The Value of Downvoting or How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The Value of Downvoting or How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009)

blog.stackoverflow.com

27 pointsKinnard36 comments

The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive. For one thing, it establishes a mindset of "internet points" which encourages grubbing for upvotes, especially on HN where you must either grind out 500 points worth of relatively meaningless comments, or wait until you have the time to post 500 points worth of useful messages, which takes much longer, before you can use downvotes. If your opinions don't match the overarching consensus of the community, it may take forever because people downvote those with which they strongly disagree.

The goal of user feedback on submissions and comments should be to gain information about the comments in a more nuanced system than the linear "good/bad" scale, so that the site can make use of this information to help users achieve their browsing goals. The other problem with up/down votes is that they're used to decide ordering, i.e. visibility, and everyone wants their comments to be read (that was the motivation for posting them). Thus there's a natural incentive to try to grab the screenspace with the most eyeballs. People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to downvote other "siblings" in the tree. These are noise votes that provide no insight into any inherent property of the content, but simply fall out of the misaligned incentives. I'd like to see a system which lets HN answer the following questions: Is a comment well-written but trollbait? Is a comment a simple request for explanation, or a brilliant informative summary of a topic? Is a comment accidentally on the wrong post, or is it someone mistaken about matters of fact? Is a comment political or technical? Is it a first-person account from someone involved in the article? Is it anecdata? Is it an empty "me too"? There are many roles comments can be playing and if you're reading HN with a particular goal in mind, sorting user content into these buckets would be very useful.

Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago. The reason HN's is so poor is because the incentives are misaligned and pg does not actually care about the quality of discourse here, but merely the quantity and subject of discussion (because HN exists to farm cultural capital for venture capitalists). I do not believe much thought has been put into optimizing HN for the people who read and comment on it.

Edit: I can't believe this article got flagged and is no longer visible on the HN frontpage. This system is so dysfunctional.

> "The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive."

> "Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago."

Upvotes/downvotes are not productive, yet you want to replace it with a system that places extra emphasis on that type of metadata?

> "People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to downvote other "siblings" in the tree."

I'd suggest a better fix is to allow for collapsing comment threads. It's easy to tell when a thread has passed the point of no return when it comes to substance. You might miss the odd one or two interesting comments, but it'd definitely add to the overall HN experience.

Metadata is useful! The problem is that 1D "good/bad" being used to order comments is not a reasonable approach. In a more nuanced system there's less incentive (other than wrecking) to inaccurately mark comments as being "informative" or "technical" or "political", because instead of changing global comment visibility you're only changing it for the subset of users who are using that attribute to guide their reading. There are honest differences of opinion as to whether a comment fits in certain categories, but these are more specific and less contentious than "good/bad" and so I'd expect a much better SNR on them.

Collapsing threads is nice but the importance of defaults to the user experience is hard to overstate. At each step of an interaction chain more users will fall off and not end up at the goal. Lots of people will never use comment collapsing if they have to manually do it.

> Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago.

The SoylentNews guys tore into the moderation system and found it was pretty arbitrary, it may be worth seeing how they've revamped it (if that's done yet).

Of note: hacker news actually does have downvoting, you have to reach a karma threshold that keeps getting moved. Last I heard it was 500.

501. I reached it this week. Too low (1000 would be more reasonable), anyway I don't plan to use it.

You still need quite a lot of time to reach it, I've reached it in maybe 7 months or something, it's another level compared to reddit.

I took years. Only users that added a lot of value to HN should be allowed to 'shape' it. The community needs that people to feel like to continue to add value. In the end everybody wins.

You can downvote comments, which is nice, but not stories/posts. That might be a different threshold?

I'm not totally sold on it being strictly based on karma. I created my account just over over 1800 days ago and I only have 299 karma. I visit HN 4 or 5 times a day most time to read a few articles and read through the comments. The fact that someone can join and grind for a week or two to get to 500 and be allowed to down vote seems silly when after over 250 weeks of quiet participation I'm unable to do the same.

Unless the goal is to push for user participation, in which case I guess I get it on some level.

I'm ok with downvote for stories but it seems the system works pretty good without it: good posts get somehow noticed in "new" and appear in the "top", the inappropriate ones are ignored or flagged.

As for comments I would remove the feature entirely: I have never felt the need to downvote a comment even when I strongly disagreed with it and when I think something is stupid I just ignore it: there is no need to tell everyone else it's stupid. Also it really annoys me when I see someone's opinion grayed out and crashed by users that sometimes don't even bother to comment on why they downvoted.

How about three buttons:

>I agree

>I disagree

>This is spam

The total votes in the first two are used in the ranking, but then you also get "recommended friends" based on who else has agreed with what you've agreed with, and "advocated devils" based on who disagrees with what you agree with. These two groups are then used to alert the user to comments made by these people, which may indicate a discussion worth joining.

The first part of that is more or less the slashdot system, which I think worked pretty well. However the recommended friends / advocated devils seems like it would encourage groupthink / witchhunts / voting rings, etc.

Personally I think the best way to modify the current system would be to have up/down votes only affect the comment's position on the page and nothing else, no persistent or visible score for users or comments.

With regards to submissions we can always flag that which isn't suited for the site. With the upcoming elections sure to contentious there will be many stories masquerading themselves but in essence they are nothing more than political attack pieces.

We have already seen a few posted. They start out with an interesting headline about a technology everyone is interested in and then suddenly go straight to politics with attacks against one candidate or another without calling out the other side.

As for down vote costing, all for it with a caveat. If a post is universally down voted then the cost is refunded.

I think the interesting/compelling point is that there actually IS downvoting on hackernews.

What is the interesting point about that? That the author didn't notice it while looking at the site, and had to be told afterwards? That some of the arguments don't work/still work? I'm not sure what you want to say (if you want to say something, and not just see what others say)

I think it's a significant hidden feature which affects the shape of the community and also how the rewards of making it to the first page are allocated. There's essentially a class of hn users with more power.

Submissions can't be downvoted, so entries appearing on the frontpage is not affected. (Ignoring flagging, which admittedly can have a similar effect. I don't remember what the threshold for flagging is, also 500?)

EDIT: ... and of course this submission becomes an example for flags as downvotes...

Apparently you are correct. My bad.

What annoys me slightly of downvotes on HN is that many users seem to simply downvote comments for the only reason that they don't agree with their content (as opposed to judging them off-topic, spam, or poorly thought/ structured).

One possible solution would be to force downvoters to leave a comment explaining the reason of the downvote. The comment could then in turn be up or downvoted, putting the karma of the downvoter at stake.

I wish flagging didn't affect ranking so much. It is still possibly to send a submission from the top spots on the second page with flags, even if it has active discussion and never gets the number of flags necessary to kill it.

Flagging IMHO should be for "enough people have agreed to kill this" and not to punish controversial topics, especially since it can't be directly counteracted (vouch only works on killed submissions, not on those that are only penalized)

I wonder if it might be a good idea to disable the vote buttons until they've been in the viewable area for a minute or so, to allow for more time to think. Has that been tried anywhere?

I don't quite understand what you mean.

Only thing I can think of that is somewhat related is the fact that in deeper comments on HN it takes a while for the direct reply-link to show up, so you have to go via the permalink to respond immediately.

I just noticed this for the first time. There are so many little subtle things about hacker news.

If you click on the time of post, you always get the Reply link, no need to wait.

Similarly, I'd like to see voting disabled until you've actually clicked the story link, to reduce people voting on stories they haven't read.

I had a comment down voted because I pointed out that the tile of the post didn't match the title of the article at the url. The title on HN was changed to make the link more inflammatory (negative) towards the subject of the article. HN needs meta moderation.

From 2009

This is old (2009) and wrong (there is downvoting). Flagging.

How do you feel this merits a flag?

Ironically, they're probably flagging because they can't downvote stories.

As for the article, I disagree with it. The 'New' section moves so fast that there's no need for a story downvote, if it reaches the home page it's because there's enough people interested in it. The mods are also good at managing incoming spam (which you can see from the Dead stories in the New section). Furthermore, whilst it may have been true to say comment downvotes were rare in 2009, they're certainly not now.

Ironically, they're probably flagging because they can't downvote stories.

In some sense, yes. That is what flagging is for.

That's not what flagging is for. Flagging is to alert the mods that content needs to be removed, that is very different from downvoting because you dislike something.

It should be removed. It is irrelevant. That's why I flagged it. The concept applies to more than just spam. It also applies to, for example, political pieces or celebrity gossip.

In this case it was a simply incorrect and outdated article. I would expect that the author would be embarrassed to see it come up here (probably forgot about it).

I don't particularly dislike the article, it just shouldn't have been posted.

Because it is old and wrong. Just a way to keep my fellow HNers from wasting their time.

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