Show HN: Automatically delete your negative point HN comments | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Automatically delete your negative point HN comments

github.com

27 pointsransom153895 comments

Please don't delete your down-voted comments. It is what it is. Own it.

For one, it's really annoying when seeing insightful reply but unable to see the full picture because OP has deleted their comment.

Not to mention, when you go down that path by curating your posting history, what does it tell about you? Being self-absorbed and depending on validation of others are not exactly healthy attributes. You think you are helping yourself in long run but in reality, you are hurting yourself more.

Agreed. Own your mistakes. And don't judge others by thwir mistakes. Mistakes are a part of life and nothing to be ashamed of.

A good idea may be to not show negative points to others but only to the author. That way you know what got downvoted but it's not public.

Negative comments != Mistakes. I've been downvoted plenty of times because people disagreed, and I'm sure I was right at least some of those times

The downvote button can be many things. One of them is an outlet for people who disagree with a comment but can't (or don't want to) articulate why.

The upvote/downvote system should be to promote interesting (and factually accurate) discussion and to demote factually incorrect or low effort comments. Downvoting well articulated opinions with which you disagree contributes to the echo chamber and groupthink effects and makes HN boring. There are many other popular websites you can visit if you want validation on your opinions.

And your down-voted comment is a perfect example.

The down-arrow is de facto used to express disagreement, you stated this and someone disagreed and down-voted you. QED.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if people were just downvoting the comment as a joke.

A comment being down voted doesn’t constitute a mistake, usually it’s a case where someone disagrees but lacks the verbal fluency to express why.

Who said it's mistakes? Sometimes you can just be making a wholly correct remark that goes against the grain.

If you should be forced to "own" your downvotes, then downvoters should be forced to "own" them too by accompanying their downvote with an explanation.

"If you should be forced to "own" your downvotes, then downvoters should be forced to "own" them too by accompanying their downvote with an explanation. "

Maybe the whole voting thing should be abandoned and comments should stand on their own. What's the benefit of karma?

Don't get me wrong. Voting and Karma do have value. It's not a perfect system though.

> What's the benefit of karma?

Probable answer: so a venture capitalist firm that runs this place can:

1. Get a feel of what's coming 'in' and climbing in popularity.

2. To control the narrative by upvoting and/or downvoting submitters to control where the news goes.

Transparency would indeed solve this. But it would also end those asymmetric benefits of controlling your own news agency/site.

On lobsters comment scores are public, downvotes has to specify a reason and moderation is public.

Programming topics are probably better at lobsters. (And almost all other topics are off topic.)

I don't know about the benefit of karma, but the purpose of karma is to enforce and reward conformity to guidelines and culture through operant conditioning, with the intended net effect being only high-quality comments (and commenters) wind up on top, and are engaged with, while low quality comments (and commenters) are left alone at the bottom, unreadable, to discourage both commenters and posters.

This is in line with HN's culture of aggressive curation and "quality over quantity," though, so I don't see it changing or going away.

Disagree. Negative comments are not mistakes. Maybe you are just going against the hivemind. HN is an echochamber like every other social media platform. It does a good job to negate the side effects but you can still be downvoted to hell just because you are an outsider.

Nowadays the cost of a mistake can be disproportionally big.

My favorite comments are those that swing wildly around 0.

And I think it's not a big deal if people delete any of their comments. It's internet threads.

Exactly. That is the sign of a great comment.

My favorite is: upvoted, with tons of responses, and flagged to death.

At this point being flagged is mostly an indication of speaking outside the window of permitted opinions on HN, which makes the comments actually more interesting.

I disagree with "mostly". To me, it seems that the majority of flagged comments are attacks on a person or group, or completely off-topic BS.

(And if you're going to argue that attacks are "speaking outside the window of permitted opinions on HN", well, yes, they are, and for very good reason.)

The issue is that it's often possible to stretch the category "attacks" to encompass to useful arguments, if you're motivated to do so. This becomes a mechanism to shut down discussion, ultimately weakening the conversation, leading to groupthink conclusions and boring echo chambers.

E.g. Imagine someone posts (in a context where it's on-topic), "Research [0] has shown that Trump supporters have significantly greater racism than Trump resisters." We can easily see how that statement can be interpreted as an "attack on a group". A pro-Trump forum may flag it to death. Yet assuming there is a good-faith effort to link valid science there, it's also an on-topic scientific result that advances discussion.

Rational, valid, discussion-advancing points can also be easily interpreted as "attacks on a group". However, just because something pattern matches as an "attack on a group", one should not discount it (assuming one values rational discussion itself, which I do). Because it may be a necessary part of the discussion.

Appendix: (Of course I don't think a statement about Trump supporters would get flagged here, not because of the form of the statement but because of who is being discussed. Imagine the statement is changed to any of a million ideas or science papers which step outside the very narrow corridor of acceptable beliefs in the San Francisco morality. I use the Trump supporter example to give some perspective of how it might feel to be on the side who thinks a statement is valuable and on-topic, but be slagged by the local majority as making an "attack". And there really is no other way to get those facts into the discussion; it's not a matter of wording or good faith, it's the notion that some facts and ideas are simply not allowed.)

True, anyone can in malice claim that almost anything is an attack. But if you have a community that is (mostly) operating on the principle of charity (that is, read comments in the best possible light), you have that problem much less than if you have a community that doesn't, and attempts to mis-label stuff as attacks should be at least somewhat corrected. HN, while not perfect, does it fairly well.

The rating of a comment has little to do with its validity as does your emotional attachment to its subjective value, or "favorite" as you call it. You might have a small and vocal minority actively downvoting something, making a comment look controversial when it really isn't (climate change or sexism topics come to mind). You could also have a highly upvoted comment that is essentially a debunked urban myth.

We should judge all comments based on the validity and logic of the content they encapsulate, perhaps allowing a few percentage points for impulsive human nature.

80% Logos, 10% Ethos, 10% Pathos.

That being said, I wouldn't obsess over any single comment. 99.99% of ideas presented on HN and elsewhere on the internet are by no means unique and if they are, the only way it's possible to tell is in retrospect (the famous Dropbox post comes to mind)

> The rating of a comment has little to do with its validity as does your emotional attachment to its subjective value, or "favorite" as you call it.

I don't understand what you're saying here. What exactly is a comment's validity?

> 80% Logos, 10% Ethos, 10% Pathos.

...fifty percent pain / and a hundred percent reason to remember the name.

How many Logos would your response be if I told you your comment is pompous?

As 'many' as I want there to be, obviously.

I don't adhere to that rule of thumb for all of my comments, since not all comments are intended to be taken seriously.

Often times it is not even a mistake. I have been downvoted before with an on topic valid point because some people might not have agreed. I don't mind that, someone can read it and judge for themselves. I personally only downvote comments that are factually incorrect, rude, or off topic. If someone does post something that is wrong they can reply and say hey sorry about that I got that wrong. Deleting posts ruins all context.

If someone appears to be unduely downvoted I just go and upvote plus add a comment to bring it back up again.

And by unduely I mean when I haven't the slightest idea why the downvote is for. I.e I don't upvote those where someone voiced his/her opinion by downvoting -- regardless where I myself stand on the issue.

Same. One of the best things about HN is the discussion. When others downvote because they disagree, people end up afraid to share an unpopular opinion.

Not only that, but you'll often find that some potentially valuable counterpoints to the discussion get downvoted to the bottom where they can't be read. Sometimes greyed out. Sometimes flagged. Such comments are effectively buried anyway so may as well delete ...

> but you'll often find that some potentially valuable counterpoints to the discussion get downvoted to the bottom where they can't be read

Yes, they can. Even if they are dead, if the reader chooses to see dead comments.

that's just stupid

So true, and the lack of Reddit-style doenvoting for disagreement is what has made HN so special to me. With all the polarization and the HN population growing, however, 'bad downvotes' seem to be increasing. I don't find myself agreeing over the downvoting of every grey comment like I used to. Many are clearly not based on 'not adding value to the discussion', but instead 'not adding the value I want to hear.'

I remember, actually, what really piqued my interest with HN on my first visit. I saw a front-page article with a couple climate change deniers, and they were upvoted, along with the other side of the debate! Would that still occur now?

Exactly--I don't care if people downvote me because I understand a lot of my opinions are unpopular. But I think as a marketplace of ideas, the Internet exists to help open minds and tear down foregone conclusions. I like to think I am helping that process along.

I understand that young people, especially those brought up by disgusting leftist indoctrination, may be reviled at many of my ideas. In my defense, I've lived long enough to know how those policies are ultimately destructive (see: Detroit) and have been paying taxes and listening to mountains of bullshit excuses from politicians for decades now, so I have experience with the passel of nonsense that serves as public discourse these days. I'm sure they'll perfect their idiotic ideas any day now, though.

Open your minds, dare to live free(r) and stop being a pussy about everything!

What does concern me is the rampant censorship these days, though. It's one thing to downvote, quite another to delete and pretend nobody has a different viewpoint than your fragile, nonsensical one.

I don't know if you realize this, but your account is shadow banned. This is one of your few comments that is viewable without having show dead on.

Quite. I've never cared much about internet points. Really, only the moderators should for those accounts that get everything downvoted.

I'm more interested in the patterns I don't see beforehand. The times something I expect to be controversial turns out to be heavily upvoted. Or when USA and EU differ so it's heavily voted one way in EU peak hours and the other in US hours. The simple and obvious comment where I turn out to be wildly misinformed. :)

I thought the same, and despised the behavior. But too many ill-intentioned people crawl through user histories for various reasons. I ended up deleting my history on reddit, downvoted or upvoted, so I do not appear as a person and comments have no context.

You could create new accounts regularily too for the same purpose, but there are often posting limits.

Eternal comments might actually be a pretty bad design pattern. Humans forget things that other humans say in face to face conversations. By conversing naturally with each other over a casual electronic medium, our brains might be tricked into believing they're in a similar context, when in reality they're in a context where one unrecoverable slip of the fingers could cost them their job, earn them infamy for the rest of their lives, etc.

See also the right to be forgotten. The immutability of comments also imposes a chilling effect on controversial or unconventional speech (if it doesn't go down well with the masses, you'll be paying for it forever).

When they can't be deleted, immutable electronic comments eventually become more important than face to face conversations simply because most of the latter get forgotten. I'd argue isn't a trend we want to encourage (unless you own a forum and want to feed Googlebot and slap ads on more things, of course).

Unrelated but am I the only one annoyed by "reply hoverers?" Unless you are asked a question and are responding, make your point and allow others to reinforce it. No need to have an answer for everything.

If a reply contains a novel argument or claim, it seems just as reasonable for it to be responded to as it was for the original points.

On account of the fade-out, the practice of downvoting to express disagreement, especially without an accompanying response, has a similar effect: unpopular ideas may disappear, regardless of how they are expressed.

> Not to mention, when you go down that path by curating your posting history, what does it tell about you?

Posting unpopular opinions and getting minus-voted on a forum like HN could have an impact on your career path. Anyone smart enough would curate.

My posting history here should reveal that I'm a Christian, I'm married, I have kids, I'll disagree with people on either side when I think they're wrong, and occasionally I can be a bit of a jerk. Oh, and I don't get FP. If any of that has an impact on my career path, well, if they're going to go through my HN posts hard enough to find some reason to not hire me, it's probably a place I don't want to work anyway.

I suspect the vast majority of downvoted comments on HN are not so controversial that they would significantly affect anyone's employability. If you're self-aware enough to want to 'curate' your identity here for potential employers, you should already have an alt account for your controversial statements.

> Not to mention, when you go down that path by curating your posting history, what does it tell about you?

I wouldn't personally do it automatically (for one think, going negative can be a transitory state), but reviewing downvoted posts and deleting them if, on review, you think they don't really add value says that you respect the community.

> Being self-absorbed and depending on validation of others are not exactly healthy attributes

Taking community feedback seriously is the opposite of being self-absorbed.

Sometimes I post something that gets downvoted and I'm wrong. I try to learn from it. And hopefully others who think similarly learn from it too.

Sometimes I post something that gets downvoted, but I'm certain I'm still right. I try to learn why I was an ineffectual communicator.

Sometimes I try again and it gets downvoted anyway. Sometimes there are things people just don't agree with and that is ok.[0]

Trying to whitewash your comment history is like what children do with instagram filters. It's a fake portrayal of what you believe or believed. The only time I delete a comment is when a thread is still active and I had some foundational misunderstanding or a momentary loss of empathy[1] for others.

[0] The NSA has this program where they try to predict what will happen in the future. When they first turned on the program they tried to take the consensus view of what experts thought. The program met initial failure.

What they came to realize after analyzing the data is that parroting consensus opinions is a low-risk, low-effort mental activity. There's no extra signal.

What ended up making the program much more successful was focusing on the opinions that experts had that were outside the consensus view of their field. They weren't more likely to happen, but they were much more likely to happen than they were talked about. Further, because few saw these less-likely events / realities materializing there were less downside mitigating plans and processes.

I think of being downvoted online—but still believing what you believe—kinda like that. You know that a good chunk of these comments are wrong, you just don't know which ones. But it is worth it to think through these things for yourself because you're adding real signal to the world.

[1] Empathy online isn't something that's come automatically to me. But once I understood how actions cascade outward I came to appreciate how damaging curt or bullying comments are.

No. Don't do this. I don't want the comments here to have a chilling filter like this. We need diversity of opinions even if some of them aren't liked. That is part and parcel of healthy debate. There should be fringe opinions on the sidelines getting attention - that's how we innovate. Tools like this are chilling, sensor ideas that may be controversial but innovative, and stifle healthy dialog.

Would you share the same thought if you had read my comment history? People post dumb, uninteresting things all the time. I don't want a collection of my dumb thoughts to follow me around.

After reading through some of your older, down-voted comments, I noticed a trend of rebuttals. Both your comments and their replies are valuable points of conversation in the topics. While you may think some are

> dumb, uninteresting

That is a subjective opinion, and that's okay. If I was searching Hacker News on a topic, I expect to see both sides, or multiple sides, of a topic so I can try and make an informed opinion myself. Are those old posts, "dumb" and "uninteresting" and merely because they are down-voted? I would argue that while some may share this view, I do not, and I find great value in the debate and multiple opinions, and I suspect I'm not alone in this regard.

If the down-voted comments are removed, the conversation becomes heavily one-sided and it is confusing to the reader what is being argued. Just because an opinion is down-voted or unpopular, doesn't mean it is wrong. As Max Planck said, "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." The discussion as a whole has more value than the individual contributions, and we loose that discussion with this kind of censorship, and with it a path to new ideas.

I really appreciate your reply, thank you. I agree that the posts are valuable when framed with the context of discussion, but when you collect them as "the thoughts of jbob2000", the context changes and they become dangerous to me individually.

I think the problem is that my post history is public, actually. If I could pick and choose which of my comments to add to my profile, I would be less inclined to delete my old comments.

Fitter, Happier.

I'm guessing this is tongue-in-cheek, or cleverly highlighting an actually important issue. And if you're considering replying to the thread at all, you're likely experiencing it to some extent - is one part of your mind considering the potential 'HN points' implications of your post?

I'm all for a late-night grace period where you can delete possibly drunk posts from the night before, or heat-of-the-moment angry posts, the following morning.

But the danger is that 'reputation points' act as a self-censorship and muting mechanism, and sometimes the truth is simply going to be unpopular.

Perhaps even the source shouldn't be able to unsay something just because it proves unpopular.

No one should feel that they need to conform to the HN zeitgeist. No matter what your perspective, the prevailing wisdom here will frequently be objectionable -- and posts which represent a minority opinion, well expressed and truly held, should be a source of pride regardless of how well they play.

At the same time, negative reactions may represent an opportunity to hone your rhetoric and consider new angles to better reach your interlocutors.

Yes. Exactly. I love to refine an approach to the same argument over time, using the points as a guide. This helps the persuasive quality of the argument but also helps refine my own thinking.

I agree with you in theory, but there are privileges tied to overall karma. Since many people downvote because they disagree, those with less popular opinions have fewer privileges.

Use this browser plugin which hides things like comment karma on HN and stop letting these numbers affect your well-being in the first place

https://github.com/a13o/disengaged

Do one for reddit.

MetaFilter has a built-in user preference for this, so that you simply see “has favorites”. It’s really nice.

Having built: https://hnprofile.com

Where it indexes and process all comments on HN in real-time, I've done a lot of analysis.

I'd argue some of the most negative comments are not actually down voted. I've had very pleasant comments get down voted as well, and even comments swing from negative votes to positive.

I don't think this helps with any of those, or the poor comments you made. It's just karma management.

I typed in the word Brooklyn and my name didn't come up so I think your machine doesn't work very well.

Interesting point. Can somebody make a map of how a given search engine hides/shadows topics? What would that look like? What blind spots are we creating for ourselves by this social dependency on search?

Depends on how much you discuss it. HN is just an example, places it works best are organizations with emails and slack. Basically tens or hundreds of emails a week.

The top results for Brooklyn still contains people living or have lived there. Mostly it’s an expectation thing... you expect yourself to be there, that doesn’t mean the system hasn’t identified better people to contact about Brooklyn. perhaps the system identified that other people had greater “expertise” simply because there was a larger data set (or someone displayed more knowledge)

Aside: What does 'mood' mean on your site?

> I'd argue some of the most negative comments are not actually down voted.

Downvoting isn't intended to mark negative sentiment in the comment. It's intended to mark lack of value.

I don't mind deleting comments without replies but as far as I'm concerned, "deleting" a comment that's been replied to is an act of vandalism.

I don't know why HN allows that, but given that they do, it should be a bannable offense.

> I don't know why HN allows that

It doesn't seem to intend to, the delete link goes away when there are replies.

> but given that they do, it should be a bannable offense.

If an action should never be allowed, then it should be systematically prevented (since it can be with no other harm), not punished after the fact.

In this case I mean "editing by clearing all of the content out of a comment" as deletion, or replacing it with a period, or something similar.

I don't know if you can literally delete after being replied to but I have seen destructive edits happening more frequently here.

You've reminded me that I wanted to build a tool for finding my highest-voted ever comments and collating them.

If you build it, please put in on "Show HN" or something. I'd like to run that on my comments.

If you have enough negative point comments on HN that you're even considering needing a bot to delete them, you're probably doing HN wrong. I wouldn't say that about other sites, but HN karma drives good conversations way more effectively than most places.

Fun little script, though pragmatically, if you are posting so many highly down-voted comments that you need to automate the process of tracking their status, you should probably take a break from HN/Internet discussions :)

Honestly who cares about votes on comments? It's fake internet points. They don't matter, post what you think is appropriate, don't be a jerk. Go on with your life.

The negative comments are often the interesting ones. I would like a script that displays them in the normal black color.

"When people go through my HN posts I want them to know I only get upvotes. My opinions are so good that everyone always agrees with me. The truth is I delete my negative posts so I can always claim to be cooler than Gilfoyle."

-Dinesh from Silicon Valley (he didn't actually say this, deleting your negative posts and comments is such a Dinesh thing to do)

There's something unseemly about comment deletion as a function of downvotes. Zeitgeist, meet Hacker News.

Part of the fun of HN are the downvoted comments. Karma shouldn't be seen as a score, but rather as a currency you've earned, to be spent on intentionally provocative shitposts.

There's a bot on reddit that does this. At least I assume it was a bot after looking at its history, as one of the messages it hadn't deleted was it trying to strike up conversation with the politics moderator bot. Either way, the behaviour of deleting anything that goes negative was in itself as annoying as the single line affirmations that seemed to be the limit of its programmed output.

This script will automatically remove comments you made that go under 1 point.

* This was just to keep me typing ruby for a few hours. However, this post made it to the top 3 posts, then was removed from the top page by the moderators. It is demoralizing to have it 'hidden' for no specified reason silently.

I had some "bad comments", but they shouldn't be deleted. Everyone had their opinion, you don't have to follow the group if you have a different one.

Ps. You should have the dignity to not do it while your drunk though :p

We all have bad opinions sometimes. I look back at my Reddit comment history (an account that I've had for about 10 years) and I cringe at some of the stuff that I've said before. Keeping the cringey stuff around reminds me how I've changed over time. Although if it wasn't anonymous, I would probably clean it up. But since nobody knows who I am, it doesn't matter :P

I've always used an online identifier that's recognizably me. I find it keeps me grounded, but in the current environment with companies checking social media before hiring I understand people wanting to use anonymous IDs. Anyone can have a lapse.

I think it's fair if you say something that you now find embarrassing to remove it. Lesson learned and all that. If you need a script to find all the embarrassing posts, then... you might want to consider that the script is not really helping you solve the real problem ;-) It might be better to start again.

> Everyone had their opinion, you don't have to follow the group if you have a different one.

I feel like discussions on this site started going downhill when PG decided "votes == agreement" was acceptable. Expressing a well-structured and well-researched opinion should not engender downvotes, while empty sound bites should. Sadly, what actually happens now depends on which side of the mob the post falls.

Very true. An upvote should mean “this is well put” or “this is interesting” not “go team”.

Transparency is the big thing here. And yet, HN is one big opaque pile of SV.

Scores? Nah we keep them secret from others.

Who downvoted/silenced someone? We don't discuss that.

Unpopular opinion, but intellectually interesting? Someone (mods or others) silence and rate limit you. Your opinion does not matter.

Mods threaten you for "ideological rants"... Its because it was not in the interests of SV/HN. How dare you discuss 'unapproved topics'.

We have better solutions right now. But at this moment, we have no clue what these scores actually are- its information assymetry at its worst.

Reversing public scores would be a start. Publishing who up/downvoted would be another. Showing flagged and killed would be a further step in the right direction of transparency. And so would also getting rid of hellbanning.

But, we end up with mob justice, overseen by a trite dictatorship.

Publishing voters is a move towards, not away from, "mob justice".

I don't agree and didn't downvoted. But it's simply not a good argument though.

Eg. Who downvoted me? Let's check out there previous post and downvote all of the comments. Put a HN alert on it, so I can make his life hell...

The mods do a good work though, eg. I would like to talk politics, but there is a reason that it's ignored ( correctly so, for quality of the comments)

And please, don't let anyone discuss 10 threads why he's downvoted to go off-topic. I would appreciate better replies if it happens, but that's hard to crack.

You've made good points why transparency wouldn't be good. And unfortunately, like any sort of voting system will have its flaws.

However, I think the abuses of everything being opaque is much more deleterious. In the case of HN, speaking rights are directly linked to groupthink. If you're highly +1'ed, you get to speak more. If you're -1'ed, you speak less (rate limited).

But yet, +1 als means "agree" or groupthink. -1 is reserved for trolls and flamewar starters. But yet, it's also used as a "I don't like you", "You're wrong", "Disagree", "Not popular"... Groupthink. Sure, you can have strong content converse to the article.. at -4.

Transparency allows us to see these groups in action, and shines a light on the whole system. Sure, some bad actors can brigade specific users - but I see that as the exception and not the norm.

I clearly see this comment heavily grayed out... So, I'm guessing it'll disappear soon?

Also, for the record I still index all comments on HN in near, real-time: https://hnprofile.com/

I'd argue some of the most negative comments are not actually down voted. I've had very pleasant comments get down voted as well, and even comments swing from negative votes to positive.

I don't think this helps with any of those, or the poor comments you made. It's just karma management.

How many Hacker News points equals one GitHub star, anyway? Is there a Coinbase-like thing for Internet Points?

What if you are not interested in github stars?

Moderators didn't touch the post or even see it until a little while ago. Whatever happened was determined by user flags and software.

Thanks dang. You are correct. I apologize for that incorrect statement. Another moderator (scott) mentioned this to me.

Either way it was a good test of a possible (terrible) feature.

BUT :) Ironically, I can't edit that comment.

PS! Thanks for your hard work!!!

No worries! Ah yes, I didn't see that email thread before I posted the above.

I always get downvoted because I have some opinions that are completely taboo on HN (being pro Google/Facebook - just watch this comment get downvoted).

My tactic is to post my opinion and then delete it when I start to get downvotes so this will come in handy. I want to get my message out there but I don't want hurt my karma too much.

If your other posts are like this one, it's more likely they are being downvoted for the arrogance and conspiracy-theory presumptions baked into them.

There are plenty of pro-google and pro-Facebook posts that get upvoted here, but there are very few arrogant conspiratorial-bias posts that get upvoted, for good reason.

This is some good 4chan-level trolling.

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