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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

>There ought to be like a "didn't read the article" link next to the comment people can click to quickly bury those comments.

There is, it's the downvote button. The distinction of why a downvote is useless.

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I don't see a downvote button. Do you need a base reputation for that, like Stack Overflow?

Edit: yeah, karma is needed.

> The distinction of why a downvote is useless.

Actually I think it would be incredible useful.

You could use it to shift a community to a more useful direction.

A more direct way of eliminating common errors.

If on a cool new tech that's renewable if someone starts another bloody global warming discussion being able to downvote as OT could try and keep people on topic rather than having to down vote something you agree with.

There are issues with the idea, it can become censorshop, but I find it an interesting one.

They could just make flagging dual purpose. But flagged comments probably alert the admins. Maybe clicking the flag button could spawn a drop down but I think there might be an aversion to introducing complexity and impedance. Requiring multiple clicks and using drop down elements might be a departure from the deliberate simplicity.

Colorize according to votes. Purple = off-topic. Red = troll. Orange = weird and scary.

You could blend colors too. Reddish-purple = off-topic troll. Dark orange = weird and scary troll. etc.

What are the requirements to be able to down vote?

a karma threshold. 800 or something?

500, I only just gained downvote ability in the past few weeks, when I finally gained more than 500.

Edit: another thing I should have mentioned is that it seemed to me that only those comments made after I gained this ability were downvotable, the thread my last few comments were in was sprinkled with downvotable comments, which were newer, and non-downvotable comments which were there before mine. I might have been imagining this or be mistaken though.

As a data point, I am at _exactly_ 500 right now, and cannot downvote. So perhaps you have to exceed 500?

EDIT: checking again at 507 and I now have the power to downvote. So there's our answer (plus my moderately shameless play for some upvotes worked).

Yup. 501. Remember. With great power comes great responsibility.

Indeed - compared with the ability to speak freely, the ability to downvote is not much of a privilege.

Council of 300

https://xkcd.com/1224/

the real question is if it goes away if you're downvoted.

I believe it does, but don't have any evidence to back it up. If itp volunteers, we could test by down voting his comments :)

Exactly... This effect might reinforce 'upvote'-grabbing behavior, to either not lose the ability, or regain downvote if lost.

Upvote-grabbing behavior is already rampant here, just as with any forum with point tallies attached to comments. Proof: all of the "edit: why the downvotes?" comments.

it seemed to me that only those comments made after I gained this ability were downvotable

I think you might be mistaken. You might not have noticed yet that the downvote option disappears on its own a set time (24 hours, I think) after the comment was made. Perhaps it was only the comments older than this threshold that were non-votable?

That's quite possible. I had not realized that the downvote option disappeared so quickly.

I think my karma accrued overnight, so when I noticed I'd exceeded the threshold a lot of the thread was perhaps a day old. The only thing I am relatively certain of is that some of the older comments in the thread were not downvotable, and the newer ones were.

only those comments made after I gained this ability were downvotable

That would be quite computationally intensive to implement.

Not if you store the timestamp of when you gain downvote rights, and compare against that.

>There is, it's the downvote button. The distinction of why a downvote is useless.

How about a tag system associated with each posting? Then you can have just a scalar "weight" and a set of keywords (string labels), each with a designated meaning. You press a "plus" button or something, and a menu with optional tagging pops up (tag clouds can be used).

Some tags could be "spam", others could be "didn't read" and users can build their own threshold filters for tags. (0) spam; (4) didn't read; (3) incomplete; ...

I've thought about this, too. In particular, I'd like to, say, separately up vote "substantive" and down vote "agree". That said, how complex do we really want the UX to be?

As for "didn't read", if you're not interested, just move on. If you think the article is inappropriate and can, flag and move on. If you see a comment that looks like the poster didn't read the article, you can call civilly call out what is in the article, and perhaps down vote the comment.

> how complex?

Yeah I thought about this very hard actually, and came to the conclusion that just a "weight"(+) button is enough.

And, if you care that much so that you would waste your time providing more ... contextual meta-info (about the weight itself), you simply need a pop-up and a quick way to select words from a common dictionary. Certain users can even make content "more spammish" by simply increasing the weight with a click (they agree with the labeling and they are "special" in some way).

This, and the weight itself should provide enough info for a comprehensive "decoration" of the postings.

So... slashdot?

Mmm, to be honest, I was never a slashdotter so I have no experience with it at all (strangely enough :))

It has/had exactly that system but with also positive descriptors.

I can't fault you - slashdot hasn't been relevant for.. at least a decade.

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