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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

To be contrary, I find HN/Reddit point systems to be related to the degradation of discussion. It's a popularity contest. Good comments do not always get upvoted (in fact, they may be downvoted because people don't want to hear it). But salacious and ill-informed stuff gets upvoted a lot.

You very quickly get hive minded behavior: similar beliefs get upvoted, contrary ones get hidden, so soon enough you've got an echo chamber, powered by worthless Internet points.

It's a very basic hack on our psychology - we like points, but maybe it's not alltogether good. It works ok on HN because it's a decent community with moderation intended to keep the discussion good. But Twitter and most subreddits are horrible abuses of this and I'm not sure people would spend so much time arguing on the Internet if they simply weren't rewarded so directly for doing so.

View on HN

I frequently see people describe HN and Reddit as 'fickle' or 'hypocritical'. But the underlying pattern seems to be a nasty consequence of point-based ordering: whatever comes first does best.

There are some great breakdowns of Reddit comment karma by time after post. The direction is obvious - earlier comments score better - but the exponential falloff is still a sight to behold. Any view that isn't outrageous enough to downvote heavily can win just by arriving first, being seen most, and being upvoted by commenters trying to increase their own engagement. (HN removes 'downvote' when people reply to you. I wonder if it should discount upvotes on comments you reply to?)

It's a less-trolled system than the open queue of a messageboard, and more conversational than the obscure branching pattern of Twitter or Tumblr. But it's not much good for comprehensive, noninflammatory discussion.

That is somewhat negated by the fact that dissenting users from a post with a 'skewed' comment section can often go make their own post in response. This happens rather more frequently on Reddit than here since HN discourages duplicate posting on a topic.

>HN discourages duplicate posting on a topic

I would grudgingly agree, but found it funny that the following example sat on the front page the same day as your comment, and the second post exceeded the original's points & comments!

It is possible to detect and block Chrome headless | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175646 (currently 146 points, 105 comments)

9 hours later: It is not possible to detect and block Chrome headless | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16179181 (currently 341 points, 158 comments)

I'm not so crazy about this criticism. Whenever I hear someone complain about echo chambers or contrary opinions being hidden it seems to me a case of "my personal opinion isn't being validated in this discussion." Does any forum on the internet ever claim that the most upvoted (or whatever metric) comments are the correct ones for all time?

A popular opinion doesn't make other opinions invalid and I think that's a mistake many people read into the situation because they're too emotionally invested. On top of that it completely ignores the countless variables that go into a top comment on a popular forum.

The best advice I can give is either 1. Don't take the unpopularity of your contributions so seriously or 2. take it so seriously that you're willing to understand how to game the system to MAKE your "objectively correct" opinion popular.

If you'd like, we can step through a lot of threads that have nothing to do with either of us and find factually wrong comments upvoted and factually correct ones downvoted. You seem to think that I'm making that criticism for personal reasons, when it's not personal. I'm aware of my own dumb statements that have gotten upvoted, so it's out of reflection if anything.

It does not bother me that unpopular stuff is downvoted (who really cares?), but it's a real dynamic. You said it yourself, if you want to craft a comment to be popular, there's a way to do that; it's not especially hard to figure out what to say if you spend time in various forums.

Maybe the issue with the upvoting system is it gives more credence to a baseless comment having value or being correct, when it's about popularity. From a social perspective it seems like a really great way to spread misinformation. Why would you not care about that?

What is the value of a popular baseless comment on the internet?

In my opinion there is a system of homeostasis that exists in internet comments. When a popular wrong opinion gets large enough it is a huge low hanging fruit. There is a race to be the first one to debunk it and cash in all the delicious "well, actually" karma. Go look at the top comment on any given hacker news thread. I wouldn't be surprised to find an overwhelming number of "well, actually" child comments immediately below them.

Furthermore, popular anonymous comments are nice but the real world still operates on reputation based media. A popular comment might inspire a reporter at a media source of record to write an article about it but you can bet their first order of business is to cut out the rhetoric and make the opinion seem as objective as possible. In many cases once you cut out the rhetoric of a baseless popular opinion there is no article, so on a larger social scale the popular comment basically dead in the water. A firstname-lastname reporter is thinking in terms of a career, not upvotes. That's why when you read the sources of a non-fiction book you see The New York Times and not The Slashdot Comment Section.

* Also I just want to clarify that the "someone" in my original reply to your comment was not a veiled accusation, I literally meant someone (anyone). It was not a passive aggressive attempt suggest that you are getting too emotionally involved with your comments. I merely meant that a lot of people (myself included) get too caught up in thinking that 1. they are objectively right and 2. lack of recognition of this fact must mean that the system is broken.

Well, you are right about the hive mind and the popularity contest and I don't know how to solve those things easily. But what I like about the system is that it reduces negativity (to some extend). So many internet discussions are full of nonconstructive, negative criticism that I am happy that the Karma system tries to hide such comments. But obviously it has its own problems :-/

I agree with the parent, I had the same experience, the comments I believe are interesting opinions are only moderately upvoted, while silly jokes get upvoted much more. And especially I don't like when people downvote without leaving comment (contrary argument). If you agree it's obvious why, if you disagree then it's not.

I think the Slashdot system was an interesting one, it had also labels, so there was a difference between "+5 Insightful" and "+5 Funny". It also provided some feedback while downvoting. I think having moderation labels instead of plain points would help moderation.

Actually, users could then customize point cost for each of the labels, so they could see the page differently.

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