Ask HN: Why has the downvoting timelimit been reduced?
I feel like it makes people have to reply in a negative manner rather than just being able to lower the comment
I would advocate that downvotes be reserved for instances where the post was a net negative to the discussion, and flags should be reserved for egregious violations of conduct that call the originating user accounts itself into question.
Based on that, I think a score of -2 (is that the current limit?) and a few hours time limit is sufficient for the purpose of filtering the discussion. It should be ample time to weed out the low quality comments that should be sinking to the bottom. Once that basic weeding is done, upvoting is a much better signal to concentrate on.
Among the characteristics of comments I am inclined to downvote in disagreement is a tone precluding the possibility that other diverging opinions on the matter are reasonable and well founded. Just because I disagree doesn't mean I want an argument. Particularly with someone on the internet who has staked out a position in hopes of capturing one.
A comment that is written to evoke argument has to first spark disagreement. My downvote confirms the author has successfully achieved that goal. The decision to forgo argument however is mine and is reasonable.
I beg to differ. I have the impression that there are many large topics that the HN community as a whole has pretty homogeneous opinions on, and that this "community opinion" is self-reinforced by (amongst others) down-voting comments that do not conform to it. IMO, that is an open door for confirmation bias. And I don't think that that is something we want to be associated with...
Having said that, I fully agree with downvoting comments that are obviously only trying to start an argument. However, I would not do so because I disagree with the opinion, but on the basis that such arguments for the sake of argument are "a net negative to the discussion", as Udo put it.
Edit: It's probably not obvious why I ask. But it strikes me very much as "I want to help you, but I don't want to do any real work". In which case, it's probably advisable just to leave him alone.
And downvote doesn't? Especially without an explanation?
> Arguments can become time consuming
If you don't want to do it, why not just ignore the thing entirely and leave to some else to comment?
In this case, personally, I always feel more puzzled, and so unhappy, with just a downvote rather than plainly stated disagreement. Doesn't that happen to you?
Maybe that's because I don't perceive the argument as a "battle", in which one wins or loses through upvotes and downvotes. I am just being curious, why people feel certain way.
I am also solely responsible for what I read on the Internet. If I don't like what I just read, why should I only downvote, without an argument? Is it really helping other people to decide what to read, or is it imposing my own ideas onto them? (Upvote is different, because by upvoting you say "this specific thing is worth reading". But by downvoting, you say "all other things are more worth reading", even without knowing what the other things might be.)
Some people aren't even wrong. They start from a different set of assumptions, sometimes missing the whole point of a topic, or sometimes they have a particular grudge or grievance that they wedge into discussions, etc. Arguing with them is like getting caught up with a tar-baby, because their angle is oblique and skewed, and getting on the same page just takes too long.
And sometimes people just get too emotionally invested in what they write. Engage them with an alternative point of view and they dig in and come back, endlessly. If you feel negativity from a downvote, that means you're emotionally invested, and that can turn into a "battle", despite your protestations to the contrary. It's a slight on your ego, and it can be a battle even when you deny it the name - a rose by any other name, etc.
Getting privilege of downvoting is not that easy to get and this weeds out a lot of trolls right there.
When I see "Reddit style" comments, offensive, emotionally incorrect - I will downvote. If I don't agree on argument I will never downvote and if the poster is actually explaining himself well, will upvote. Same with people that seen their mistake and correct themselves - they always get an upvote to encourage them.
When I see someone wrong, but can't be sure or the case is open for discussion I will never downvote and if I see at the bottom comment section such a post, that got downvoted without people actually giving reason why - I will upvote it.
Its different to downvote comment like "Lol, tits or GTFO" and downvoting "I think Donald Trump would be better for Silicon Valley because: here insert 20 sentences of actually good ideas and thoughts". I cannot accept personally downvoting based on different way of seeing things. And while some of my comments might be sided - downvoting is not for expressing your agreement or disagreement on a matter as long as it is presented in "HN" quality style.
edit: sorry for making this comment as "I am" "I think" "I do", but overall it was intended to describe of what I think downvoting is for in my opinion and opinion of few people on here that I know.
"if you find a well-written comment you disagree with, you might even upvote it and disagree in text form."
"disagreement sometimes needs an outlet ... you might just upvote the best existing reply that you feel captures your feelings.
But AFAIK the HN guidelines (or pg?) say that disagreement is an acceptable reason for downvoting. It's really poor UX to have a single input that indicates wildly different things.
dang - is there any chance this rule will change? Or any particular reason why we don't want to change it?
I know this will be disappointing, but no, I think it would be a big mistake to introduce such a rule (that is, to outlaw downvoting for disagreement and say that people must comment instead). The site would be swamped by an avalanche of petty disagreements.
Our goal is to optimize HN for intellectual curiosity, which requires a higher signal/noise ratio. Downvotes dampen low-value comments. I know downvotes do bad things too, but that's the good thing they do, and it's big. Taking that away and/or increasing the noise with a flood of people disagreeing about their disagreements would not be an optimization.
Downvoting does gets used as an outlet for undesirable behaviors, but it's a non sequitur to blame that on downvoting. Those undesirable behaviors are sadly inevitable and will make use of any tool at hand. In my view they do less damage via downvotes than they would otherwise.
A recurring theme in the Perennial Downvote Debate is the idea of having a site where everyone presents their disagreements rationally. That's sadly not possible on the public internet—not even close—so we're not going to risk HN on trying to create it. What we will do is keep looking for incremental improvements. We've found a few (e.g. vouching) in the last couple years, and there are probably more to be found.
Edit: this later comment is relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
I'm guessing it's a pragmatic approach. We know that some people will always downvote for disagreement. The solution isn't to make them stop (because that's impossible) but to make everyone else supply corrective upvotes.
And that's the point that's missing in this thread: a downvoted comment hasn't just attracted downvotes; it's failed to attract corrective upvotes. Since many more people can upvote than downvote many people saw the comment and decided not to correct the downvote.
if you find a well-written comment you disagree with, you might even upvote it and disagree in text form.
Making this into one of the guidelines may, I think, be a good idea.
edits: grammar.
I think there's a misconception that they are, especially pertaining to up and down voting. I just reread the guidelines[1] and see little mention of up and down voting. The only mentioning is don't complain about or bait for down votes.
In the past pg has said it's okay to use votes for agreement/disagreement[2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Edits: formatting
"In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world."
In fact, if you scroll to my comments further up in the discussion, you will see that we have a very similar opinion as far as downvoting is concerned.
Again, my apologies if I have inadvertently caused offense, I certainly did not mean to.
Please could you link to where they say that?
But I also like the strictness of the often critiqued stackoverflow moderation.
For example, my top comment is the one in which I basically said that learning natural languages is hard. Pretty original remark, huh? In my second most popular comment, I posted a link to a funny image that didn't have much to do with the conversation. And my most downvoted comment is a detailed explanation of why I'm not impressed with Twitter's plans to use advanced machine learning.
I am not arguing that we should abolish votes, since I don't see an alternative. But tweaking the existing system to see if it becomes better is a sensible idea.
Also, I would like to make a point that comments at the bottom of the thread aren't always off-topic and boring.
While some comments might be quite good below, if you have limited time and want to be more successful at cutting "crap" you will hover only around top comments. Not a perfect thing, but this is what makes this place different from Reddit - you can be almost sure top comments will be valuable, cleverly funny, starting some interesting thought and not funny image, joke or offensive.
True. Which is why I make a point of scrolling down and reading them whenever I can ;-) Often those comments are simply made by people who came late to the discussion and didn't garner as many upvotes as the people who were there first, even though what they had to say was just as (or almost as) good.
Also, with voting, you have meta-debates about voting, people complaining about voting, voting rings and brigading, etc. Voting also presents the problem of earlier posts persisting at the top regardless of their quality.
Of course it's possible to gamify imageboard threads as well since they sort by the last comment, but a purely chronologically sorted thread wouldn't have any such issues.
The news-page should by sorted by a KPI that is a mix of clicks/shares/comments/hides.
Voting just distorts everything to "I vote down everyone who disagrees with me"
Also, forced anon. ;)
At the very least it was a jarring change.
Edit: Point proven. Two upvotes and seven downvotes in 12 minutes. Nothing short of a reply from `dang` will save it now! Bad commenter, toe the line if you seek discussion, lest you be banished to the graveyard of greydom. I'm baffled that nobody else sees how this is a problem.
If nobody downvoted, then the author of the comment would be unable to distinguish between "the community doesn't value my comment" and "my comment was ignored". A downvote sends a clear signal vs. a lack of signal which is important to establishing/maintaining community norms. If we didn't have that signal, there might be reddit-style pun chains on HN and new users who see that might think it's accepted by the community since those threads are indistinguishable from other comments due to the scores being hidden. Seeing comments downvoted to grey is an important signal.
Of course, replying is also a signal but it's not appropriate in every circumstance. It's redundant when sibling comments provide correct information vs. the downvoted comment's incorrect information and an in-context reading of the thread will make that apparent. Or when the downvoted comment is flamebait/trolling and you don't want feed the trolls. Or when the comment clearly doesn't fit the community norms. And, most importantly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to reply to every comment on HN offering constructive feedback so I pick and choose carefully when I do that... as I'm doing here.
Long story short, HN deemed it acceptable to allow users with a minimum karma level to downvote. It's a feature, not a bug, and as long as it's used with discretion it sends a valuable signal to the comment's author. That feedback mechanism also confers positive benefits to the entire community.
I agree that it's abused, but the notion of not contributing to the conversation should have some penalties.
In my experience, the greying of comments for "computer/programming" topics is usually accurate and lets me save time by skipping them.
However, for non-technical topics discussed on HN such as economics, gender sociology, suburban housing, the grey text often is result of a larger group winning(downvoting) an ideological war. Ideally, the top 2 comments should be constructive comments representing opposite positions. However, the popular ideas are often at the top and the contrarian ideas are on the bottom and greyed out.
It's not a perfect situation but since I view HN as a resource for technical topics (Techcrunch, Ars Technica, programming, etc) instead of the "soft" topics (NYT, The Atlantic, etc), I'm willing to outsource the disapproval of bad technical comments to the crowd because it has shown to be pretty accurate. I have finite reading time so evaluating every comment on its merits is a step backwards in productivity. The ability for the anonymous crowd to create a quantity of unproductive comments exceeds my capacity to filter every comment that isn't greyed out.
For those who oppose grey text, please state your reading budget for discussion forums like HN. That would give me an idea of how you "manage" the signal-to-noise ratio.
I get that the point is to make it easier to skip over the downvoted text, but greying so far as to make it almost impossible to read is heavy handed, more like censoring then censuring.
Maybe a continuum of first greying (but not too low contrast), then shrinking (but not too small), and finally striking out (for truly terrible stuff) would be better.
Your account has been active for 158 days. HackerNews has existed for nearly 10 years – at least 3000 days. On pretty much every single one of those days, pg, dang and others have worked to build this site into something that reflects the wishes of its community – a community that continues to grow in number and quality as a result of their tireless efforts.
The downvoting/greying feature has been developed, discussed, reviewed and refined steadily throughout the history of the site. That will continue as the community evolves, but right now, it reflects a status quo that the overwhelming majority of the community endorses, as evidenced by their continued engagement with the site and the particular feature.
Any user is always welcome to suggest an improvement to the site and provide a thoughtful and articulate justification for it.
You, on the other hand, have entered this discussion with just 158 days of history and 276 karma points, trashed a core feature of the site as "antisocial and pointless" and demanded its removal without suggesting an alternative, then broken the site guidelines by complaining about the community's response to your demand.
Then when the site's administrator – a person whom the longest-standing and most positive contributors to the community respect and value as the thoughtful, fair and hard-working bedrock of this site – takes the trouble to explain why you've been downvoted, you abuse him as "disgusting".
It's worth reflecting that dang often finds himself being attacked/abused by people on opposing sides of the one argument, with each of them complaining that he's favouring the other.
If there's a community that welcomes the kind of behaviour you've exhibited here, you should most certainly defect to it right away.
But perhaps the problem isn't downvoting itself (occasionally I see abusive comments downvoted and think yeah, this is what it's for)....
The problem is that downvoting has no cost.
Anyone can downvote anyone anytime, at no cost to themselves. Contrast this with commenting, which has a cost in time, in mental effort, etc. - and occasionally in karma, when one's comments are downvoted...!
IMHO the cost-free nature of downvoting encourages glib, quick, lazy downvoting. It encourages dislike and abuse.
Let's make downvoting have a cost - and let's make the cost increase as one downvotes more frequently (if one self-appoints as a guardian of HN, increased cost will police the "guardian's" behaviour).
For example, why not a Fibonacci sequence of downvote cost? The first downvote of a period T removes one karma point from the downvoter, the second removes one, the third removes 2, the fourth 3, etc.
One's position in the sequence would be reset by not downvoting for some period. People who rarely downvote would incur no practical cost, but people who over downvote would incur a large cost.
What you are asking here is to eliminate freedom of expression. By downvoting I voice my disagreement with your statement. Preferably there is a comment added, but that must not be necessary. Eliminating such a feature would give a distorted view of this community as a whole. One must live with the fact that not everybody has the same opinion.
>It's antisocial and pointless.
No, according to [0] antisocial is a behaviour that is contrary to the laws and customs of (a) society, in a way that causes annoyance and disapproval in others. In our society, or at least that is how I appreciate it, dissenting opinions are important and accepted. Yes, as mentioned above, a following argument would be nice, but isn't necessary. And also others must feel annoyed and be disapproving of it - not you. As to "pointless", see above.
[0]: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/antisoc...
There seems to be a consensus here that disagreement is not a sufficient reason to downvote a comment. However, I don't see anything in the Guidelines about this.
The topic was "is there a consensus that disagreement is not a sufficient reason to downvote a comment?" I pointed out that there is no evidence for a meaningful consensus even in this thread, with several people arguing in favor of downvote-for-disagreement. I pointed out that historically people have downvoted for disagreement, with links to examples, and I pointed to pg's early statement to that effect.
The evidence is that there is no consensus in HN readers, and that downvoting for disagreement, within limits, is allowed by the powers-that-be.
"Allowed" or "condoned" is different that your unjustified interpretation as "downvoting any opinion that you find disagreeable".
Just because we can send a man to the moon doesn't mean we should send all men to the moon.
I think I agree. The culture has changed a bit here, which is fine (or at least unavoidable). But now there's much more down-voting of things with which the voter merely disagrees (case-in-point, your comment: down-voted with no replies at the time of my writing). It reenforces the hive-mind.
Here's an AskHN from 7 years ago titled "Ask HN: Downvote for disagreement in some cases?" The top answer is "This comes up all the time here. Most people use downvotes for disagreement. Gotta live with it." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2020612 . Others express other opinions.
Back in 2008 pg said "I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
How do you know that the hivement changed in the last 8 years in this regard?
I don't recall saying that there were no downvotes-for-disagreement in earlier times. I said it feels like it has increased.
I think it's quite obvious how this affects the hive-mind; "un-popular" opinions become hard to read (greyed-out), which diminishes argument.
Personally, I've been lurking for a little over three years, and haven't seen much of a change.
I've been around much longer than that. As someone who doesn't really care about "karma", I reset my social media accounts on occasion.
Did it, though? As the other commenter said, pg himself said 8 years ago that downvoting for disagreement was fine.
I don't think the culture really changed, it was just never a settled issue, sometimes it's just more visible.
Downvoting should be for comments that don't add to the discussion, not for disagreement. I know pg said years ago that you could use downvotes for disagreement, but I propose that we revisit that...