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Comment by eternalban | Hacker News Reader

> even this community suffers from this strange phenomena of "group think"

There is absolutely no social cost for downvoting without commenting.

Adding costs and accountability:

    - force comment box on downvotes

    - deduct from karma

    - flagging only

Is it important for HN's community to have a "psychologically safe" [1] at this point in time?

I can not think of a more critical time for the "STEM" crowd to have a viable forum of discussion.

Topics ranging from the expected behavior of tall steel structures subject to excessive heat (ahem), to digital rights, cryto, crypto-currency, voting systems, genetics, AI, ..., can all benefit from informed discussion and debate.

HN membership, considering the depth and range observed, is entirely capable of this.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn... -- remember this one, HN?

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I have to say, I prefer when someone responds to my comments vs. an influx of downvotes which don't allow me to learn anything. I come here to learn, not to feel like I can't and shouldn't contribute. I originally got really discouraged from posting anything when all I ever got was downvoted and didn't know why, or how the rules worked here. Also as was mentioned above, the fact that I would make statements that others didn't agree with would get me downvoted to oblivion would stop me from commenting most of the time. I usually ctrl + f to see if anyone else is posting from the same viewpoint as me, and if nobody has I don't bother, some people who probably call themselves open-minded are not as such, everyone has their own prejudices.

I like the idea of downvotes costing you karma.

Forcing the comment box is also interesting. Maybe only make the downvote available to people who have already replied to a post.

Karma economy: Every submitted link or comment: +1 karma, every upvote, another +1, but a -1 for the upvoter. In the case of a downvote on a comment: -1 for the comment writer, -1 for the downvoter.

I think the upvoter should remain karma neutral. That keeps a steady flow of karma currency entering the system, which is necessary when the primary mechanism for filtering and ranking interesting content is upvoting.

If you penalise users for doing that, they'll do less of it, which will make the ranking/filtering less effective.

The writing of good comments and the submission of good links will already do that.

Not to nearly the same level.

Like any major site, I would guess the majority of HN readers do not comment, or only comment rarely.

Losing karma for upvoting means you need to comment if you want to upvote, and I suspect many readers will simply choose not to participate in either activity rather than try to maintain a positive karma balance.

  Each upvote on a submission: +100 for submitter, -1 for voter. 
  Each upvote on a comment: +10 for commenter, -1 for voter. 
  Each downvote on a comment: -10 for commenter, -1 for voter

This aligns with the ladder of engagement, where there are 10x as many creators as commenters as voters, while keeping a steady stream of currency injection.

> 10x as many creators as commenters as voters

It's rather the opposite. There are tens of thousands of potential voters, a fraction of that in comments and a fraction of that in quality link submitters (once you filter out the spam). Anyway, regardless of the situation there is an easy way out of this: measure and adjust accordingly, I'm sure 'arc' has the ability to define named constants.

This would also answer the question 'what is karma good for?' once and for all.

Whoops you're right I had it backwards in that one sentence, typo.

One paradoxical thing about discussions here is that often I see a bad post, followed up with a really good reply. And I want the two to be seen in tandem, but if I sink the parent I also sink the child. So I often upvote both.

Just a stray thought.

I would say that if a "bad post" has resulted in good discussion, then it wasn't a bad post. It might be in poor taste, but if that is a filtering criteria then you're going to get groupthink around controversial subjects.

I like the idea of deducting karma for a downvote. However, forcing a comment on downvote, while perhaps leading to less downvotes, might also just lead to many more comments that are not thought out and simply put there in order to downvote.

Maybe we need more nuanced voting options? While this could get a bit complex, such a system may function better. People could upvote a post as it is well written/thought out and/or is provocative/clever/interesting, but downvote it as they disagree. The overall comment karma would balance out, rather than it just being downvoted as lots of people disagreed with it.

Facebook is now using a similar type of system with their multiple emotes. I think such a system would work well with the HN community. It may lead to more thought out comments, as simple opinions can be expressed more accurately via the voting system.

Or simply force a comment if none already exist from a previous down voter. That way first one in has to give a reason for the downvote, which others can then +1 (or is it -1..)

That's a good point. The system could potentially be much more expressive with that approach, in that its not limited to simple categorical voting.

It will still have the problem that child comments of a downvoted comment will not get as much exposure. It also means that even if the comment was just unpopular (despite being well thought out) it will be downvoted after the first person posts a comment disagreeing.

Another approach could be to factor child karma when ranking comments. Though this gets significantly more complex as there are many edge cases where this will not work as intended.

Just to present another point that I just thought of:

Imagine if we take the downvote ability away from everyone. I believe there is still an "implicit" downvote in the form of every other comment getting upvoted. Under the current system, upvoted posts will be pushed to the top and downvoted posts will be on the bottom. Would this not cause the same effect as previous? Being ignored several times because your opinion does not conform the social norm will cause you to self sensor (or leave HN), would it not?

At the same time I think we recognize the value of upvotes, which in theory should allow for relevant and thoughtful content to be pushed to the top so more people can be exposed to it. Otherwise we'd have the traditional forums, which has widely variable SNR.

I'm not sure how to reconcile these points:

1. The wish to filter for "good" post and filter out the "bad" posts.

2. The subjective definition of "good" or "bad".

3. "Bad" (opposite) opinions gets buried because of point 2.

On the other hand I think education does work, as personally I refrain from downvoting when i disagree, only when it clearly does not add value (but even then, that is subjective). Although I'm not sure if this is obvious enough to HN users who first gained the ability to downvote.

The idea of forcing a comment on downvote is an excellent one, and I for one would like to try that for a little while. (I say this as someone who tries to only downvotes for tone and trolling, never for disagreement.)

Yes! It's so annoying to be downvoted without knowing why, and without being able to respond to that argument. It just kills the discussion.

Deducting from karma would be a fun experiment. Down voting is already disabled for people without enough karma.

HackerNews is a marketing channel for a technology investment firm.

Why should they care about balanced conversation? What if those balanced conversations somehow promote criticism of companies that they are involved with?

They obviously care as they implement extensive moding to avoid this place from devolving into something like Reddit.

So the community itself should have no say in how things work? It's this sort of attitude that leads me to make comments which get downvoted.

More logically, Ycomb gets a lot of prestige and "free" marketing from the quality and popularity of HN. It's in their interests to maintain and improve that quality. Besides, they're hardly going to lose clients because a couple of negative comments don't get downvoted into oblivion as swiftly as before.

Groups of people only become mindlessly profit driven when that's the last common goal they have left. In a large enough group that seems to always happen because people's goals are so diverse, but I suspect that HN team is still small enough to have some common goals outside of just collecting a paycheck.

They should care because they've created an excellent community and a wonderful forum for thoughtful discussion, not many of which exist on the internet. It's something to embrace and be proud of.

It's not perfect but it puts every other fairly large public internet forum I've seen to shame.

Not everything has to be done for economic gain. If you want to pretend it's all a ruse to make more money then you are free to consider having such a robust discussion forum to be good PR for Y Combinator; it garners an enormous amount of goodwill and respect in the tech community.

And they do care about earnest thoughtful balanced conversation. There are plenty of posts critical of YC companies or PG or you name it that are not censored. Mods interact with the community regularly to enforce standards and curate post quality.

Adding to this: Replace the down vote icon completely with the flagging icon, as the down vote icon probably encourages aggravated people to use it in the wrong way.

HN rules don't say anything about the "wrong way" to use the downvote button. If anything, we're encouraged to use it in the way we feel is best.

in the past, pg has used the analogy that upvotes are not only for civility, so downvotes aren't restricted only to incivility.

My own personal guideline: upvote = "I would like more comments like this" and downvote = "I would like less comments like this". My reason for wanting less comments of a particular type can be a lot of things -- incivility, factual incorrectness, being off-topic or distracting, being technically correct but misleading, or even being repetitive in relation to prior comments that already made the same point better.

PG had a few comments about downvoting. Two were like you said - people use upvote for agree so it makes sense that they downvote to disagree. But he also said that downvote for disagreement was a problem. That's (one of the) reason(s) why comment scores are no longer visible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683

Here's pg trying to address incorrect downvoting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057338

I think pg is wrong in this next comment, I think people vote to disagree, and I think there's a pile-on effect. But I don't have the data, and he (and dang) did (and do). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403716

EDIT: Some of those threads talk about the "meanness" of HN. I know I'm sometimes dumb and sometimes mean, so please if you see me doing that downvote me, flag me, send me an email.

yeah, it's more nuanced than "downvote for disagree" or "downvote only for flagrant hostility".

It's clear that some people are using downvotes aggressively, and that needs managed. I actually had a period of time when every comment I posted (no matter what time of day or what topic) received exactly one downvote between 5 and 6 pm in my time zone, as if I'd offended someone and they were retaliating. But I've also seen people post comments that are purely inflammatory with no worthwhile content (along the lines of "[group] is evil", where [group] is mainstream -- not ISIS or Nazis, but like, Republicans or Muslims) that didn't get downvoted. So the issue is more than "too few downvotes" or "too many downvotes".

So I try to be part of HN's corrective mechanism. If I see something blatantly inappropriate, I downvote and flag if appropriate. If I see something reasonable that's grayed out, I upvote. If I see something non-gray that I think is of negative value, I downvote, and I hope that if I misjudged it someone else will come along and cancel out my vote.

huh - maybe HN should have some sort of Karma modifiers like Slashdot did?

Here's what dang, who's currently in charge of HN, had to say about downvoting a while back:

> Downvoting for disagreement is not always bad, but it sometimes is. There should be some nuance here. Don't be indiscriminate. When a comment is blatantly false, downvoting is probably ok, especially when there's something else wrong with the comment. But high-quality, polite posts don't deserve penalizing just because you don't share their position. When you see one of those in negative territory, please be a good citizen and upvote it back to par. Users doing that is one of the community's self-correcting mechanisms, and it's more important now that we've made some downvotes more powerful.

(Emphasis mine)

For what it's worth, I agree that this should be in the site rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606517

Flag opens a drop down for Spam, Me-too, too Far off topic..etc

Much like Slashdot's moderation system.

And 50 jumping jacks for upvotes.

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