Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandoooo | Hacker News Reader

As one of the posters of a TLC, I can tell you that the scores of all my posts are going up and down like a yoyo.

Or it might be spiking up at irregular intervals then steadily decreasing over time. I haven't instrumented.

It's a recent phenomenon as far as I can tell. Within the last few months or so, every comment I post (especially at the top level) gets immediately, sometimes within seconds, downvoted to -1 or -2, then throughout the day stabilizes back up to some equilibrium value. I also wonder what the cause is.

I’m glad to hear it’s not only me. I used to get powerful amounts of upvotes on my comments when well written, but lately I’ve been seeing my votes swing wildly all the way from -4 to back in the positives. I just don’t get it, and I wish Hackernews had a way to see the full voting activity on comments. As of now, I’m going to assume there’s vote fraud going on.

Interesting. I notice a similar pattern on some off my posts.

Not that it explains the instant down-votes or the "say one controversial thing and get everything else you've said in the past 24hr down-voted" phenomena but I used to run a script to track when I got up-voted/down-voted and the TL;DR of the data is that up-votes happen slowly around the clock and down-votes roll in when people show up to work and at lunchtime in HN's two most popular time zones (EST and PST).

Sounds like someone may be downvote-botting you. Or just brigading. You might report it to HN.

I've definitely seen the latter recently. Last week there was a post about Snopes' current legal troubles, and an argument started about whether Snopes was politically neutral or not. For the first hour or so, everyone who implied that Snopes was anything but rabidly left-wing was downvoted well into the grey, then mostly rose back up with time. It very much looked like someone had multiple accounts, or multiple friends with accounts, and was downvote-bombing everyone who disagreed with them.

Maybe it's just that people have strong opinions and/or feel lightly triggered for some topics?

(Also TLC here; and no, did not downvote you:P)

In isolation, that's very possible. In practice, like ryandrake, I've been seeing comments on certain topics get mass-downvoted almost immediately and then slowly trend back upward. If it was just that HN readers in general disagree with me, I wouldn't expect such an identifiable and repeating pattern.

(Also, TLC?)

top level comment is my guess

yes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com