the best weapon I have to skim through lower replies to catch the "theme" of the discussion. It's especially important on nested replies that may be attached to a highly voted root comment.

If you decide to hide comment points, perhaps consider at least showing the points after you vote. I'm not sure if that would encourage voting, though, in a case where people would have skipped voting before. I know I would vote more often in that case.

Yeah, that was why I brought back points the last time I tried removing them. Without points it was harder to read comment threads. But I have some other ideas about how to solve that problem. For example, I could distinguish comments by users whose recent comments are over a certain average. That approaches the score of a specific comment as the window size decreases. If I didn't discard outliers, as I currently do when calculating comment averages, I could probably even catch the case of the high scoring comment made by a user with an otherwise low average.

I may also try letting users specify other users whose comments they're interested in, and distinguish those in the display of the thread.

I don't know whether these will work, but I want to try them and see what happens. If anyone has other suggestions for things to try I'd be glad to hear them.

I found reading comments without scores very refreshing. The biggest problem I'd have guessed would be the lack of self-limiting when voting. Without scores people would keep voting a good comment, so I'd imagine karma would be counted a bit differently.

Averaging comment karma sounds like a terrible idea. Some of the best posts are made in intelligent, long conversations several levels down the comment tree, which are almost never upvoted. Wouldn't it discourage such conversations?

> Wouldn't it discourage such conversations?

Absolutely.

You can expect a complete change in atmosphere due to this.

I agree that removing the points may cause the issue where someone is upvoted tremendously without merit. After all, I often decide whether to upvote a comment based on its current score. If I see someone with a score of 20 for a reasonable comment yet someone with a score of 1 for a brilliant comment, I would be more likely to upvote the lower score. I think this would cause a bit of Karma inflation if the points were not visible.

Well, pg knows how the numbers look in this case from the last brief experiment, so he probably could try to adjust with a logarithmic scale of some sort. Would it work?

"I may also try letting users specify other users whose comments they're interested in, and distinguish those in the display of the thread."

This would be awesome.

I think one of the flaws with the points system is this:

A comment that has been down-voted 50 times and up-voted 55 times is not the same as a comment that has been up-voted 5 times. Up-vote and down-vote are not opposites. They are just two flavors of passion; the opposite of up-vote and down-vote is indifference. If a comment is only getting up or down votes, it's a pretty good chance that the person is saying something insightful or everyone likes or there's something wrong with their delivery, or it's a universally unpopular idea.

Also, some people say you shouldn't use points to censor an unpopular idea, but not everyone is doing that. It only takes a few people going around doing that to make the community start to suck. Here's a rage-quit by a guy feeling that he was being censored:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1054044

There should be a way for that guy to see that nobody agrees with him without feeling like he's losing something personal. And people do take their points personally.

The ideas of "I agree" and "I disagree" are conflated with the idea of "I think this is a good discussion". Perhaps if you have a back and forth going on, you can show people's votes without affecting karma. The discussion itself might be interesting even if one person is playing devils advocate.

One suggestion to try: for a young comment whose score has not stabilized (i.e. high recent variability), then no score is displayed except for an indicator for users whose recent comments have low recent variability and high score.

(Edited for brevity)

Thanks for the response and your hard work to build up and sustain a great community!

Have you thought about hiding the submitter's and commenter's name for an hour (or twelve :)) after the post is submitted?

Won't that solve the problem of mob voting?

The problem with mobs is they gang up on individuals and the problem with that is the mob can easily over power an individual.

If you take away the mob's power by only allowing points to go down to 0 or 1 for example instead of -4 it might feel less mob-ish..

EDIT: The end result of mob encouraged commenting is someone ends up with negative points for their comment(s).. Maybe only users who've reached certain karma level should have the ability to down vote below 1. Reduce the size of the mob?

But then you lose the power to distinguish between the genuinely wrong/inappropriate and the merely banal. There is a case to punish the former but the latter should probably just be ignored.

That is a bit a of a trade-off, agreed.. How about anything below a certain threshold of down votes just gets deleted and not just grayed-out?

That would eliminate the 'wrong/inappropriate' all together and the mob would disband? Human behaviour is complicated indeed.

That would be open to terrible abuse! You can't undo a delete; there's no chance for the larger crowd to undo unfair downvoting.

I have my own favoured scheme, which is basically votes counting less the further they go above/below neutral. The first eight votes will get you up to 8. But then you need another 8 to get up to twelve, 16 to get to 16, 32 to get to 20, etc. Downvoting would be similar but without the positive bias, ie 4 to -4, then another 8 to get to -8, etc.

By removing the possibility of "windfall" results, that system might be reducing the incentive to appeal to the mob in the first place. And people will be less likely to add yet another vote if it's already +12, say - they know their vote's mostly impotent by then. Could settle things down.

I thought it wrong before, when unlimited downvotes were possible - there'd always be some sorry cur saying something the crowd didn't like and down he went, by 20, 30, 50. That was terrible, and has now been thankfully stopped. But ridiculously high upvotes continue and create undesirable incentives, IMO.

Wow, that was an essay, sorry, hehe

That's a neat idea.

If you are going to discount some peoples votes, (Mine seem to currently be discounted), can you let them know that? Or at least not update the UI for them when they click an arrow, or just not give them an arrow at all.

Then I won't be wasting time clicking arrows that don't do anything :/

My thoughts exactly. I feel like I'm somehow being toyed with.

That is not the intention, I'm sure but still to have a 'pacifier' vote button there that is not functional feels like I'm in someone else's car with a plastic non-functional steering wheel.

So you are axod are also in the same boat? But yours are some of the most interesting comments... and your comment averages are not below the 2 cutoff that pg stated above, anyway:

axod is 3.65: http://searchyc.com/user/axod?only=comments&sort=by_poin...

jacquesm is 3.03: http://searchyc.com/user/+jacquesm?only=comments&sort=by...

Possibly the code is more broken than pg realizes (or perhaps it's searchyc that's got it wrong).

I think it's happening to me as well, and searchyc rates me as just over 3 points per comment.

I didn't realise it happened at all until seeing Jacquesm's comments about it, and I'm still undecided about whether it's annoying or not.

It's more annoying when a thread goes "comment by me no votes, comment by someone else upvotes, reply by me no votes", for instance, and the result of that kind of thing needs an internal adjustment of the sort "clearly my replies aren't as good as I'm thinking they are". I get a similar feeling from this - yes I'm going out of my way to vote up effortful comments and vote down weak, silly, effortless comments but maybe my votes aren't as 'good' as they should be.

Not like being patronised by a car with a plastic steering wheel as mentioned above, but like something that's out of alignment due to misunderstanding the "HN way".

I haven't been able to upvote / downvote for months.

I think the averages are behind the learderboard point totals, not what searchyc says (it doesn't have direct access to the HN db).

Paul addresses this in his reply up at the top. You're viewing the averages after the update, but there is a lag.

I calculate averages differently. I only consider recent comments, and I discard outliers before averaging.

Thanks - could you tell me what my average score is please?

Actually, just having that on the user page would be interesting, even if it's no longer used for anything internally.

I think it is the number in the third column of the leaderboard.

Mine is at 1.91 and I can't vote so that would make sense.

11 of the 100 leaders' votes don't count, because <2.0. Something is disconnected, if our best and brightest are comment-vote-banned (could be the leader criteria, I suppose).

BTW I seem to be able to vote again now. Thanks pg! kinda nice... Though now I feel the weight of responsibility again. However, the big OCD thing is that now the UI works properly! I really like that. And, no longer being a persona non grata (an exaggeration; I could still comment and vote on submissions).

And it's on the user page as well. I dunno whether it was already there before I mentioned it. I guess it's been a while since I've looked at my user page.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=10ren

Thanks - is that new today?

Odd: my average is precisely "2". Not "2.00" (as it is for robg, #6 on the leaders). Have you kindly promoted me, or is it just an coincidence (and you're using different formatting)?

EDIT my average should have decreased with this comment score at 1, but it hasn't (unless there's lag of course).

Was mentioned on this page somewhere that average scores are calculated asynchronously, so there will be a lag.

I wish things were a little more transparent.

Personally I don't think people should have their comment voting rights removed, without being told, unless they're really causing trouble. And even then, let them know so they can adjust their behavior/leave.

This sort of thing just kills communities IMHO.

Perhaps instead of point totals, put a comment into a limited set of categories or some such.

Popular - >= 10 votes

Interesting - 3-9 votes

Contributor - 1-3 votes

Neutral - no votes

Unpopular - -1 votes

Detractive - <= -2 votes

And show those instead of points or votes. Karma could still be calculated normally, and the votes could be used internally for thread sorting.

Setting the threshold at 2 seems a bit high to me. It basically requires that (on average) at least 1 person upvotes every comment you make. That's unlikely to happen in a nested thread of back-and-forth conversation. And it's less likely to happen for people that are a little late to the conversation but still have some valid input. I tend to fall into the latter category -- I'm often reading posts that are several days old in my RSS reader.

Setting the threshold around 1.5 might work better. Or perhaps whatever threshold might allow 75% or 80% of readers/contributors to vote.

Any threshold is wrong.

Votes are a currency with which users tell each other what their feelings are, setting some arbitrary limit on that ability to express means the underlying system is broken.

Either voting works as a mechanism to identify quality content, or it doesn't.

If voting is to be limited to those that want to engage in group-think (the quickest way to boost your average is to post stuff people will find agreeable) then we'll soon have very bland conversations here.

I think that my personal problem is that the semantics of voting are usually more related to popular/unpopular instead of quality/poor quality. Not that I have a particular problem with popular/unpopular as the semantics per se, just that that seems to be the way the community uses them (myself included most of the time).

To use the voting average is a really bad way of doing this. I answer a lot of 'Ask HN' style threads, these are hardly ever voted up and they are a ton of work.

If the effect of this change is that doing work like that gets punished then that is really putting the horse behind the cart.

For instance:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049551

Essentially you are punishing people for being nice to others.

it punishes people for a lot of things: for being nice to others and responding to unresponded-to inquiries, for participating in lengthy discussions that don't particularly keep the majority of people's interest, expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc..

why not simply implement a minimum karma score barrier past which your vote counts? it would simply mean that you must contribute to the community before your vote has weight. keeps newer people from flooding things immediately. could even be a rolling barrier based on the average karma per user.

...expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc..

Amen to that. I'm still a fairly new member, and recently I finally got past the karma threshold to be allowed to downvote. I felt like I'd ascended to Mt. Olympus, and couldn't wait for the chance to mete out some dings the way I'd been invisibly hit so often before. Of course, I actually have yet to issue a single downvote, as I try to take the high ground of only downvoting for abusive type comments, not just something I disagree with. I also feel I earned my karma the hardest way: I've only submitted one or two things, and I don't tailor comments to please others. I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.

> I don't tailor comments to please others.

Super. Neither do I, prepare for the occasional -4. And don't worry about it.

> I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.

That's a double edged one. On the one hand, yes, you're right. And some of the 'top submitters' here take the easy road by putting in a lot of the mainstream / techcrunch stuff.

On the other hand to get some points for finding a really nice article sends the signal that says 'well done', find us more stuff of that caliber.

Personally I think that domains that have had more than say 20 links submitted (TC, wsj, cnn, bbc, sciam, the top blogs and so on) should no longer be rewarded.

It's basically a race between the people that have their RSS feeders primed and want to be the first to submit that sort of thing.

Yes, jacquesm, you were one of the first names I began to recognize, and in one early thread you were being downvoted, something to do with poverty differences in nations I believe. I thought man this guy is getting beat down, but you stood your ground and kept making your point. I respected and admired that. As for the karma points for submissions I'd rather see a 5 point maximum awarded. Some submissions get over 100 votes, but I've never seen even the most insightful comment do that. I guess it becomes more important depending on what we take karma to mean and be used for.

There are always going to be outlying cases, whatever strategy you use. I suppose I could fix this one by making the threshold depend on either average comment karma or total karma. But as I said, my inclination now is just to stop displaying points on comment threads.

But the issue is not one of displaying or not displaying, the issue is one of functionality, of votes not being counted.

If you do not display the votes but you do pretend that you're counting them you have not solved the problem at all.

On an 'average' forum that sort of trick might work but HN is populated by some of the smartest people I have run in to in the last 20 years or so and it will not take them much work at all to find out whether or not their votes are counted.

I can already think of two ways right of the bat.

As I also said, if I stop displaying points on comment threads, I can also get rid of the thresholds on which votes count.

Ok. That would help a lot.

It will at least make people that have been here for a long time have the same privileges as an account that is less than 5 minutes old.

I'd hate to be in your shoes on this one, it's one of those 'damned if you do/damned if you don't' kind of things.

From the sidelines it is easy enough to criticize but I've run enough websites to know that a users point of view is not always the same as the point of view of the person that tries to maintain the atmosphere.

I'm all for dropping the points, in fact, as far as I'm concerned you can drop the leaderboard as well.

If someone is interested in the karma of a user they can always go and look at the profile.

At least like that we get rid of stupid comments like 'I made it my mission to be in the top 100'.

The leaderboard does not really seem like it is that impressive anyway. It seems to me that a well formulated bot could easily surpass the highest ranked listings at this point.

Think of the leaderboard as an odometer, it basically logs how much time you spend on HN.

If I had to put a number on it I'd say 1 karma point today equates anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes of work on HN.

If you were to express that in money, given the kind of expertise that walks around here anybody on the leaderboard has spent upwards of several thousand $ worth of their time, which gives you an idea of how much they get back out of it.

I suggested this before, but I think it was well after you stopped reading the threads. Let me try again:

Why not show a percentile for comments? Before there are 10 or 20 or so comments on a page, don't show any score of any kind (except maybe gray out really bad comments). Then, when the number of comments is high enough, display a percentile compared to all the other positively ranked comments. You can still use points internally, but you display a much fuzzier number to users. It is useful to quickly pick out the best comments to read, but once a comment becomes one of the best in the thread, no one will have to keep voting it up (and similar for down). People will just cast votes to say "this comment is over (or under) valued" not to say "This comment deserves another (or one less) karma point".

I'd really love to see you run that experiment for a day or two :-) What do you say?

That's a really nice idea actually.

I would love to see this - I think it's a very promising idea.

Good idea; I'll consider it.

Hope this suggestion catches on, it sounds good.

These aren't outlier cases.

If I wanted to boost my comment score average, I would very deliberately formulate even more bogus opinions about popular "controversies". Oh, I sure would come up with a lot of crap to say about Zynga, the Apple Tablet, and Websprockets.

It would work, because haunting the less popular topics has been a surefire way to get my average to drop.

Good point about the orphan threads. I should somehow normalize for that.

That would take care of the Ask HN threads as well, especially since these suffer from the additional burden of being identified as 'self posts' so they are hardly ever on the top of the homepage.

Dividing comment votes by article votes (or comment votes by parent votes) would be a start.

I'd just cap comment scores at 50 (or less). Scores give a way for people skim read a thread. You're already capping at -10.

edit: On plastic.com, they stopped displaying user scores at 50 when it became a competition. -- you could do that too: remove the ego from karma.

Agreed. I know how to write comments that get tons of upvotes, but most of the comments I write aren't those kinds of comments, because I think there are other types of comments that also add a lot of value even if they don't get any upvotes.

My votes haven't counted for a while, and my comment average is 2.64 according to http://searchyc.com/user/10ren?only=comments&sort=by_poi...

I think a respectful approach is to be upfront, and just say there's a cut-off, instead of making the votes appear to count. I assume you want to obscure it, to protect HN from scamming, but I'm not sure that valuing protection over respect will work in the long term.

EDIT I'd like to upvote some of the comments here, but what's the point? They won't count.

Not only that, if it is known beforehand that my votes won't count don't show me the silly buttons.

There's a contract that user interfaces have with people, it kind of goes something like this: I will show you a button. When you press it, something will happen. I should do everything possible to make the same thing happen every time, because if I keep making it different things, it's probably going to piss you off a lot.

Seems like we're kind of getting backwards who is supposed to be in charge here, the person or the algorithm.

> it's probably going to piss you off a lot.

We're getting there.

The last few weeks have been pretty rough in this respect.

Cheating your way to the top is fine, simple requests get denied, basic site functionality appears to be broken but turns out to be working as designed only nobody thought of making it plain.

It's a fine line between subtlety and disrespect.

For what it's worth, at jtv we used to have a policy of silently failing various actions when one of our many spam-like flags got raised. It seems like such a great idea - the spammers will have been caught, but they won't know it. Unfortunately I think we've found over time that the negative consequences for users who are falsely flagged as being spammers just aren't worth it, and we have become more explicit about telling users they've been flagged in some way.

Long story short: If you're going to disable some action I think it's actually better in the long run to make it obvious that's what you're doing.

I always find your continued thinking on ways to improve and maintain this site to be insightful, thank you for sharing so transparently.

> thank you for sharing so transparently.

You must have missed the bit where this was brought up many times before over a period of months.

This is the first time there actually is an answer and it turns out that at least from where I'm sitting this 'feature' was actually detrimental.

If there would have been some more user input I highly doubt this would have been implemented.

I'm 2.89, on a downward trend, and the past several of my votes haven't counted. Is something else going on?

I recognize the good intention, but the "vote not counting" thing is on a visceral, psychological level very irritating. It feels antagonistic.

I recommend that you kill that feature in the short term, and then proceed to remove scores from most comment displays.

Are you sure your votes don't count? Your average comment score is way over the threshold, and your account hasn't been flagged for any kind of abuse. There are other reasons individual votes may sometimes be ignored (e.g. apparent karma bombing, or voting rings) but if you upvote a randomly chosen comment, it should work. Let me know if it doesn't.

I've never seen an upvote fail. It's only downvotes. I know that sometimes, if I downvote, nothing happens, I reload the page, nothing happens, but if I click through to the direct link for the comment the vote has taken effect --- in other words, I know to check for that. What I'm seeing is, most of my downvotes don't count.

(Finding a random comment to downvote is more effort than I want to spend on this problem).

Ah, I see what's going on. If more than a certain percentage of your votes are downvotes (currently the threshold is 65%) the downarrow stops working till downvotes drop below that threshold.

That's amazing to me that somebody can have more than 65% of their votes be downvotes.

It shouldn't be. I mostly downvote. (I comment more than I downvote, though).

Input to the site is input to the site. If it's well-intentioned, it should be helpful. I assume the 65% rule was put in place to handle abusive semiautomated voting.

> I assume the 65% rule was put in place to handle abusive semiautomated voting.

I'm not sure I understand how that's materially different than what you are doing?

So the vast majority of the time when you do go to vote on a comment, it's a downvote? I know that you didn't get a karma in the mid-20k's by having people do that to you -- perhaps they should have. As this discussion is revealing, the system has artificially capped you at 65% but by your own admission it would be some significant percentage higher than that?

I'm not sure which adjective I could use to describe such malevolent behavior...."shocking" comes to mind, but so does "abusive".

I mean, I'm sitting here stunned. This means that you click the little down arrow at a rate almost 2x the rate you click the little up arrow. And that's only because the system has capped you to that "low" of a downvote rate. Given your druthers it would be higher. Or to put that into perspective, that's ~15 thousand points of your current karma score if this site gave you a point for every vote you doled out.

So that I can not loose all faith in humanity, I have to ask this honest question:

Do the things people have to say around here either not make an impression on you so you don't bother voting ever, and when you do it's only out of some kind of indignant revulsion and you've only voted some trivial number of times, like 3 times total? (Please say yes).

and people seem to not comprehend my bitching about the downvote hoards on HN

I didn't even read this comment, but I'm going to re-clarify anyways.

When I see something overtly bad: a troll, something irretrievably wrong from a technical perspective, or an over-the-line personal attack with no redeeming content, I'll reliably downvote it.

Otherwise, I don't vote. I'd rather reply to something than vote it down anonymously, and if you're going to reply, downvoting the parent is counterproductive; it effectively asks the site to bury your comment along with the parent.

I'm sure I routinely downvote things out of pique just like everybody else, and I'm sure I occasionally upvote things too. Those events cancel each other out. Meanwhile, I'm still reliably downvoting bad stuff. Hence, 65%.

To be honest, I don't really care what you think of how I use the site. I just want to speak up in defense of the idea that up/down percentages don't matter. Like short sales, downvotes contribute to the efficiency of the site, just like upvotes do.

PS: Now I have read it, and I'm glad I didn't before I wrote the comment above. Come off it. If you want to know how I got to ridiculous levels of karma --- besides commenting a lot --- I'll tell you: once you get to a certain level of karma (which we'll treat as a proxy for all sorts of other reputation effects on HN), it becomes self-reinforcing. You and I could make the exact same comment and I will reliably get voted higher than you, because fewer people expect "good" comments from you. So, go ahead and downvote me as much as you'd like. You'd actually be making my comment scores more accurate.

If I filter out the exceptional narcissism on display here (particularly in the postscript), I think you make several points that I both agree and disagree with:

1) >When I see something overtly bad: a troll, something irretrievably wrong from a technical perspective, or an over-the-line personal attack with no redeeming content, I'll reliably downvote it.

I think this is good. I don't think anybody will argue with you on the merits of this kind of downvoting. In fact, on some level, most people would even think you are too light on trolls and the like since there is a flag option intended for just those kinds of users.

2) >Otherwise, I don't vote. I'd rather reply to something than vote it down anonymously, and if you're going to reply, downvoting the parent is counterproductive; it effectively asks the site to bury your comment along with the parent.

Again, I think this is good. The purpose of a forum like this is to drive discussion not karma building. Comments as replies with or without a vote up/down is far more valuable than an anonymous vote. I think we also agree that downvoting can also have the effect of "tainting" an entire thread so that further responses are also downvoted or nobody participates in that entire sub-tree. I applaud your willingness to participate and engage in this site via contributing comments and discussion. We've butted heads here before as well, and I enjoyed every bit of the engagement despite our strong differing opinions.

>I'm sure I routinely downvote things out of pique just like everybody else, and I'm sure I occasionally upvote things too. Those events cancel each other out. Meanwhile, I'm still reliably downvoting bad stuff. Hence, 65%.

Actually you would be over 65% since the site's logic no longer allows you to downvote (at least according to pg). 65% is the cutoff, given no limit you would probably be much higher than that.

> I just want to speak up in defense of the idea that up/down percentages don't matter.

I most strongly disagree with this. By force of logic, if they didn't matter, there wouldn't be a cap...period. The fact that there is a cap is designed to control for users of the site such as yourself.

And you are right, it doesn't matter what I think, I'm just a low karma user that writes too much. However, it does matter what pg thinks, and he thinks that up:down ratios like yours represents such bad behavior that he took the time to build a control into the site explicitly for that purpose. You, I and pg agree, there is a body of users on HN that represent abusive downvoters -- hence the control. You simply don't think you are part of that group for some reason.

> Like short sales, downvotes contribute to the efficiency of the site, just like upvotes do.

I do not disagree with this, hence the existence of a downvote mechanism. Like negative feedback in any social situation, it's a social normalization function designed to move a person towards an equilibrium of thought and action with their social group (just like my negative feedback to you is intended to do). I'm not sure it's always helpful since it tends to suppress out-of-the-box thinking as well as bad behavior, but it is there.

However, you and I must read different HN sites. Unless you spend your entire day policing http://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments and downvoting "trolls, bad info and personal attacks", or you vote so seldom that a vote either way makes up a large percentage of your total, I simply don't see a particularly large number of posts on this site that fit into your three criteria. I may be mistaken, but I'm guessing that pg has also not deputized you in some fashion as a body responsible for policing HN -- feel free to correct me on this.

I personally think that the user community on this site tends to not skew towards those categories which is one of the reasons I enjoy this site so much.

Please don't take this as a personal attack, I know that your intentions are good. But you seem to be the only habitual downvoter that has decided to make themselves known to the user community at large so my focus is on you. Really, my focus is on the group of such like-similar downvoters since they represent a significant portion of the small list of reasons where I don't find this site enjoyable.

p.s. I upvoted your comment.

I have definitely experienced some kind of caching behavior in the past: Load a page, vote something up, reload the page and my vote has not counted. But then reload the page some time later (without voting again), and now my vote is counted.

Or someone else voted it up too...

Hard to tell the difference.

No, I mean I've had the experience where I've voted something up (making the arrows disappear), then reloaded the page, and the arrows are back again.

That may have been a case of being a little bit too quick on the draw on your end.

If you look at the status bar of your brower, your vote has only registered with the server when it says 'done' again.

If you refresh before then you may cancel the vote altogether.

second that.

I wonder how many people who should have received votes didn't get them either?

My guess is you got flagged by possible-sockpuppet. See news.arc in arc3.tar for why some stuff gets ignored.

    (def possible-sockpuppet (user)
      (or (ignored user)
          (< (uvar user weight) .5)
          (and (< (user-age user) new-age-threshold*)
               (< (karma user) new-karma-threshold*))))

Since your age and karma don't seem to be a problem, I'd guess an admin or editor marked you as ignored, or an admin reduced your weight.

Interesting - thanks. I wish I could upvote you.

No, that isn't it, RoG is well above those thresholds.

I've had my voting stopped on a couple of occasions. The last one was because I downvoted someone 3-4 times in a row in the same thread (all their comments needed a downvote :) it wasn't anything nasty) and my voting stopped working for a week or so.

I also think in the past I have had it removed for:

- upvoting different stories in quick succession (came back to the page to vote stories I liked....)

- downvoting the same person 2-3 times in the space of about 20 minutes in different threads (without realising I must stress!) with no other votes in between

It comes back after X amount of time.

> but I'm pretty disincentivized about bothering to spend time trying to add value.

Yeh I feel that; I read now but dont bother to contribute many votes.

from pg's comments elsewhere my thoughts on what behaviour limits your voting might be incorrect - simply circumstances of coincidence (and more related to volume of posting_

Chill out man. First, it could be a bug. Second, no doubt HN is a special place, but it's still just a news forum. Get back to work, go out to play, don't make this your life.

</patronising>

I know what you mean but HN has also been a place where like-minded people could identify one another for possible real world collaboration. That's much more than just a news forum.

First of all, yes, I am fully aware that this is just a news forum, and that there's this thing called "real life."

Secondly, this is a great resource of both contacts and information. It's made great because of the quality of people here, and the time they take to submit, comment, and vote. Without that time from people with busy lives, HN will become rather non-special.

I'm pointing out that at least one person here now feels, because of a stated policy, that their time is undervalued, so I'm thinking of taking it elsewhere. I do have an outside life, I was investing time here because I thought it might be valued. I'm re-evaluating that decision

I'm not going to walk away without explanation. When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why. I'm giving PG the courtesy to let him know my reactions to his policies. It's his site and he can and will do as he chooses. So far he's done an extraordinary job.

Think of this as customer feedback.

Fwiw I think people who downvote you are reacting to the tone of your writing

Sentences like "I'm not going to walk away without explanation." sound (mildly) pompous and priggish.

You could cut all the dramatics and posturing from your post, state the facts (as you see them) plainly, provide any supporting data and ask a polite question about the effect you want and what you can do to help.

Sentences like "When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why." and "Think of this as customer feedback." have an assumption built in which may not hold.

"user" != "customer".

Thanks for the feedback - appreciated.

I could've taken more time to explain that more clearly, and it probably would've sounded better, but I really do have other things to do.

The simple facts are that my votes don't count, I don't know why, I thought I was a useful contributor, I resent the implicit message that my votes aren't valued, and I think it's rude to walk away from a service because of a perceived flaw without giving feedback.

I'd be interested to know what people think the difference is between "user" and "customer." Perhaps a "user" simply doesn't pay in any way, whereas a "customer" does. I prefer to be a "customer." In return for the contacts I've made and information gained, I'm happy to repay by taking time to add value.

Most companies try to turn users into customers. I'm just pointing out that the current situation has turned a customer into a user, and that might not be what was intended.

Maybe it's your presumption of malice that's rubbing people the wrong way. Instead of immediately thinking that you are under attack, perhaps a presumption of malfunction would have shown higher regard for people's intentions.

(But then again, given that this is HN, maybe assuming their code isn't bug free is a worse insult? ;-)

As I tried to point out (and obviously failed - you're not the first person to suggest this) the fact that others have in the past said that they have lost the right to vote, and the fact that PG says he tinkers with the question of whether specific votes count, make me believe it's not a bug or other unintended feature.

(ADDED IN EDIT: PG has said: "I'm experimenting with changes to the code that decides which votes count.")

And in some sense I'm content that for some reason and in some way my votes have been deemed irrelevant. I'd just like to know why. More than that, I spend time thinking before I vote. If my vote has no effect, I won't waste that time.

I don't think the intention is "specific votes" as in an editor cherry-picked particular users to ignore. Rather, I think they are trying to code logic that will recognize patterns of behavior and ignore users that exhibit that behavior. That is tricky stuff, and it's going to get a lot of false positives until they settle on an acceptable set of rules.

You're really not giving PG and whoever else develops the HN code the benefit of the doubt.

  > I don't think the intention is "specific votes" as in an
  > editor cherry-picked particular users to ignore.

I'm sure that's true. They write complex code that tries to identify deprecated behaviours, and then take action based on that. No doubt I could've expressed that point to better reflect what I think. I will look at going back and editing the phrasing - thank you.

  > Rather, I think they are trying to code logic that will
  > recognize patterns of behavior and ignore users that
  > exhibit that behavior.

Most likely, yes.

  > That is tricky stuff, and it's going to get a lot of false
  > positives until they settle on an acceptable set of rules.

Yes, and no. Yes it's tricky, and yes there will be false positives, but the rate depends on how aggressive they try to be.

  > You're really not giving PG and whoever else develops the
  > HN code the benefit of the doubt.

I suspect I'm giving them more credit than you give me credit for. This is the sort of thing at which I earn my living, and I really do know how hard automated behavioural analysis can be. I also know that behaviour modification works best when the reinforcement is strongly attached to the behaviour. The problem here is that I have no idea what I've done to have my voting privileges revoked, and that is counter-productive.

RoG is on the ball and has voiced something a lot of people have been up against. I don't think it should be up to you to tell people what they should do or not do.

For you it is 'just a news forum', for me it has been:

  - a source of knowledge
  
  - a source of friendship

  - a source of income

  - a way to help others

  - a way to find help

It's the same for me and has been like that for weeks, months(?). Having your votes on hacker news isn't exactly important to life as others have pointed out but it's slightly demoralizing whenever I forget myself and vote on something only to realize the system just ignores me. I'm useless and valued less than even a new user. :(

I'm considering creating a new user because of that as I've tried to just wait for it to work again hoping it's temporary. I have no idea what caused me to loose my voting rights in the first place and there's no way for me to change my behavior if it's undesirable. I've for the record never voted maliciously and this is my username because I've lost my password twice before not because I have several users to vote with.

Considering that pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a short list of people whose comments he tends to find interesting, I doubt this was intentional.

It also might've been better handled by a short email to him.

  > pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a
  > short list of people whose comments he tends to
  > find interesting ...

Really? I didn't know. Do you have a reference?

  > It also might've been better handled by a short
  > email to him.

To be honest, I never actually thought of that.

I thought it was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845938

...but it's not. Might've been somewhere else, or I might be mistaken.

That's the reference I found, and I found no others. Never mind, it was a nice thought while it lasted. 8-)

I know this may not be the same situation as yours, and it may not be entirely helpful to you; but whenever I've had a problem with my account I've just sent a note to PG and it's gotten taken care of within a day or so.

(I have had voting problems previously.)

I think what it boils down to is that the devoting logic is easy to trigger and permanent. I haven't had the ability to up or downvote in about six months.

I've not heard of the automatic bans lasting that long???

The longest I ever had was about 2 months (give or take - I was away for part of it). The longest ever someone has mentioned to me has been about 3 1/2 months

Then I am your new record! Just checked it and it happily fails.

Is it not safer to assume it is a bug first of all before claiming that pg is wasting your time and not valuing you?

Often yes, but in this case probably not. PG has stated publically that he tinkers with whether or not to count votes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871458

It appears that in this case, as in others before mine, he's decided that he's not going to count my votes. I have no idea why. As I say, it makes me inclined not to bother giving much back to the site, even though it's a great resource.

No, that thread states that he tinkers with "changes to the code that decides which votes count". I don't see why you would jump to the conclusion that it's intentional and not a bug when he's publicly said he's experimenting.

False positives in complex code designed to detect behaviour are not bugs. I'm not saying I've been singled out and that some editor has said - Ooh, that RiderOfGiraffes, we need to remove voting privileges. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that as a result of the system they have, I've lost my voting privileges, and I think it's a false positive.

And I'm asking - what have I done to trigger the mechanism?

I doubt I'll get an answer, no one else ever seems to have, and given that the site seems largely to work pretty well, I'm not going to campaign actively for it to be run differently.

But I'm not the only one, and I'm disappointed that despite trying to stay within the guidelines, despite submitting stuff I think the community will find interesting, and despite thinking carefully about how I vote and why I vote, somehow I've fallen foul of the system.

Sufficiently disappointed that I don't think I'll take so much care in the future.

There's a really interesting subtext about web-apps here. So much so that I think it deserves more follow-up.

Yes, you are correct: you will not take so much care in the future.

People are wonderful pattern recognizers. Show them a system where you vote up and things go up and you vote down and things go down? They grok it. Where you punish people by down-voting them and reward them by up=voting? Makes sense.

But start mucking around so sometimes when you vote up the article goes down? Or sometimes you can vote and sometimes you can't? Or you can't vote now, but you can vote in 12 hours? Or you can vote for this guy, but not this other?

Eventually they just say "Screw it. It's effectively either random or designed especially to piss me off. Therefore I will not take it seriously"

Oddly enough, the more attached people are to the gaming/karma aspects of the site, the more this will annoy them. Also the more annoyed they are, the more likely they are to start gaming the system -- since in their minds the system isn't giving them a "fair shake" to begin with.

Lots of interesting insights into human behavior with complex systems here. Of course I'm just speculating, but it's important stuff for anybody running a public site.

Okay, so this topic comes up pretty frequently, so I'm going to go at it again. I, for one, completely support what pg is doing.

The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake. It's to keep conversation at the absolute highest possible quality. To that end, pg and and the editors curb a lot of behavior they find contrary to that goal. They kill spam. They kill articles that are too far away from our core topics. They ban trolls. They ban people who aren't quite trolls, but still have a negative effect on conversation. At the low end of the penalty scale, they sometimes take away your voting privileges, for awhile, or potentially forever. I'm guessing that means: we like what you have to say just fine, but we think your voting patterns are harming the site.

I've noticed this happening to a lot of people, so I've used that feedback to modify my own behavior. I try to make about four or five comment upvotes for every downvote, at least. I don't downvote anything into negative points unless I think it is really harsh and goes very much against the grain. The details don't matter, but the overall outcome does: I try to behave in a manner that I think is good for the site.

If it turns out that pg disagrees with what I'm doing, I'm perfectly fine with that. If he takes away my voting rights or bans me outright, I will still think he's doing a good job.

Here's why I think so: just look at this place! Have you ever seen an internet hangout that got this old and/or this big, yet remained as civil and valuable as this one? I certainly haven't.

That says to me that pg isn't just doing something right, he's doing something incredibly right. I am frankly a lot less impressed by the community-building track record of any of the complainers.

Largely speaking I agree with you. My problem here is that I don't know what I've done wrong. If those responsible (PG and his editors) want to communicate a message to me, they've failed.

I haven't gone around upvoting and downvoting excessively. I've upvoted a few things I think are of value, and I don't remember downvoting anything recently.

I'm just confused.

Feedback works best when it's consistent in direction (but not in frequency) and clearly attached to the action that provoked it. I think PG and friends do a great job on this. I think this is something they get wrong.

Yeah, it looks to me like pg is a lot more subtle than most of the techie-types who come here. He is not loud or brash or confrontational. He expects people to observe and figure things out, rather than being told explicitly. That goes against many people's expectations.

On the positive side, he is very responsive to people with problems who are sincere about working with him. Almost everybody who has ever been banned and made a good-faith effort to work with him has gotten unbanned. From what I've seen, this pretty much always happens via email. As others have mentioned, that's the go-to communication method for people with problems.

The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake

If I understood the OP, their issue is not that they don't feel like a special snowflake - it's that this is a site that is driven, among other things, by the warm fuzziness of user contribution, predominantly expressed by voting, and that if users get the feeling that voting is irrelevant this might cause a lot of users to stop contributing.

While one can always say, correctly, "It's PG's site and he can do what he like with it", I think it is fair to comment on things like "if my vote doesn't count, showing me the button regardless and eliciting my vote seems unfair". If The Great Algorithm In The Sky has decided my vote doesn't count, I think it is fair to indicate this to me in some way.

My comment average is 4.24 right now so I am presumably not affected - who knows?, but I sympathise with the essence of the OP's argument. I also sympathise with PG's attempts to maintain the integrity of the site in the face of increasing popularity. I think the issue is not the why, it is the how.

I can't believe you made a new submission about this. Seriously. Why can't you email him?

I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your votes irrelevant. Seriously. It's just the internet.

> Why can't you email him?

That would probably be impolite :)

> I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your votes irrelevant

Please read Riders explanation. There are automatic triggers which stop your votes counting for an unknown period of time if you trigger them. Not a conspiracy; requests for information on this have been posted a couple of times before.

It'd be impolite to email someone something when it only concerns them, and yet it's fine to post on an online news group where everyone will see it?

What emailing out of the blue on a low priority issue and for which a wider group of people are interested in the answer anyway?

I certainly wouldn't bother him.

There is a history at HN of people who encountered problems emailing PG and having the problem solved.

Something is clearly broken, or not working properly. And affecting many HN users. I think it was worth the post.

The same here. I had started a topic on this before and some people assured me that it will probably get back working, as they had this issue before as well.

Personally, I don't care much about this. Though when I start a topic here asking for help, I feel that I should thank those who helped me by upvoting their comments.

I had no idea HN's defense mechanisms were this sophisticated.

While we're talking about the voting system - could you please specify more clearly in the guidelines in what circumstances downmodding is appropriate?

One example of downmodding that I've seen personally is that someone will post a reference of a link or a book that I had never heard about. When it is particularly valuable to me I like to respond thanking them for posting it. I don't expect karma from this, I simply want to convey my thanks to the person who provided the information and to encourage other people to do the same. I also upvote them, but I think the personal thanks is more valuable. I've had these "that you" comments downvoted consistently, to the point where I no longer thank people and ultimately delete the comment. I find this behavior strange in a "community".

what you're describing there is a pretty information-free response, not terribly different from just saying 'me too'. that's what upvotes are for.

I see your point, but I don't believe we have the same definition of "information-free". Unless I'm mistaken, upvotes are anonymous. A comment of "thank you" or appreciation is essentially a publicly identifiable upvote. The information being conveyed is to the commenter and that information is the appreciation of the comment from an identifiable individual.

In just about every situation you could say that greetings, salutations, etc. convey no obvious information. But I'm not sure how far we'd get without them. I personally believe that things like this are what maintain and bond a community. But that is simply my opinion. I'd take a thoughtful comment reply, even if in disagreement, than an upvote any day.

I've got a better one for you: I submitted an article yesterday. Quickly 3 or 4 people upvoted it -- it was basically an "Ask HN" piece. Nothing special.

But the odd thing was that even though the score increased dramatically from 1 to 5 in just 10-15 minutes, the ranking didn't change that much. Used to be that an increase of that much would get you near the top of the front page, if even for a little bit.

I'm not complaining, just figured somebody somewhere was tinkering or it was some kind of effect of karma inflation. However it does bring up an interesting point about UI design and large groups of users -- any non-obvious new system behavior can easily be interpreted in lots of ways, some of which aren't so flattering to the board owners.

FWIW, I've always thought this behavior was a bug. If I thought my vote was being taken and then returned to me at random times depending on the "smarts" of the system without notifying me why, I'd be pretty mad. I understand that it's already happening with deep threads and the first time I stumbled across it I was so mad I was ready to just throw in the towel on HN.

Not exactly a happy user experience, but yes, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Just a better job of communicating would salve a lot of these hurt feelings, in my opinion.

Apparently submissions with text as opposed to URLs don't get ranked as highly. Two items submitted at the same time and with the same votes, one with URL, the other as text, the text one will rank significantly lower.

That might explain your observation.

Thanks!

But that's my point -- there's all kinds of little nuances and "if X, then Y" in the system and hell if I have time to keep on top of all of it. To my mind, it seems a reasonable assumption that there is a mad sysadmin somewhere just screwing around with me. After all, in the past for most boards limiting voting or tweaking ranking or turning on or off features was traditionally handled by a person, not an algorithm. Maybe it's some super-duper cool collaborative voting checker that's working wrong or maybe somebody just had a bad day. As a user, beats me -- and once I have to start second-guessing who is doing what to me and why the site is totally screwed. In my opinion.

You shouldn't have to be on HN everyday and read all the pages to understand how the site works. That's an idiotic expectation.

By the way, I'm commenting on all user sites with non-intuitive behavior, not just the peculiarities of HN.

Random News - perhaps not a bad idea?

There are a couple other things that are down-weighted like self-posts... tweets, unembedded images. PG commented about this at one point.

PG commented about this at one point.

(sigh)

The ranking algorithm treats t0 as if it were actually 2 hours. Without this damping, you get too much volatility on the frontpage.

If you haven't done so already, why don't you email Paul Graham privately and ask him what you have done to cause your comments to be discounted. If it is for a reason that he wants to keep private then it might be more constructive than raising the issue in public.

Not that I disagree, however, I found it interesting to hear about this issue. I wasn't aware it exists before this submission.

> I understand that you need to stay on top of the problem of people gaming the system, and that being too open just makes it easier for people to screw around and make the voting system less valuable.

Is security through obscurity really a good idea in this day and age?

Works for Google and their pagerank. And I would argue that in that case it IS a good idea. :)

Its another brick in the wall. As long as you're not fooling yourself into thinking it's all you need, it aids in not making things easier for people to figure out and slightly raises the bar against intrusion. "Defense in Depth" is the only situation where I could consider obscurity a security layer.

Just because I keep my ssh servers up to date (disable passwords, root login, etc), doesn't mean I don't gain anything by having them listen a high port. The moment a 0-Day exploit is found (or maybe another Debian key generation bug) the security of not showing up on every script kiddies initial scans looking for unpatched ssh servers is worth something.

Thanks to everyone for their interesting comments. Some of the forms of site behavior mentioned here I don't think I have ever observed. I don't read the code for the site software, so I just use the site empirically. The discussion of trade-offs involved in different kinds of site voting behavior defaults has been very helpful to me.

My overall perspective on any online forum's forum rules is that I just deal with them. I don't take any set of rules personally. I don't assume any kind of enforcement action or limitation on my own forum participation is directed at me as an individual, but rather is a forum management response to forum issues. If I enjoy a forum, I keep right on participating. If I don't enjoy a forum, I take my participation elsewhere without feeling offended. I happen to like HN a lot. To each their own.

As to specific observations of voting behavior, to the best of my knowledge and belief, when I upvote a comment or submission, and when I downvote a comment, my votes immediately change the score of the item I have just voted on. I try in my own mind to upvote more often than downvote, but I have no way to keep track of my actual count of votes up or down. I do like to clean up the comments, so I definitely downvote from time to time, and sometimes in bursts of downvotes in one thread. Unless I am wholly mistaken in my observation, my votes count as ups or downs on those items, in real time. It has been my observation that my own personal karma score will sometimes be stable for hours at a time, even if I have made new comments or submitted new articles, and it may be (I don't know) that I am running into some automated response of the site software such that my karma score is frozen if I have just been downvoting repeatedly. But it often seems that overnight, or after a while, my personal karma score becomes unstuck, and anyway I don't worry about this too much. I look at my threads view from time to time both to see if anyone has replied to any of my comments and to see what the aggregate votes are on those comments. If I am below 1 in aggregate score on some comment I have made, I try to think why readers would decide to downvote it. If I see someone else get a conspicuously high net score on a comment in a thread where I have also commented, I try to figure out what he or she did right to achieve commendation from other participants. As long as the site in general is worth reading and interesting to me, I don't especially worry about how its voting behavior is implemented. It's fun for me to learn from other participants here what kind of rules are visible in the source code and what kind of incentives may be designed by management to keep the conversation worthwhile. Since 1992, I have been a moderator on one or another of a variety of online forums, and I'm always deeply curious about what makes online communities successful and valuable to participants. I think HN is doing a good job.

P.S. I like many of RiderOfGiraffes's submissions and comments, and have certainly upvoted more than a few (and perhaps downvoted none of them). I too recall some thread in which pg mentioned RiderOfGiraffes favorably, although I don't have the link at hand. I would regret seeing RiderOfGiraffes leaving the site or changing his username, because I like to see familiar usernames as a clue that a comment or submission will be worth a read.

I've noticed this same effect as well. I thought that it wasn't counted for some period of time + it wasn't counted unless there was a reply to the comment or some such.

Try Ctrl-F5 on pages where it seems your vote doesn't count. It's most likely stale cache.

Been there, done that, run experiments, and no, it's not a cacheing issue. This has been raised before, and it's not a bug. PG has explicitly said he experiments with not counting some votes. It appears he's decided (perhaps temporarily) not to count mine. Hence the question.

What does dl;dr: mean? I couldn't find it in the urban dictionary.

Not sure if you are sarcastic, but I'm pretty sure he meant tl; dr

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr

Yes - thanks - now corrected.

For some browsers you will need to use: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr

It's amazing how voting gets pretty complex, pretty fast.

Although, these are more ballot-based, I remember reading about this in my discrete math class (in high school!):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system

I second a couple of people's comments about how it's very cool PG is constantly trying to improve the system. I've sometimes read his comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg), and one can tell he really cares about the level of discourse (even if he just writes, 'Please stop', etc.).

The idea of preventing 'mob feel' reminds me of America's system of checks and balances. A democracy/republic with three branches of government is not a perfect system, but it's been sustainable.

I don't know the right way to do voting, but I'd recommend pg and whoever else is involved in this discussion -- think about it in terms of time (i.e., too many processes running in similar time intervals can get out of hand -- exe, leg and s.ct. are all staggered in terms of their time horizons) and symmetry (i.e., balanced levels of power).

Arguably, in a majority rule situation, the government's checks are in place primarily to protect minority rights (from mob rule). This seems a little different from the 'mob rule' problem being discussed (where people gravitate into two-sided arguments). But anyway, perhaps I'd try to figure out fractional voting. People with more karma (maybe 50% weighted by total karma and 50% weighted by karma velocity over the past couple of weeks) can upvote with maybe something like 1.5 the votes of everyone else.

But if you ask me, everyone's downvote should be significantly less than 1. Though, there could be again a 50% total and 50% velocity function for how each user's posts and comments are treated. I.e, if a user starts posting really bad stuff, then they should be able to be voted down much more quickly. But arguably, this part of the system should be tinkered with much less. Everyone, theoretically, should have a right to say whatever want. Hmm, maybe they could be forwarded to the rules for discussion and be delayed from posting (like a Hockey penalty box?)

I don't know. It's a complex issue. Maybe it's good enough the way it is. As this system moves forward though, it'd probably be smart to build in ways to vote/approve changes to the system. Not for everything, but big things (analog is the presidential election. People would probably feel a lot better about it all. It's strange. Maybe you need a Constitution too.

Update. One last little idea. You could introduce new voting functionality perhaps as A-B tests. Some posts randomly get flagged for voting with feature X, some don't. If you could establish some metric to judge 'satisfaction' with the experience (more good karma in the discussion?), you could, basically, build 'learning' into your system.

Just create a new account. I get banned all the time. This is my third account. You can't take it personally. It's either some person being wrong about you or some automated system. Who cares?

I love it when I get banned, it means I won't be back for a while, until the desire for attention overcomes the inertia. This site is kinda like Get Satisfaction for bloggers. "You don't have to create an account. It's just that everybody on this one thread is talking about you right now, and they're all taking your lack of response to mean something."

I hate the karma system. Any site that has one is fundamentally flawed (detailed rant: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...). It's an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship, and I hate to kick somebody when they're down, but this guy, with all his sad whining about "I don't know what I did wrong, why don't you love me any more"? That is not the sign of a healthy community. That is the sign of an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship.

Any venture capitalist knows that you run a lot of experiments and some things fail. The karma system is fail. Throw it away.

PS, please ban me.

PPS, nothing against you, giraffes guy, I just re-read my sentence and it seemed a bit harsh.

I'm just saying that a web site that makes a person unhappy is not a good thing for them to be part of, and as someone who comes back repeatedly, despite being banned, to me it looks as if your desire to come back, despite being disenfranchised, is a sure sign of dysfunction. my coming back is certainly dysfunctional, but here I am. people dig the site in spite of its dysfunctions, but it sure would be cool if PG et al just threw the dysfunctional parts away.

There is no shortage of karma-free forums elsewhere full of flames and junk. The karma system is helpful in providing feedback to people with a lack of impulse control or respects for others. If you're repeatedly banned, you may want to examine how you communicate as doing so would probably increase your ability to affect change.

I said I liked being banned. Why would I want to change something I like? It's a reminder to avoid getting into arguments with people who pay no attention to logic and have weird, arbitrary loyalties to systems which present no actual usefulness.

>Why would I want to change something I like? It's a reminder to avoid getting into arguments with people who pay no attention to logic

In other words, you are happy to be rejected by those you consider inferior because you consider it a validation of your own perceived superiority.

Yeah, exactly. It's a dysfunctional pattern. I enjoy it, but I really think there's a systemic tendency to dysfunctional patterns here. That's inevitable with any social software, so you have to plan for your dysfunctions. Look at Stack Overflow, the dysfunction they get is karma whores answering as many questions as possible, and competing to be first with the answer. That's a pretty great dysfunction. The dysfunction we have here is anybody who polarizes opinions gets banned. The cynical (me) find it amusing and the sensitive (Giraffes) get their feelings hurt. Either way, it's bad. You don't want a community which punishes anyone for voicing controversial opinions, but that's inherent to the design here.

I think it's more the the way that opinions are expressed than the opinions themselves which creates blowback (unless one is expressing something truly polarizing, like singing the praises of racial hierarchy). So, if you pay attention to the tone of communication you can express controversial opinions without defensive blowback and have a higher chance of people understanding your ideas.

you're making the same assumption I disagreed with two comments ago. to me, getting banned is not the negative part of the experience. the negative part of the experience is the bad habit of coming back to engage in more fruitless conversation when I could be off doing stuff. the more offensive my tone is on this site, the sooner I'll get banned again, the quicker I'll get on with something actually useful to do, and the better it'll be for me.

I should just follow my own advice and devolve into Tourette's syndrome. fuck you, you chinchilla rapist. (nothing personal.)

anyway, ALSO, none of this has anything to do with what I'm talking about, which is that HN's karma system incubates various dysfunctions, and that anyone who sets up any kind of points system on a social site is going to be setting up the rules of a game that people will then play and be emotionally invested in winning.

curious game, the only way to win is not to play. I'm going to throw away my password to this account, log out, and see how long I can last before starting account #4.

I assumed that being banned wouldn't be a positive experience if not being banned was more of a positive experience, i.e. if you got more value from communication.

But yeah, communication is often minimally useful. And I get that the pollution of motivation caused by social app incentives make make it even less so. It seems that without these incentives things tend to fall down in different ways, but maybe my experience of qualities communities that don't rely on social app incentives is limited.

[And chincilla is mischaracterizing what happened between us: it was my understanding that it was consensual.]

This is a good example of the power of a karma or rating system on your website. Personally, I don't give a shit if I'm being rewarded (or penalized) on websites, and seeing a little number next to my screen name doesn't give me any sense of pride or validation.

With this little rant about feeling like they're 'wasting time' because a counter isn't being incremented with an arbitrary points system, it's obvious there's at least some people out there that absolutely need this add-on to contribute positively.

Look at it like voting in America. Yeah, it probably doesn't mean squat, especially if your views contradict the local majority. But you still do it, right?

No.

I think the root here was complaining about the "First Past the Post System". In that case he has a point, especially when our politicians enjoy engaging in "jerrymandering".

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