Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>suffering from the same "problem" as Wikipedia: the quality & quantity of existing content is now so high that it's becoming really hard to contribute new content. However, while this is indeed a real problem for "askers" trying to get heard in all the noise, and there's diminishing returns for the "answerer" who has less fun questions to tackle,

I agree with your observation but Jon Skeet's essay seemed to be focusing on something else... the culture of hostility (or perceived hostility). The key words I noticed he used (multiple times) were "hostility", "jerks", "feelings".

On the other hand, the keywords I would associate with your observation would be... "boredom", "novelty of a new website", "low hanging fruit to quickly build easy karma", etc.

To discuss Jon's specific angle, let's use an example of a [tag] that's fairly new technology such as "[vue.js]". Since Vue is 2014, it doesn't have the "completeness of answers" of a very old tag like C# from 2008.

Here's a Vue question sitting downvoted to negative 4: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49345098/how-to-get-prop...

Maybe his question deserved all those downvotes. I don't know enough about Vue to guess if the downvotes were all caused by a pasted screenshot instead of pure text.

To Jon's "culture" essay, is the minus-4 the optimal way to communicate it's a "bad" question? Is it a bad question because of its format (the screenshot) or was it bad because "props" is a trivial LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You Question)?

Here's another Vue question at negative 1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49321665/how-to-add-a-ge...

To generalize, if there's "[new technology]" that opens a vast untaken area for new contributions of answers, is the culture created by Stackoverflow's mechanisms (the downvotes, the karma system, the moderators' powers, the "closings" vs "moving", etc) ... the best incentive system to minimize hostility?

Are Jon's well-intentioned "covenants" realistic? Or are they naive to human tendencies when any website is open to mass participation?

Maybe his question deserved all those downvotes.

The downvote button is marked "shows no research effort".

Where's the "I looked at this manual and that tutorial and this debugger and tried these things"? Nowhere, which makes it feel like "I put no effort in stackoverflow do it for me".

The downvote button is an awful way to do what it purports to do. In practise it's percieved as more of an "oh fuck off" button.

It's a single mouse click by a single person (or maybe a bot), but it carries so much weight.

Also... the question is answered regardless. Not very damning. Boo hoo, the OP has an answered question but their question is -2? I think people on HN care way too much about points.

Yeah, one of SO's problems is people using its question system to cache-hit other people's brains instead of having to spend 2 seconds on google.

I can't really agree with any posts here that think the solution is to tolerate it with poor question quality and duplicates. But good luck doing that in a way that doesn't grate on anyone.

That's one thing Jon didn't touch on, the downvote. It's the easiest thing in the world for the giver, but to the receiver it feels like a kick in the gut. It definitely contributes to the feeling of hostility.

Personally I try to use my downvotes only as a last resort, for factually wrong answers or questions where clarification attempts went nowhere.

It's the easiest thing in the world for the giver, but to the receiver it feels like a kick in the gut. It definitely contributes to the feeling of hostility.

I have several well recived answers there but I have never downvoted anyone because leaving it as is feels right than downvoting for the reasons you mentioned. I never asked a question there and tried figuring out the answers based on existing resources and on my own and it helped me learning a lot. This might not be the right way but being hostile and downvoting feels more than disagreement to me. This is the reason why I avoid being there.

I think downvoting is one of the things they got absolutely right over places like HN and reddit. When you downvote someone, you lose rep. And you can't downvote until you have a certain amount of rep, if I recall. (Or maybe once you hit 0 you can't downvote?) But it really makes you stop and think, and it makes serial downvoting much less of a problem.

Down votes on questions are free. Down votes on answers cost 1 rep.

You need 125 rep to be able to cast a down vote (votes for people and anonymous users with less than 125 are recorded in an anonymous votes table ( for example, http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/209365/ano... ).

Hacker News has down votes too... and you can't down vote until you get a certain amount of karma.

The rep lost from down votes are an investment in site quality that you get back if the post is deleted.

I've never thought twice about the cost of downvoting a bad question or answer. I only downvote things I think are more harmful than helpful (incorrect or really-bad-idea or misunderstood-the-question type of answers).

Maybe that's not how most people do it?

Has the idea of downvotes costing the user karma points been brought up before? At face value that seems like a good way to limit the amount of impulse or emotional downvoting. Most sites require a certain amount of karma to be able to downvote at all, but that addresses a slightly different problem I think. Having downvotes cost something (even if they're only fake internet points) seems like it would limit the idea of piling on. It would really change the dynamic so not sure what the result would be, so I wonder if it's been considered/discussed before?

[edit] I should have done my research before asking the question :P Apparently downvoting on S.O. does cost reputation/points. I guess the actual cost is so small it seems to be in the doesn't-matter category, at least for me as I didn't even notice. Perhaps if the cost was higher...

[edit2] I looked it up, and the cost is indeed trivial - one point. An upvote on your answer provides 10 points, and you can of course receive many upvotes for a good answer. The cost of downvoting is really only significant for a new/low reputation user. High reputation users can still be poor-downvoters. Seems to me there's a lot of opportunity to tweak the costs of downvoting to reduce the negative aspects of it.

Downvoting answers costs you, downvoting questions does not. You can definitely see the difference in dynamic.

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