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Comment by bdickason | Hacker News Reader

As someone who recently discovered HN as an alternative to digg/reddit I am thankful as well.

Things I love: 1) People downvote trolling and negative/witty comments 2) The interface gets out of your way 3) It updates constantly 4) The content is exactly what I'm looking for... and exactly what I couldn't find anywhere else 5) People are genuinely here to help. I am eagerly anticipating launching my startup so I can post an "Ask HN: Review my launch" here!

Ok I wanted it to be 'three things I like' but it turned into 5 :) Thanks to Paul and the community!

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Yeah, but they need to make votes non permanent. It's a crapshoot if you'll hit the up or down arrow on a mobile device or iPad when you try to rate stuff.

I can see why they are permanent; it makes your votes feel like they mean something. But please, can we at least get an allotted number of "vote revokes" per week or something? I agree, it's too easy to misclick on an arrow on a touchscreen, and there's nothing that can be done.

Better & simpler solution: Bigger buttons on touchscreen devices, preventing mis-clicks in the first place

This is definitely the answer :)

Or just use links instead of arrows:

I've often thought the same.

This should be easy as a greasemonkey script to save other people having to make changes to support it.

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EDIT: Out of curiosity I made up a javascript bookmarklet that seems to do the trick... upsize all the page's upvotes to 30x30

  javascript:{im=document.images;iml=im.length;for(i=0;i<iml;i++) {if(im[i].src=="http://ycombinator.com/images/grayarrow.gif"){im[i].width="30";im[i].height="30" } } alert("Done"); void(null);}

Cut and paste that into your browser URL bar, or bookmark etc. It's easy to validate by eye, for the worried

The issue is that it doesn't work on MOBILE devices, i.e. things without greasemonkey.

Even better solution: separate the up and down arrows:

[up] 7 points [down] by alanh 35 minutes ago | link | parent | flag

On the iPad or iPhone, just zoom in.

Agreed. I'd be ok with, after voting, a new link appended to the status line (1 point by so-and-so...) that just undoes your vote. Even if that is permanent (eg, can't vote again).

Call it "abstain."

Or could simply modifying the UI solve this problem? Putting the downvote arrow to the right of a news item (maybe just on mobile devices) would prevent fat-fingering, and then votes can remain permanent.

Or could simply not feeling guilty solve this problem? The up/downvotes are to give an aggregate view of the community response to a comment, not to give a precision karma score.

I like the permanence, because sometimes I upvote an insightful comment, then read an insightful reply and upvote it too. I think if votes were impermanent, I might be more tempted to null or downvote the original point if the second one is better - not because of evil, just because of the natural human desire to be very consistent. So I like the permanence thing...

...but I understand the misclicks. Maybe an "undo" button for a short time, like 10 seconds or until your next click that just nulls your vote?

" I might be more tempted to null or downvote the original point if the second one is better"

Can't both comments be good?

Agreed. I upvote contradictory comments all the time. I don't see it as lacking consistency; I'm voting for quality and thought, not necessarily "right" opinions.

I'm voting for quality and thought, not necessarily "right" opinions

Then you are doing it right.

I almost wanted to upvote this, but I might have regretted it, so I didn't.

Stack Overflow has an expiring undo and it seems to be a good compromise.

Here's what it looks like in the iPhone app I built: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4595/hn-vote.png

You can see a demo video of the app here: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews/

Have you made an iPad version yet?

I've been working on it for the past few weeks. The challenge is in updating the Three20 framework to support iPad.

off-topic: please, please add Instapaper support to your already very good app.

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