Hacker News, now with downvotes | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News, now with downvotes

jacquesmattheij.com

60 pointsswombat45 comments

Quoting:

  > The downside of this being an obscure feature is that
  > knowledge of it could be abused by the less scrupulous
  > to push undesired articles off the homepage using a
  > series of flags.
  >
  > Another way to abuse this is by downvoting everything
  > except for the articles that you upvote

PG has stated elsewhere that he has an "indiscriminant flagger" detector, and that when it gets triggered, subsequent flags from that person don't get counted.

This is somewhat frustrating to me. I understand why it's there, but I hate having to be in fear of being tossed out when I'm genuinely trying to improve the site. I really think people who trip a detector should be notified of it so they can understand why. Failing to notify seems like a DRM-type move: basing a decision on preventing abuse rather than empowering honest users.

Yeah, that reminds me of the recent story on how most crosswalk buttons don't actually do anything.

I tend to aggressively flag stories from new accounts, especially if they're obviously spam or political. Did not realize that I was setting myself up to be ignored. I guess the safe move is to no longer flag stories.

Surely it makes no difference: if you flag too much and you're ignored, you have no effect; if you don't flag, you have no effect.

Why not go on flagging? You might be having an effect.

Because I feel like a chump, not knowing if my flag effort counts or is being secretly ignored. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it just doesn't feel like it's in the spirit (or what I perceive as the spirit) of the site to trick me like that.

I'm not sure if I'd want to know my flags are being ignored. I know I was pretty disappointed to lose my downvote ability a few weeks ago (I was one of the 200-500 karma notch babies). Knowing that I'd lost an unearned flag ability might be even worse. On the other hand, if I knew, I wouldn't bother with the noobstories page anymore.

I hear what you're saying, and as someone who has been on this site for about two years and still treated as a sandboxed user, there are times where I wonder "why bother flagging" when there is no feedback provided to show me my affect on the system.

Then I take a breath, close the browser tab, get back to work and realize that I care too much at that moment about something very low on the totem pole that isn't going to increase my effective output for the day.

We can't have it both ways, unfortunately. The more transparent the voting and flagging mechanisms are on the site the more likely they are to be gamed. I'm ok with just 'doing' and not worrying how much of an effect it has on the site.

That will probably not be any problem, since you're flagging stories that lots of others flag as well. It probably works by checking if you flag completely different from 'most' people.

Yeah, but I also flag stuff that I don't like but others do (judging by their eventual front page status), such as some of the recent TSA and Wikileaks submissions. I flag social media stuff from time to time if it doesn't seem very technical. I even admit to sometimes flagging submissions without reading the linked content.

No, the safe move is to assume that pg is doing as good a job as he can to make the rules line up with the collective behavior he wants to see. If you systematically flag every story by an established user whose comment you just downvoted, that would probably trigger a reduction in the weight of your flags. However if you flag lots of spam, and it really is spam, that's good. Please keep doing it.

(And by the way, thank you.)

Some angry moderator once ghosted my account. It was very bad because I could not even get any help on the site itself. In the end I had to directly mail pg.

Greater transparency in the UI would be welcome, but what I think would be the best solution is a "temperature meter." Think barrel temperature in some action games -- fire a lot all at once and you'll overheat; fire efficiently and you'll be able to fire whenever you need to. It could be displayed as simply as a numerical percentage in the top right.

The same system could even be applied to other user actions such as voting, replying, and story submission, to help emphasize quality over quantity.

I wonder if that's a permanent change? If someone indiscriminantly flags for a while, but then slows down, will their flags begin to be counted again?

Doing that opens the system to being gamed easily. If the penalty is temporary, then a large number of logins can be acquired and scripted to enable down-voting cabals. If the penalty is permanent, then new accounts with sufficient karma would need to be "farmed."

Downvoting cabals are no worse a problem than upvoting cabals; probably actually less bad. And I think pg said he's running some cabal detection.

No, downvote cabals are worse. They are also harder to detect. Note that the distance from 1 to -4 is much less than the distance from 1 to 99.

I can easily see the point of an upvoting cabal -- you'd use it to get your stories onto the front page. And you'd only need five accounts in order to do that quite successfully.

What's the point of a downvoting cabal? To allow you to severely punish comments you don't like? Sounds petty even by internet standards. And if you do manage to get a comment down to -4, then I notice that comments in severely negative territory which aren't obviously awful tend to get rescued anyway.

See the effect of a downvoting cabal on Digg here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1579444

Upvoting a story keeps it on the front page longer. Downvoting a story makes it disappear before people can see it.

Maybe pg's spam controls are just excellent, but it really doesn't look like HN is being gamed too hard. There are the usual serial self-promoter/spammers (the kind that submit everything they post, regardless of quality), but I really haven't seen that many problems. Perhaps we shouldn't be as worried about flags being abused.

I think we should be worried. From what I've seen on reddit, downvote abuse seems much worse than upvote abuse. Flag abuse would be much the same as downvote abuse.

The power of upvote cabals is often dwarfed by the will of the majority. Downvote cabals can prevent material from being seen by the majority, so they are inherently more powerful. (The distance from 1 to -5 is much less than 1 to 99.)

I have accidentally tripped the "indiscriminant flagger" detector, so I can tell you about what happens.

I can't type well or much these days, so I rarely post and spend nearly all of my time reading. When PG was kind enough to reset the password on my account, I ended up with an ancient account but no karma due to simply not using the account much (never logging in).

Given my situation, I thought I would try to help out the quality of the site by both up-voting "good" stuff and flagging obvious spam. In trying to be useful and helpful, I obviously tripped the "indiscriminate flagging" detector on the first day of flagging spam. It only took a flagging a few (under five) articles, and the "flag" link disappeared. I can no longer flag anything.

I believe the detection code incorporates karma of the account due to the low threshold I've seen compared to the experiences stated by other high-karma people (jacquesm, yourself, ...).

It would be better if the abusive flagging detection code took into consideration whether or not the post/article was eventually deleted or marked dead, then reverse the "damage" to become a "benefit" to the person who flagged something (i.e. you actually helped in identifying something inappropriate).

Because the word 'flag' has a strong connotation of 'calling to the attention of others/administrators', it was always my assumption/hope that flagging things meant some human-with-authority was likely to see it, and be able to take conscious action using their privileges.

So, I 'flag' articles that are perfectly on-topic, but have abusive against-the-guidelines headlines. (I may have even, at one point or another, upvoted and flagged an article at the same time.)

I have some concern that my strategy, if misinterpreted by the algorithms, could result in my flags being discarded as signal-free.

The rise of automated moderation is giving a different meaning to the word 'flag' -- indeed closer to 'downvote'.

I flag any article that I think doesn't belong on here. (i.e. It doesn't fit the theme of the site.) I wonder how close I am to the 'indisciminant flagger' line? Or if I've crossed it?

I use it only for spam articles. I don't believe I am able to judge what fits the "theme" of the site. As I see it, if you hang out here, you are a "hacker" by some definition. Stories are submitted, and if you find it interesting, you upvote them. If nobody upvotes a story, it is uninteresting to everyone and it dies out in about an hour (how long it takes to leave the first page of the New section). If it is uninteresting to me, I would be inclined to flag it since I don't think it fits my definition of the site, but I restrain myself since other upvotes mean that it is interesting to some (possibly quite large) subset of this community. I can't decide that ahead of time. All I can do is not deprive others of the opportunity to upvote a story before it gets killed.

This is the Hacker News Ideal. Your urge perfectly describes the tension of "interesting to me". Now that I think about it, the upvote/flag seems like a simple, elegant social cognition hack. In order to flag you have to go to the comments page. Positivity is made slightly easier and negativity can always be undone even while it take an extra click.

What's the equivalent for comments?

Thanks. I am a bit more judgmental with comments. If I see a comment where the person is just not getting the point, or seems to be actively trolling, I downvote. I mitigate having to make decisions, by rarely voting, up or down. If I do vote, it's usually to upvote a good comment.

For a community-driven site without a clear statement of intent, 'having a number of upvotes' == 'fits the theme of the site', surely?

Personally I think articles about how to make more money are nothing to do with the hacker mindset, but I wouldn't even consider flagging them if other people found them interesting enough to upvote.

The site started out as 'start-up news'.

The guidelines are pretty clear about this, really:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.

Startup-related stuff is therefore explicitly on topic. Making more money seems on topic re: startups.

Can you define "hacker mindset" for me?

Not really :-)

No better than pointing towards a dusty old copy of the Jargon File -- or the New Hacker's Dictionary, the book version I read when I was a teenager, without which I probably wouldn't be here saying this.

Anyhow, the difference in mindsets between the different readers is EXACTLY why I wouldn't go around flagging things as off-topic that other people liked. Viva la difference.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

I find this to be quite acceptable. Reddit is constantly facing the question of what exactly a downvote is. (There was even a very funny comic on the topic recently.) Everyone sees downvote as the opposite of upvote, which is understandable, but this gets problematic because people don't like being disagreed with so polarizing arguments tend to end up with net 0 upvotes. Just by changing the name from downvote to flag it makes it enforces a different user behavior.

anyone know why they raised the downvote option from 200 karma to 500?

I miss my down arrow :(

Now you're just showing off ;)

because they can

Inflation. More users means karma is easier to get. And there's enough folks out there with 500+ karma to ensure that any deserving comment can get downvoted to the floor.

I had this delusion that if I flagged an article, someone would come read it and kill it if it was off topic. I like knowing that it is merely a downvote. PG's invisible hand is always working.

Wasn't this already known? I seem to remember a discussion months ago about why some highly upvoted articles disappear faster off the front page than others.

HN does have downvotes actually. Once you hit 500 Karma you get access to downvoting

Articles, not comments.

That's downvoting on comments - not on articles.

Ahh, you are correct. Sorry about the confusion there

That's only for articles. The author, jacquesm has over 45,000 karma and would probably have mentioned here it if he had a down arrow for articles.

Unless he's hiding his powers so that we don't get jealous and overthrow him.

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