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Downvoting isn't the problem - it's spam flagging. There's no better tool for suppressing ideas and viewpoints you disagree with than flagging it. Only on HN can a story occupy #1 on the front page due to overwhelming upvotes, and 30 seconds later be sunk to the depths of page 2 or 3 by a handful of flaggers who disagree with the content that's presented.

A trust score could solve this problem.

Whenever someone flags a thread, the thread either gets globally flagged or not. If it automatically gets globally flagged, a mod may un-flag it. Or, it may not be automatically flagged, and a mod will flag it.

We can then find the probability that a user's flag will result in a "permanent, global flag" by looking at the user's history. We ought to use the lower bound of the Wilson score interval for this. This is the user's trust score, which needs to remain hidden from them.

We then set some threshold under which a user's flag will be shadow-ignored. This way, we only act on feedback that has a high probability of fitting the same pattern of mod behavior. Just make sure you have quality mods who consistently and correctly flag threads.

Strongly agreed. If I recall HN also has some built in functionality that downranks posts when the comments on it come in at high volume, indicating some level of flame war.

I get the motivations behind both, and in some situations it works great. But a lot of the time it helps to enforce a monoculture on the site: any disagreement, particularly strong disagreement, is seen as a negative signal and is vanished from the site. Next time you see a post about, say, women software engineers, you’ll be able to watch it happen in real time.

Nah, you can do that on Reddit as well...

Reddit is a horrible place for discussion

I have complained about this to moderators before. There are certain topics that are almost off limits on HN not due to the rules, but due to the heavy flagging they always receive. Articles by, about, and for women are one common example. These articles being flagged results in this community being pulled further into a dangerous realm of misogyny that already exist in some pockets of the tech world.

EDIT: Another example of semi-banned topics is criticism of HN. This post was number 1 on the front page a few minutes ago. It is already down to 11 with several older posts with fewer points higher up on the front page.

EDIT 2: And now this post is seemingly flagged killed. From number 1 to disappeared in roughly 10 minutes.

I'm not a mod and I don't have any inside track, but I've been around a while. I suspect that this item has fallen not because of flags, but because it's got 80 comments and only 75 votes. There is a mechanism as a proxy to detect flame wars, and is not necessarily because of flagging.

If you think this has been sunk inappropriately then email the mods. They are quite open to getting honest, constructive comments and suggestions. If you think this item and this discussion is of value to the community, let them know and they might agree and remove the flame-war penalty.

I have scrolled through several pages and this post is no longer in the top 200 on HN. I have never seen the flame-war penalty hit anything close to that hard that quickly. I am pretty sure this is from user flagging.

It may be. I've also now read through most of this thread and I can say categorically that for me, this thread is now mostly full of dross, and I'd be tempted to flag it as being of negative value to HN.

I haven't, but I can see why others would. Like it or hate it, the purpose of the voting system is to provide a direction for the content. You may disagree, but it's like elections - you get what "the community" deems valuable or relevant.

There's a lot of stuff I post that sinks without trace, and other things that get downvoted into obvlivion even though I personally think they are of positive value.

The community decides - you have to accept that.

I am not suggesting we remove the ability to downvote or flag. I still want the community to decide most of these things. I simply want more accountability for these actions so they aren't used for petty reasons. You would be free to flag this post for causing a comment section full of garbage. You would just have to say that rather than flagging and moving on.

That would lead to a ton of comments saying why they had flagged or downvoted things. Such comments tend to be of low quality and (if people could reply) would lead to endless bickering. IMO it's much better for signal/noise ratio not to go there.

I once spoke to the creator of a much larger forum than HN, who told me the biggest mistake they made was to add a meta facility to the site.

I respect your position but I don't agree with your conclusions:

> That would lead to a ton of comments saying why they had flagged or downvoted things. Such comments tend to be of low quality

It's only low quality if the reasons for down voting are low quality and since the purpose of forced replies is to weed out low quality moderation, I think the ends justify the means.

> and (if people could reply) would lead to endless bickering.

People already bicker about the moderation. Constantly. What I'd hope to see it fewer people impulsively moderating posts. Which might have the ironic effect of reducing some of the complaints.

Obviously those who have a tendency to bicker will likely continue to do so but that will be little change to what they're already doing now.

> I once spoke to the creator of a much larger forum than HN, who told me the biggest mistake they made was to add a meta facility to the site.

That may also turn out to be true for HN but equally it may not. Every forum and community is different so what works in one place might not work in another -- and visa versa. As it is, the quality of comments have and peer moderation has already been on a downwards trajectory for a few years now so it's probably worth trying some new ideas to see if it does shake the less confident yet still experienced engineers back into contributing thoughtful posts.

I think the idea is that when you flag or downvote you have to provide a comment on the action, and that comment is then displayed when someone asks for a list of downvotes and/or flags. Those comments are not part of the regular comment system, and one can't reply to them.

It's what happens on Lobsters, but whether or not it makes a difference is hard to say. The traffic is small enough that I doubt the effect is properly measurable.

Right, but however you expose that information, aren't you just providing nucleation sites for meta-debates? This is a site that practically begs users to generate opinions about everything; you can't even pick the background color for your blog post without potentially sparking a 10-comment subthread about it. Off-topic meta arguments are arguably the biggest problem comment threads on HN have.

Agreed.

> you have to accept that

Except for eating, drinking and breathing, that's almost never absolutely true. All human contrivances are malleable.

Go for it. Good luck.

It was both, but we turned off the flamewar detector.

... and on Lobsters you would neither need to speculate what happened nor kneel in front of the mods to fix it, because moderation actions are publicly logged¹. :-)

¹ https://lobste.rs/moderations

HN has hosted countless threads about gender issues and articles by, about, and for women. Here is one from two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22128385. Some get flagged; sometimes we turn off the flags, especially when the article contains substantive information and isn't primarily a sensational piece.

This is by no means an under-represented topic on this site in relative terms. You may feel that it's under-represented in absolute terms, but that's true of every important topic, because front page space is the scarcest resource HN has.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Isn't the fact that you regularly have to turn off the flags on these articles a sign that these articles get unnecessarily flagged? And even when you do unflag articles, sometimes it is just too late to rescue. For example, this article was flagged. You unflagged it, but by now it is page 8 instead of number 1 on the front page like it was when I saw it.

EDIT: This comment received two downvotes within 3 minutes of me posting. It is a comment buried half way down the comment section on a post that is 8 pages deep on HN. That type of immediate reaction seems strange and as a user it would be helpful to know whether something I said is unfit for this community or if there is some other reason for that reaction. Requiring users explain themselves for this behavior provides some immediate value for me on this comment.

It's a sign that moderation mechanisms and user mechanisms sometimes produce different outcomes, which is true of every aspect of HN, and is why moderation is necessary in the first place. I wouldn't draw specific conclusions about gender issues from that. Gender is a well-represented topic on HN, and has been for years. Some people feel it should be more so, some less so; that is also the case for every prominent topic, and doubly so for divisive ones.

We didn't unflag this article. We turned off the software penalty called the flamewar detector.

There's nothing odd about your comment being downvoted. Other users are still reading this thread just like we are. As for why they downvoted, perhaps they felt you were prosecuting the point in a repetitive way, or that the discussion has gotten too meta. Those things attract downvotes because they quickly get uninteresting.

Did my other comment here legitimately get flagged? I am supremely confused by that. I guess you could read that first sentence as rude, but that hardly seems flagging worthy. I also have no idea if that is even the reason it was flagged because flagging requires no justification on HN.

Dang, do you see how that flagged comment reinforces my point?

I'm afraid I don't. Sure there's abuse of the flagging system; there's abuse of everything. But HN's system as a whole (consisting of community, software, and moderation) has countervailing mechanisms for that and other abuses. The example you raised, of threads about women and gender issues, shows this very much, since those not only do not "always get flagged" as you claimed, but just the opposite: it is one of the more prominent topics on HN, as I've explained.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what your point is, other than to complain about downvotes and flags, which is a discussion that gets increasingly repetitive and tedious, which is no doubt why the posts attracted further downvotes and flags.

For sure it sucks to see one's comments downvoted or flagged. The best response to this is to reflect on what in your comment might have led to that. Usually it's not so hard to see this if you're willing to look objectively. If you do see something, that's good learning for next time. If you don't, chalk it up to the quirks of other users and move on—it's priced in for everybody, and focusing on it further (e.g. by demanding reasons) is a poor use of energy and an especially poor direction for further discussion.

You really aren't going to admit that there is any abuse of the flagging system? Either way, at one point this article said [Flagged] in front of it and now it doesn't. Can articles reach that flagged state from purely the flame war detector?

I disagree about the gender thing and I'm not the only person to mention that specifically in this comment thread, but I recognize arguing that point isn't going to get us anywhere.

My point in that edit was that it is strange to see immediate and strong reaction on a comment that is buried so deeply. There are different expectations for a comment here compared to something on the front page in which many users are likely to see it as soon as it is posted. I have mentioned this to you before, but I think constructive feedback is important if you want people to actually become better community members here. Both you and I are left wondering why my comment received a negative response and I therefore have no direction on how to improve my comments.

I think that a better solution, at HN scale, would be to limit the number of downvotes in a 24 hour period.

Not clear what the ideal number is; maybe 5 at 500 karma, and 5 more per 500, possibly up to some limit (25?).

Otherwise, 'you must provide a reason' is trivially gameable, it just means downvotes are two clicks instead of one.

I suspect that the recent trend to low-quality downvotes is because 500 is a relatively low threshold with as much traffic as HN gets these days, and we have a bunch of newbs who were champing at the bit to inflict some punishment and go nuts with it when they get the ability.

Limiting downvotes at first would train users to be more thoughtful in what they censure; eventually the limit becomes no practical barrier, but hopefully by then the habit is established.

The Slashdot karma system sort of had something like this. It’s been a few years, but comments weren’t given point totals but tags like “insightful”, “funny” for positive or “troll” for negative. This way a comment had feedback on why it was ranked higher or lower. A moderator only had so many points to give for a limited period of time as well as other guardrails. In order to get mod status you had to do things like history of reading comments in articles and posting articles and comments which in turn had high marks. This made a positive feedback loop where more positive participation gave more chances for mod status.

See: https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml

On top of that there’s a meta-moderation system where in turn mods in comments are evaluated if they were modded fairly or not. If marked fair the original mod got more karma, and less if deemed unfair.

https://slashdot.org/story/99/09/07/155233/slashdots-meta-mo...

I don’t know if such a system can exist in modern day, but out of all comment systems I always found the Slashdot style both simple and fair for the complexities of large comment volumes.

They did also have point totals, but a given comment could only range from -1 to +5.

> Otherwise, 'you must provide a reason' is trivially gameable, it just means downvotes are two clicks instead of one.

I’d think if your reply was something low quality you’d end up with more downvotes than the parent you just down voted. Or am I misunderstanding something?

My experience on HN is that getting 500 karma was not easy; it’s quite hard to get submissions past “new” and comment karma takes some time to accumulate. I think it took me about 7 years! Perhaps others have an easier time.

I'm not on lobste.rs, so I could be getting this wrong. But I believe the system is that you have to choose a reason for downvoting, which is shown to the person you downvote, but that you're not required to reply to the post, and the user doesn't know who in particular did the downvoting.

I'm not on lobste.rs either and if that's their system then that's not entirely what I had in mind. I'd want voting to be first class comments. That way bad moderation surfaces quickly and can be moderated on itself -- thus pushing the abuser below the threshold for access to negative voting.

One thing I think HN does really nicely is that you cannot down vote someone who's replied to your comment. Only 3rd parties can. That too can be abused if there's an argument between 3 people but it's still a better system than not having one at all.

Has the downside though that now a genuinely bad comment takes much more space in the comment section, because of all the comments necessary to justify its downvotes, and all the comments arguing with those comments (I'd expect that to descend into flamewars very quickly).

That is certainly one possible outcome. However HN already supports tools to minimize the pain there via comment folding and/or hiding down voted comments (the option for that is in your profile).

Optimistically speaking another outcome is also possible, fewer people feel the need to down vote comments so topics where people are using moderation to suppress an unpopular opinion (rather than moderate an objectively bad comment) might see fewer flamewars.

Of course incorrect posts should still receive moderation but this also ensures that errors are accompanied with corrections -- which doesn't always happen at the moment.

HN's moderation system certainly isn't the worst I've seen. Far far from it!! But I do think now is a golden opportunity to review it's moderation system to see if any tweaks could enhance the experience. Doing nothing is sometimes just as bad as doing the wrong thing. :)

> 5 at 500 karma

Wow, someone would use 5 downvotes in 24 hours? I think I may have downvoted all of 5 to 15 times in all my time here.

My "downvotes" are merely not upvoting, due to indifference or some flavor of distaste.

> My "downvotes" are merely not upvoting, due to indifference or some flavor of distaste.

I do the same. I don't know you but I already like you :D

profile checks out!

This is a very good idea, and I think the quota should be even lower. I also think the old Slashdot mechanic of allowing a set of tags on user mod votes is useful to provide additional feedback.

Another reason for requiring feedback for downvoting is so others know why it was downvoted. There have been many times where I’ve seen a dead comment on a topic I’m not familiar. I know the general user disagrees with that statement but I have no idea what’s “wrong” with it. Conceivably it’s because it’s obviously wrong to anyone in that domain so nobody bothers commenting or it’s a contentious issue in that domain and people who agree or could provide further insight don’t think it’s worth the negativity to bother commenting.

Either way I have no clue. I read a comment recently about setting up a graphics pipeline that seemed reasonable enough but was downvoted to hell. I would have liked to know why.

>Another reason for requiring feedback for downvoting is so others know why it was downvoted

That will just lead to bickering. And really if that's the rule then you should also be forced to make a meaningful comment when upvoting.

I find that there are times to downvote that don't or shouldn't require a comment. It will just spiral into a comment war tit for tat comments spiraling down into a hundred levels.

> I find that there are times to downvote that don't or shouldn't require a comment. It will just spiral into a comment war tit for tat comments spiraling down into a hundred levels.

I'd be interesting to hear some examples. The only instances that sprung to my mind were instances where posts probably should be flagged instead anyway. However I'm open to the possibility I've overlooked some scenarios (as well as the possibility that flagging might get abused as a way of voting without commenting)

I really liked this idea too until I realized that it's really easy to come up with an excuse like "this doesn't make any sense". Which often times, is the real reason. I don't think mods have time to investigate each little spat and confrontation if someone chooses to "abuse" the system.

I think HN's current system of keeping a limited window open so that comments that in general are disagreed with will be downvoted makes sense. Honestly, I think it's even kind of brilliant, and I am not sure what system would be better.

How about losing your own karma points to make a downvote like SO?

I would agree that having to give a downvote reason is more relevant at bigger communities. But I'm usually surprised at how "lighter" moderation/voting works better in HN/Reddit

I remember the "Web 1.0" days of forums and slashdot where votes/moderation was more fine grained. But it seems cheap comments were more valued in these kind of environments than in the more modern ones (even if they're popular on Reddit, and I'm glad here it's toned down)

Yes sometimes the community here will disagree with you and there's a bit of "echo chamber" effect, though I find my comments will usually have an ok number of votes after a while (sometimes my opinions won't match the community, sometimes I'll have a badly worded comment that's misinterpreted and goes to have a low score, well, you can't get it right always)

HN can use one other thing, that is not showing the OP's name in the story.

The OP can still reveal himself by a comment (maybe different color name of OP in comments) but there is no other way to know who submitted the story.

This would greatly encourage upvotes by merit of article than people just following influencers.

hn should do away with the voting system.

i fail to understand why some comments get down-voted. sometimes i am thinking the same thing the commenter got down-voted for. i sometimes ask myself if there is no language barrier at play at times?

but i am usually not logged in, or on the phone, to comment. i seldom log in and yet has been around forever. i have accounts before that i forgot the password for. i think there are many of us that just hang around...

now, other times, i fail to understand why some posts get to the front page. and they never fail to get there. the first few replies on those are "see previous thread", "discussed before", and so on. and there is so kind of popularity thing going on that makes some people auto-magically get to the front page.

A better choice might be limiting upvotes or requiring a reason (as Slashdot did). There's already far too high a ratio of upvotes to downvotes IMO.

Down-voting sometimes increased my incentive to do trolling. I felt like they attacked me first for no good reasons.