I Downvoted Because
idownvotedbecau.se
idownvotedbecau.se
Leaving something at 0 upvotes is still a signal, although it’s less distinguishable from “no one saw this”. This approach makes the decision of voting binary (to upvote or not) rather than one with 3 choices, which reduces mental overhead. It also allows me to focus on positivity and finding comments that provide value, and pay less attention to ones that don’t. In the end, I think there can be value in downvoting, but I personally just don’t feel that the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.
- HN: Some really repugnant attitudes from time to time need to be downvoted. For example, personal attacks and things that would have been moderated out of existence on other platforms.
- Stack Overflow et al: Answers that are objectively and dangerously wrong. And I don't mean answers that just misread the question - those actually might be useful for someone else who stumbled on the page looking for exactly that thing. I mean answers that are dangerous, vulnerable, misleading, or represent an extreme viewpoint as fact ("buhh object orientation is dangerous, you must write C++ using functional paradigms, it's the only way to make good programs")
I worry that if stuff like this doesn't get downvoted by some, these things will be considered valid - or even acceptable - by others.
I don't think anybody reading an Internet discussion has so little time not to add to the downvote: "This part of your comment is horribly wrong, I warn others against doing it."
Actually, I think I would be more convinced to be careful with that sentence than just seeing bunch of downvotes.
But commenting without downvoting skews the ordering algorithms, and of course if someone else has already made a similar enough comment that you wouldn't be adding materially to the conversation, adding a similar comment just makes the post look busy an therefore, potentially, interesting.
You got a downvoted comment with no replies. Now, why was it downvoted? You can reread it and see if you were rude/offensive, but besides that...
Usually SO is a last resort for me once I have done enough research and read through lots of documentation for hours trying to understand why something does not work as expected. I ask a question on SO, and rather than being answered, am downvoted and belittled in the comments. It has made SO a toxic place where honest questions that are researched prior are punished. I do understand why it happens though because for every honest question, there's probably thousands of questions from people who obviously don't do any research.
Then having your "Thank you for answering my question" comment removed by SO moderators because they don't want thank you's on the platform... It's just turned into too much of a toxic place and is an absolute last resort.
IMO. Others experiences may be different :)
The point is that people generally downvote for whatever reason they want. Even with community standards that help to educate people, by empowering people to downvote, they just exercise that right and it has consequences for the community.
This has been my experience too. For someone like me who's a non-professional programming hobbyist, SO has been one of the most toxic and unhelpful communities. My only helpful experiences there are with the people who also happen to have their real names for their user ids.
I've had questions downvoted because I omitted something that "should have been there", downvoted because I included some things that "should not have been there", downvoted because I "asked for a suggestion" (eg: which type of DB is better for this kind of data?), or because I asked for something "that has been asked elsewhere", even though the two questions might have different tech stacks and use cases altogether.
I recommend most beginner programmers to go to reddit instead, where there's a less barrier to entry and visibility for questions. People are happy to answer you in Reddit for some karma, while on SO, the people who answer correctly have to subtly beg the questioner to mark the answer as correct.
It seems fine to disagree - but if that is your standard of “extreme” or “dangerous” it makes you seem like a crank and makes your justifications for downvoting seem very biased and wrong.
The dangerous part is presuming that no good software can come from OO. A comment like "I would prefer to see this in a functional paradigm, with as few side effects as possible" is absolutely fine.
The statement that all OO is bad makes an absolute out of a subjective, rubbishes the work and effort of millions and may cause a relative beginner to ignore learning a paradigm that is fundamental to their growth and learning as a developer.
Now then, that said... if you wanted an argument over avoiding OOP, I would argue any statement that categorically says "Avoid X" is an oversimplification. Everything is a balance of strengths and weaknesses, and there are times when OO is the right tool for the job. You are welcome to disagree, and I wouldn't downvote you for doing so _in this context_, but in a Stack Overflow context, depending on how you say it, I very well might if I considered your words dangerous enough.
(i.e. Silver bullets kill more than just werewolves)
On Hacker News, I totally agree that downvoting debatable views that are expressed poorly is totally unnecessary. If it isn't a statement that is outright dangerous or intentionally hurtful, my bar for downvoting here is very high. I would trust the audience to discern for themselves.
On Stack overflow, you are essentially there to teach people something. "Don't ever do X" is not going to teach something. Unpopular ideas (and even some popular ones) should be backed up with cogent reasoning, and I think downvoting (with an explanation) is the best way to tell future visitors "this is (probably) not the answer you are looking for".
That’s a ridiculous perspective.
Again, it’s totally fine to disagree with them, and make solid counterpoints if you can, but calling them dangerous is completely ludicrous.
This makes you sound like a narrow OOP zealot who gets cranky when people point out the truth that any use case solvable by OOP is also solvable with at least equal quality and equal satisfaction of the constraints using functional programming.
Again, merely disagreeing is one thing, and raising pros vs cons of some specific OOP design. But to call it dangerous to suggest OOP may never be needed is just completely unreasonable. I question your understanding of the concept “dangerous” in that case, and if it were up to me, you’d lose downvote privileges treating people like that and misrepresenting their sincere, evidence based software ideas with a derogatory term like “dangerous.”
I can't tell whether you're intentionally building a straw-man here. My original example of a downvotable comment had three statements:
"object orientation is dangerous": It clearly isn't. Badly written object oriented software can be dangerous, and you can argue that OO languages could do more to promote safety within themselves, but that doesn't make OO as a theoretical construct a bad thing, or all OO code bad, or all OO developers wrong.
"you must write C++ using functional paradigms": Again, there are separate challenges when writing fully FP-style C++, certainly there is nothing to say you MUST write C++ that way. And many projects would probably not welcome you rewriting their codebase in that way. If someone goes back to their employer / open-source project / teachers and tells them they are doing it wrong because their code contains OO, they may well be laughed out of the door.
"it's the only way to make good programs": This is obviously a lie.
Then, look at the context - I said "answers that are dangerous, vulnerable, misleading, or represent an extreme viewpoint as fact (...)" - I intended the above three statements to be an example of the latter, I figured that people can easily imagine dangerous / vulnerable / misleading SO posts themselves. But yes, while I do consider there to be dangerous effects from stating a subjective viewpoint as an absolute like this, I do think that the above statements take a reasonable yet subjective statement like "Few pieces of advice have served me as well as [avoid OOP]" into a totally unreasonable objective statement "it's the only way to make good programs"
Also, take a look at my later statement "Everything is a balance of strengths and weaknesses, and there are times when OO is the right tool for the job." I thought it would be relatively clear from this that there must always be times where OO is not the right tool for the job. My original statement was not an attempt to bad-mouth FP. But telling beginners to never use X because it's evil for whatever reason does have its dangers, whether that paradigm is FP or OOP.
> any use case solvable by OOP is also solvable with at least equal quality and equal satisfaction of the constraints using functional programming.
I suspect games programmers and kernel devs might disagree with that. But even if not, I would say that the bar you have set is terribly low. To my mind, a good program should also be readable, expressive, and in keeping with the project's coding standards. Generally, that's where I find that even some well-written FP code may fall down. But again, that's not an argument against FP itself, because I would not argue against FP. As I said before...
> A comment like "I would prefer to see this in a functional paradigm, with as few side effects as possible" is absolutely fine.
In fact, I would go as far as to say I might even agree with that statement. I certainly wouldn't downvote it. Sure, I'd like to see better arguments about why the side effects in that case are a problem, and why FP might be able to improve the code. But that is a perfectly valid and true statement. But hopefully now you can see why that statement is materially different to "object orientation is dangerous, you must write C++ using functional paradigms, it's the only way to make good programs".
> “ I mean answers that are dangerous, vulnerable, misleading, or represent an extreme viewpoint as fact ("buhh object orientation is dangerous, you must write C++ using functional paradigms, it's the only way to make good programs")”
So you are claiming that an idea expressing “OOP is dangerous” is itself dangerous as an idea and that this danger is what merits your downvote.
Yet you’ve done nothing to explain such an extreme and unreasonable point of view.
> Then, look at the context - I said "answers that are dangerous, vulnerable, misleading, or represent an extreme viewpoint as fact (...)" - I intended the above three statements to be an example of the latter, I figured that people can easily imagine dangerous / vulnerable / misleading SO posts themselves. But yes, while I do consider there to be dangerous effects from stating a subjective viewpoint as an absolute like this, I do think that the above statements take a reasonable yet subjective statement like "Few pieces of advice have served me as well as [avoid OOP]" into a totally unreasonable objective statement "it's the only way to make good programs"
Please quote me the bit where I say that I "downvote other ideas because they (the ideas) are dangerous” - I said very clearly that I downvote answers that are dangerous.
An answer is a concrete expression of an idea, but an idea can be correct without the answer being correct. (an extreme example: "We should improve the overall health of our nation" might be a completely valid idea, yet "shoot the disabled" is a completely wrong answer that embodies that idea but takes it in absolutely the wrong direction.)
> Yet you’ve done nothing to explain such an extreme and unreasonable point of view.
Alright, let's flip it: "Functional Programming is dangerous". I can use FP to write a program that accidentally wipes a hard disk. Therefore FP is dangerous. Argue against that.
Functional Programming, when used correctly, mitigates some of the dangers of Object Orientation. Arguably, a correctly written Object Oriented module should not be any less safe than a module correctly written in a Functional style.
You can argue (and probably do) that the implementations of Functional Programming that you enjoy using make writing correct code easier. And that is a valid statement.
But saying "OOP is dangerous" is no more valid than saying "FP is dangerous". Saying "Haddock are slimy and disgusting which is why I prefer Cod". No, fish are slimy and disgusting, and these are both fish. Maybe there are degrees by which some fish are slimier than others, but that doesn't justify an out-of-context vilification of Haddock.
So let me tell you some things that are more dangerous to your code and project than OO:
- Using a language or paradigm that your team are not familiar with
- Using tools that force you to distance your variable and method names from the domain-specific words that the specification is written in
- Premature optimisation
- Following every new framework and fad that comes along.
So yes, it is extreme and unreasonable to categorically state that "OOP is dangerous".
As an answer, it deserves to be downvoted.
As an idea, it has merit and deserves to be explored and justified and compared.
In a place of ideas (like Hacker News) that statement is perfectly acceptable (if not entirely helpful)
In a place of answers (like Stack Overflow), it is misleading and dangerous in that it encourages far more dangerous behaviours.
What are things that are moderated out of existence on other platforms and not on HN?
I disagree. Just call them out. I don't like it when anything is disappeared
I think HN would be improved by simply eliminating the downvote entirely and rely on upvoting alone, as the parent suggests.
If it's not egregious enough for flagging just ignore it and it'll sink to the bottom. No need to downvote.
As much as HN is far from perfect, I still think there's some healthy disagreement visible and bad faith arguments don't get promoted.
I believe that's the case now. The only difference would be that, if you felt the existing top response was incorrect and there was no better post for you to upvote to try to overtake it, you would have to write one. I think that would be a positive development.
Up == agreement
Down == disagreement
Flag == violates community standards
I generally try to add a thoughtful response to anything I downvote, but I am guilty of downvoting and moving on a couple of times.
I think requiring a response to downvote would be better than removing downvoting entirely.
Guilty, guilty, guilty! :-)
Seriously, I think all of us have done it. But for most it's an occasional thing and we wouldn't miss it if downvoting went away, since most of the time we either write an opposing view or upvote an existing one.
In the perfect world, I'd come to HN and the top 2 voted comments would be the most succinct and well argued sides to the discussion (assuming there's a traditional for+against), then the top voted comments the tier down would be the best refutations of those points. That way I can read both and get to my own balanced view quicker. If all the voting system tells me is "this is what the average HN reader agrees with" that's far less valuable.
For example, if a group of people who tend to vote the same way on certain things all downvote a particular comment, but a smaller group of people with a different voting history vote a different way on the same comment, the system could mark that comment as a minority opinion rather than simply a "bad comment" and give less weight to downvotes from users of the opposing position when sorting that comment.
The HN readers are good at moderation overall, not perfect but definitely good. Maybe it would be enough to have an "agree/disagree" button as well as a "good/bad" button.
I much præfer discussion fora that lack a voting system. The order of comments and submissions can purely be determined by last reply bumping whatever tree had it to the top.
Another issue is that places like HN and Reddit only show the total score, and not the upvote/downvote breakdown. I saw a topic here where all the comments on one side were downvoted and grayed out, but when someone put up a poll asking for the opinions that side got about 40%. It's hard to know if a greyed out comment is because the community as a whole feels the comment is bad, or if it's simply in an emotionally charged discussion where the opposition has a slight majority.
But - lately I’ve been second guessing myself and wondering whether there’s any virtue in continuing to not use this feature, which is sometimes useful. There are a minority of comments that should be downvoted and I agree with downvotes they receive even if I don’t hand any out.
One reason I’ve been questioning my personal policy is because I’ve recognized that - in the spirit of the article here - that downvotes on HN are given for a wide variety of legitimate reasons that don’t necessarily amount to disagreement. Sometimes comments are very off-topic, sometimes they make assumptions, sometimes they’re polite and nice but factually wrong, sometimes they’re jokes that aren’t funny. I’ve started to view downvotes as being symmetric to upvotes, and I give upvotes liberally and for a huge number of reasons. There’s nothing really wrong with downvotes being seen in the same light... other than negative feelings it might cause and the times it leads to destructive responses rather than constructive responses.
I’d love to hear what others thing, should I start using downvotes now, or continue to abstain?
Well there are two good reasons, maybe they're good enough?
Relevantly, I have found myself accidentally tapping the downvote button a few times on mobile — if you tap and hold on Safari, it brings up a link preview which has the same effect as [up/down/flag] voting deliberately.
You know, a lot of downvotes are rooted in "You and I come from vastly different backgrounds and will probably never see eye to eye" and it's a giant, giant, humongous, painful can of worms to dig around in that. A downvote (or ten) is the least painful way to let very different people "say" things like "Wow. I think you are stupid because I'm a racist/misogynist/classist asshole and the way you said it tells me you are the wrong color/a woman/poor." or "I'm from a different country or culture or religion and, good, god, there is so much baked in implicit assumptions that it would take weeks, months or years to sort out why we don't agree."
I mean, if you participate regularly and remain civil, some of that may get sorted over time. But it's not going to get sorted today because you submitted the downvote equivalent of a "bug report."
Downvotes are annoying. And they are often kind of like that saying about democracy: "the worst thing ever....except for all the other options."
(Edit: I wish there were a word that meant simultaneously misogynist and/or misandrist. I don't mean to suggest it's just "men hating on women." (if only because plenty of women hate on other women) I just have been up all night and I'm failing to find the elegant way to say that in a more gender neutral or even-handed way. Sorry 'bout that.)
You mean “sexist”?
But have an upvote.
Misandry: men bug me
Misanthrope: people bug me
And if it's egregious enough, I will flag it.
As someone who is a demographic outlier, I'm okay with getting downvotes as part of the feedback mechanism for trying to figure out how to navigate this social space. I think it's problematic to err too far in the direction of "Everyone needs to be nicey-nice to everyone all the time, no matter what they really think or feel about it."
Of course then again, all of this body-language pales in comparison to a well-written response.
I've been all around the world by now and I've realized people are rarely what you think they are. Even when you can point to stated political ideologies, I've argued and debated with enough people to know that the box almost never fits. I can judge your comments at point in time, but I've often found myself scrolling someone's post history on here and saying, "They're not so bad, they just lack perspective or experiences in this area." It's also possible they've had overwhelmingly negative experiences in that area, but a bad opinion nonetheless gets a downvote.
The whole point is I can rarely bring myself to judge a person as a whole. That takes some overwhelming information about them for me to do. I can judge individual criterion and that's exactly what the downvote gets used for on this account. I don't expect people to change and I don't really expect my fraction of an opinion to matter much.
One of my comments on HN was repeatedly downvoted for saying something like "I don't use more than a bit of a particular ingredient in food because it gives me a throat burn".
This makes you realize sometimes a downvote is just "because". In someone's mind anything can trigger a "penalize" response towards the comment or the author. But I'm fairly certain most times guesses for the reason are very likely to be wrong.
Funny, because I see it more often as "I think you are stupid because you have an opinion which I don't agree with and has triggered me due to my hypersensitivity, assumption of ill will, and inability to handle issues which may require nuance which my ideology won't allow for, which therefore causes me to suppress you"
I see overt racism (or even 'classism' or misogyny) on HN very, very rarely, certainly not remotely common enough so as to be a primary impetus for down-voting.
Edit: as an exercise in reality, I'd urge anyone interested to have a cruise through top, say 100 current threads, and point out the examples of misogyny/racism/classicism, or at least this as a basis for voting patterns.
That's often part and parcel of things like racism and sexism. Most such things do not get openly painted as "I don't like you because of your skin color or gender."
Metafilter is a great example of this. When I was there, it was not only a cesspit of ugly classism, it was horribly misandrist in ways that I found just pure evil.
But of course no one there described themselves as misandrist. They described themselves in amazingly wonderful and glowing terms as woke, pro women's lib, welcoming of the LGBTQ community, etc.
But rather than being pro women or something, it was mostly a space where it was okay for women and the LGBTQ crowd to be openly hateful to men.
One guy posted a question asking for support to help him cope in the aftermath of his wife's rape and one of the comments nailed him to the wall for supposedly "making this about him" because of him seeking support for himself separately from and in addition to supporting her recovery from this awful incident.
I left a long and helpful comment that moderating staff deleted and when I asked why, I was told it was "tangential" and "not providing resources" -- a test not applied to the long comment handing him his head for seeking support on the grounds that he was clearly some misogynistic piece of shit of a human being who only treated his wife as a sex object, clearly, as that could be the only possible reason he would ask such a question.
I kept a copy of my comment and posted it on a blog of mine in hopes he would find it somehow. He messaged me a few hours later and was very thankful for what I had to say on the topic because the comment handing him his head for asking the question (which had like 80 "likes") had him just losing his shit. It was a poisonous message delivered by people who simply hate all heterosexual men and I just don't know why any men participate on that site, it's so openly hostile to men. Meanwhile, a lot of them parrot the party line about it being all woke and wonderfulness.
Being openly hateful to men is not and never will be pro women's rights. Kicking the shit out of men does not redress the lack of status for women. Kicking the shit out of heterosexual men for the crime of being in a hetero relationship does not make the world a better place for the LGBTQ crowd.
What helps them is...helping them. Weird as that may sound. That's what helps them.
And it's a shockingly hard message to try to get across. About 99 percent of the time people seem to think "I know! The answer is: let's find some man to lynch!" when what I would like to see is, oh, more money in my bank account or something.
Me watching men get lynched doesn't fill my belly.
However ...
... the default characterization of a system or group of people as being 'sexist or racist' because they may 'downvote' something, or may not agree with a specific statement of social or moral justice ... just isn't right.
HN just isn't a racist or sexist system.
Contentious statements regarding race/gender aren't really that common, moreover, when they are it seems to me that discussions are generally well within the bounds of civility and at worst, there might be some misguided ignorance.
I don't for a second doubt people (such as yourself) have a really crap experience now and again - and there's no excusing that (there's no reason for people to have to put up with that kind of crap) but I don't think it's very representative of the system, or a problem with the culture or moderation for example.
That's debatable, but there's probably nothing to be gained by debating it here and now.
It is the least worst thing I know in that regard, which is one of the reasons I hang here.
But my firsthand experience over the course of more than 11 years suggests that, yes, sexism is an issue here, though it certainly isn't overt. The fact that it is subtler than usual actually makes it harder to root out.
Another reason I hang here is "I'm too truthful to be good." and people here are willing to tolerate that personality defect. Unlike Metafilter and some other forums, I haven't (yet) been banned for sometimes pointing out what I see when I'm sufficiently fed up and cranky and having a bad day and unable to keep erring on the side of giving people credit for their many virtues and I, thus, feel compelled to say something like "...and, yet, I remain dirt fucking poor and no amount of virtue on my part of adding value or some shit -- like people say I should -- ever seems to remedy that."
To be clear, I count it as a tremendous virtue that so many people here are willing to tolerate my presence in spite of me being too truthful to be good. It gives me hope that HN will be the space in which the internet figures out how to do things better, in spite of all of us being human and having inherited so much awful crap from the past and the inherent challenges involved in redressing large-scale social injustices.
I don't really care to discuss this further at the moment. I hope you have a great day in spite of making the egregious mistake of having spoken to me.
If I simply disagree with someone, I prefer to reply (or upvote someone else's reply) with an explanation of why I disagree. I try to only downvote posts with whom I disagree if I believe they are being mean.
As for my own posts, I do get frustrated when I am downvoted but nobody replies with an explanation for why they downvoted me. I leave comments on sites like HN because I want to evolve my own thoughts on the subject and help others evolve theirs. So to me a downvoted post with no replies is a missed opportunity to evolve my thoughts and better understand those who disagree with me. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this site applies to HN comments.
A silent downvote lets you avoid a lot of that, even if you respect the premise of the original post you downvoted.
This is a noble goal, and might work on StackOverflow, but I doubt it will get much traction.
I can't agree more with your comment about wishing people would reply with reasoning rather than simply downvoting.
When I jump into a heated conversation or comment on an emotional topic, I am fully aware that I'm asking for downvotes without responses. But that has served as a negative reinforcement for making said comments, which leads to me engaging in those conversations much less often.
My point is, I'm not sure this is a bug. I'm pretty sure its a feature.
I'll often upvote posts I disagree with if I feel others should see the the counter arguments..
Would not it be better not to play nanny and let readers decide for themselves?
Most voted and the best can be two different things.
I'm barely active on StackOverflow anymore, because posters show less and less effort. I'm somewhat of a senior WordPress developer and eager to help, but the sheer amount of absolute basic stuff, without any effort made by the poster, just kills it for me.
And it's not even the "can you recommend a plugin"-questions, but those which show that somebody has been given a task (or took it by themselves) without knowing anything at all. It's like getting into a car and then asking what that round thing right in front of you is for.
I just downvote and flag those questions. I think nobody should answer those questions at all and we have to discourage behaviour where people, without any knowlede and effort, try to collect breadcrumbs to (somehow) reach a goal without even trying to understand the bigger picture.
edit: Why the bigger picture is important? Because we are talking about systems that are, in most cases, facing the internet. And the internet is a hostile place where attacks against your systems are starting right after setting them up.
It's ultimately important to know what you are doing and what the consequences are (or could be) when you start tinkering with theme files, "how WooCommerce works" and whatnot. That's especially true for shop systems which contain private data of customers but it's also important for any page that could be misused to send spam, distribute malware and whatnot.
It would feel less like it, if there were some ready made text one-liners with a compassionate summary and a link to the longer version.
Also, if you want to help - why would you downvote? Just help!
ESL is a separate problem.
But the first half of the webpage only talk about communities in general, so I first assumed this was meant to be used on places like hackernews and reddit, places where downvotes most of the time mean: "you are an idiot/troll, I'm downvoting this to save other people from having to read this garbage."
A situation where I really don't want to help the poster...
I don't think they do; there are many ways to disagree, while with agreement there is often little to add.
Therefore, downvoting a comment should always require either upvote to a direct reply or another reply. Then this reply can also be judged for its value.
I understand some people are tired of hearing the same old argument, or a wrong fact, and so they downvote without response. But consider that you're doing the moderation for others, not yourself. If you're tired of explaining the problem (even in the obvious cases, with one word), then perhaps do not get involved at all in negative moderation.
Of course, the things that are obviously spam or offtopic should be deleted, not just downvoted, and that should be a different mechanism.
I think they do, but I don't think it's an open and shut case. I see downvotes as dual-purpose. They are a behavioral nudge for the commenter, and they are a signal to everyone else that the comment does not contribute to healthy discussion. I'm fine if they fail to be the former in some cases.
I've met a decent number of high functioning people in real life who are emotionally incapable of introspection and will go down the rabbit hole to defend something they've said/done that was clearly an asshole thing to say/do in the moment. Responding just gives them a target (you) for the inevitable defensive reaction. There are few people like that, but I've had enough interactions with the internet equivalent of this over my lifetime that I've long since given up on the idea that anybody who clearly comes across as an asshole on the internet will get reformed by a nicely worded "stop being mean".
The other case where I might downvote and not respond is when it's a tired debate (usually political, often over diversity/equality related topics) and the comment is arguing with common talking points that use incorrect facts or is arguing with common bad faith talking points. I've been in too many of those over the years too. I'm not going to be the magical person who gets the other anonymous internet poster to recognize the error of their ways.
Outside of those cases, I tend to respond after downvoting. Or just not downvote and respond anyway.
"The other case where I might downvote and not respond is when it's a tired debate (usually political, often over diversity/equality related topics) and the comment is arguing with common talking points that use incorrect facts or is arguing with common bad faith talking points."
Well, consider that these common bad faith talking points are repeated because nobody bothers to rebut them properly. If other people (not the OP) see these, they might think of them as valid arguments. If you respond to them, you are also explaining to others, why they are not valid. It is a lot more helpful (you can actually convince someone) than just downvoting. And if your counter-argument is really good, it might be picked up by people on your side, too.
If the goal is to be helpful and to convince bystanders, then I think it's much more productive to find and engage with the comments where people are asking thoughtful questions, engaging healthily, or giving an overview of the common points made on the topic. Or just upvote those for visibility instead.
Likewise, how do you determine if it's a quality downvote - as in, is the downvoter actually interpreting what's being said adequately? Maybe the downvoter is biased somehow, e.g. suppressing anti-CPP commentary seems to be more common even when they are thoughtful and critical responses. If the downvoter is forced to actually reply with a qualitative response, then the OP would be able to either realize they didn't explain clearly enough - or we'd all be able to determine the would-be downvoter isn't reasonable or with incongruent logic.
I'd say the cost of spending time to think through enough to respond with writing is a fair, good cost, in order to participate vs. getting a quick hit of dopamine with a downvote click; everyone grows then and refines themselves and help to refine others.
Exactly. I expect in the end, downvoting without any explanation will just keep people in their eco-chambers, as at least there they are not downvoted.
And the answer is ”yes”.
> Therefore, downvoting a comment should always require either upvote to a direct reply or another reply.
If something spurs productive debate which deserves an upvote, or supports a response which is worth having, it doesn't deserve a downvote. Requiring a downvote to be accompanied by things which only make sense if the thing being downvotes doesn't deserve a downvote in the first place is nonsensical.
I disagree (without downvoting). I have some downvoted comments without replies that I suspect I'll never now why they were downvoted. So, if there was anything wrong with my opinion, or the way I expressed it, I won't correct that.
Suggestion:
Technical forums have more than code being discussed. You may want to add categories or groups.
Idea/HN feature wishlist: When you downvote a comment, you can add a reason right there. When you hover on any comment which was downvoted, you can see the reasons why it was downvoted.
In the case of downvoting, it doesn't rise to the level of needing to be triaged by a mod, but I suppose you could argue that by giving the commenter a signal about why you downvoted, you're allowing them to self-triage (e.g. update the post to address the issue, or at least try to do better next time).
Being able to choose from a short list of predefined downvote reasons -- even if it were between "This breaks forum rules" versus "I simply disagree" -- would be useful.
Edit: typo/words
I would welcome it.
1. You can't downvote direct replies to your own comments
2. You can't see comment scores other than your own
3. Heavily down voted comments aren't hidden, just greyed out
4. New comments are initially sorted near the top of the thread, so they aren't immediately buried and have a chance to get voted on
5. Comments on older threads can't be downvoted
I wish you could also see the scores of direct replies to your comments, so you know if the replies are popular and merit being addressed.
As it stands now, if you see 2+ replies, and they aren't greyed out or responded to, you have no idea if they're heavily upvoted, or just got ignored.
It would add a lot of value to the downvote button and the "I disagree" option could silently not apply any modifier to prevent groupthink.
But I do agree that simply disagreeing with someone shouldn't work the same way.
If it were up to me, and aside from the neutral "I disagree", I'd add one for "Factually incorrect" because that's pretty much the only time I downvote on HN.
I notice that often comment blocks will have a confidently incorrect technical post at the top of the discussion followed by a gish gallop of derailed technical debate.
I think the aggressive comment folding also aggravated the lack of interaction. There was no point in replying to a discussion more than 2 levels deep, nobody would see it.
An upvote is communication to the person who posted the comment that it was positive in some way. For me, it usually stands in for "that's a good point", or "my thoughts exactly", or "this comment was unjustly downvoted".
Downvotes, on the other hand, are a communication to everyone involved that that comment crossed a line in some kind of way. There's almost a social shaming that goes along with it. "Keep expressing that opinion and what you say will be increasingly harder for everyone else to see." I'm not a big fan of trying to suppress ideas. Much better to respond to them explaining why you disagree or, alternatively, to just ignore them and move on. I guess I don't feel it's up to me to work with others to make comments harder to read. People can make their own minds up without me having to tell them what they shouldn't agree with.
That's why I only upvote and don't downvote.
Maybe an idea for YouGotBlockedBecau.se/me-too ;-)
It could be collapsable, with a "overview" of likes/dislikes.
Here's an experiment -- Try reading your next HN thread from bottom (most downvoted) to top, and see if it's an equal experience.
I find that any service that doesn't do vote-ranking (e.g. newspaper forums) usually turns atrocious almost immediately.
Really bad universally unacceptable comments get buried.
But comments with mixed upvotes and downvotes ("controversial") are shown higher than simply upvoted comments.
This promotes interesting conversations and exposes readers to broader world views without shattering readers faith in humanity.
Downvotes help you avoid confrontation and discussion. You get to slap anyone on the wrist without them knowing it was you, or why. It's self-policing by censorship that directly counteracts free speech and free thinking. It's too convenient, too powerful, too disrespectful, too arbitrary, and too anonymous. Here comments literally fade out. You're voting to "cancel" a comment.
Why respectfully reply when you run the risk of being downvoted yourself? Being wrong and downvoted is one thing, but what if you were not wrong? The votes are a measure of opinion and sentiment, not fact. And we can police comments, but we cannot police the downvotes. To then call this tally "karma" and equate this with your worth on a platform is a sure way to encourage thought alignment, not debate.
What I would immediately do to improve the experience on HN:
1. As others have suggested, add a score for upvote/downvote total. So 50 upvotes and 51 downvotes = 101 points. Any points cancelled out could even be double Karma, or just the negative flipped to a positive. Engagement is worth valuing, and an upvote/downvote pair is healthy intellectual drama.
2. I would have a small list of keywords to select from displayed next to the comment title AFTER you click downvote. Downvoting should be a rare occasion (and I think it is), and adding one more step to add nuance to the downvote should be positive for the downvoter and the downvoted.
So a comment after downvotes would look like:
unabst 16 hours ago [–] troll 1 tone 2 incorrect 4 flagged dead
This could be done for upvotes too, but maybe make the selection optional.
I have a feeling on HN the shaming and bitterness of downvoting is not a bug but a feature. It's democratic, it's power to the user, it's fair, yada yada yada.
Personally, at this point I am certain downvoting features lead to polarization, toxicity, bullying, group think, hesitation of substantive discourse, and a lot of negativity with the experience. And all the notable platforms with downvote features have suffered.
Good of this site to be earnest, but I'd argue there is no meaningful "why," for downvotes, it's just a way to pander to the worst part of peoples nature.
What problem does this solve that "please post your code" doesn't?
1 - Not relevant to the discussion
2 - Rude/Offensive/Prejudice, etc
Downvoting means the comment get less visibility. In real life conversations, when you don't agree, you don't turn down someone's voice so nobody can hear them. You either reply saying that you don't agree, or you get them out of the discussion if they are 1 or 2 above.
If any opinion that is different than the prevailing opinion get downvoted - thus, less visible - people are not going to see the different angles of the discussion. Even if it's an opinion based on wrong assumptions/facts, other people might benefit from seeing the correction on the replies
1. The people who would rely on this site should really consider upping their reading and social skills to determine if they should even consider expending the effort to respond in the first place. If it's deemed worth it to respond, get a feel for the language the question-asker is using to see if it's someone with vast dev experience but new to a certain system, someone with mid-level or just enough experience, etc., before one types out a response. This could be its own article, but this is a huge problem.
2. There are a lot of people who simply do not care that HackerNews/StackOverflow/etc. are communities and are just looking for answers to their questions. I've come to see that people can make all sorts of guides and resources like https://xyproblem.info/ and community-specific resources like for IRCs, Discord channels, etc. but there are simply people who, while they aren't vindictive, don't give a shit about a given community's etiquette. The people who care enough will at least scan these guides and try their best.
My biggest concern is that both of these aspects overlap and if this was actively used, there'd be situations where:
- Experts/those knowledgeable in a certain domain but lacking in social acumen will lazily link these answers to people who are new but who have at least scanned community guides and have tried their best to create a post, leaving the new user feeling like they're simply being turned away
- The same group noted above will perform the same deal with someone who doesn't care about the given community and just wants an answer, inciting this individual's vitriol and perpetuating the cycle of apathetic or "control freak" experts and outsider chumps expecting free work for no effort
Solving the StackOverflow empty downvote problem is hard, but simply adding a hyperlink to someone else's pre-written words as a SO comment is not the right move.
---
I just downvoted your comment.
FAQ What does this mean? The amount of karma (points) on your comment and Reddit account has decreased by one.
Why did you do this? There are several reasons I may deem a comment to be unworthy of positive or neutral karma. These include, but are not limited to:
Rudeness towards other Redditors, Spreading incorrect information, Sarcasm not correctly flagged with a /s. Am I banned from the Reddit? No - not yet. But you should refrain from making comments like this in the future. Otherwise I will be forced to issue an additional downvote, which may put your commenting and posting privileges in jeopardy.
I don't believe my comment deserved a downvote. Can you un-downvote it? Sure, mistakes happen. But only in exceedingly rare circumstances will I undo a downvote. If you would like to issue an appeal, shoot me a private message explaining what I got wrong. I tend to respond to Reddit PMs within several minutes. Do note, however, that over 99.9% of downvote appeals are rejected, and yours is likely no exception.
How can I prevent this from happening in the future? Accept the downvote and move on. But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated on Reddit.com. I will continue to issue downvotes until you improve your conduct. Remember: Reddit is privilege, not a right.
downvoting has divulged into shaming. That's the real problem here. It trained millions of internet users to be hypersensitive to how others might react to their comment.
Which got me thinking. How about a system where we penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes? If a comment is genuinely not adding value, or against the guidelines, one imagines it would not garner many upvotes. So if a comment gets upvotes as well, this probably indicates that the downvotes are for simple disagreement, and those downvoting should lose karma.
I'm not sure what the ratio should be, or how much the penalty should be. In my mind equal numbers of up and down indicates that the downvotes are misplaced. So perhaps something like if upvotes = downvotes/3, or maybe some hard limit like 4 upvotes would trigger downvote penalization. Perhaps this would make people think twice before downvoting for disagreement.
As an aside, on StackOverflow downvoting costs you 1 point. I don't think that's a good system because sometimes a downvote is warranted, but something like the above seems more fair.
> penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes
Seems like a version of automatic meta-moderation. I'm not strictly against the idea of modifying someone's "voting power" based on past voting behavior - frequent vs. infrequent, positive vs. negative, conformist (for lack of a better term) or contrary. However, such systems have to contend with the issue of reinforcing groupthink rather than actual quality, and the last thing HN needs is more groupthink. Also, any implementation is likely to involve the manipulation of values that aren't small integers, and apparently that's Too Hard.
I feel this would be interesting because with the current approach, a comment can have +1 (yay!) upvotes, where in reality, 61 readers voted, 31 up, 30 down. Knowing that, I'd see the comment and discussion with more depth.
Thoughts?
The anonymous reply could be visible to everyone also as long as it remains anonymous I think is the key.
In fact it could even improve the community if serial downvoters are required to leave replies instead of downvoting an unpopular comment to the abyss.
My suspicion is that, even more than moderators, nice FAQs, and such, these can influence the forum experience the most.
So whenever that happens, I feel like I've won. Thanks for all the downvotes suckers!
> Ain't nobody got time for that
No time for the poster to read through a page of text, or for the downvoter to find the most appropriate link describing their rationale.
I think it is much better for the commenter to post in a reply why they downvoted. It shows they are willing to engage. To simply post a link may signal to the original poster that the downvoter couldn't be bothered, or that he just pushed a button and ran.
Second, even for a broad class of entries downvoted for a similar reason, each one has some nuance which may get lost if all the poster has to go on is a preachy page.
For example, my posts would be marked as a F/OSS Zealot/Linux Fanboy. Or something like that.
And further, if my account downvotes something about Apple, it should have less impact than if someone who is an Apple fanboy does it. Balance.
Just an idea. ;)
1) Require a selection of one of the reasons when a downvote occurs (require HN cooperation & implementation)
2) Add a similar capability for upvoting reasons
3) Require a selection of one of the reasons when an upvote occurs
4) Add a 'save this' feature to HN, so an upvote is not used as a bookmark to quickly search HN posts you wanted to find again.
I would say then that my request would be that favorite is a link with the main set up links under the post entry on the main page, rather than just on the page for that post.
Now I just need a plugin to paste that for everytime I downvote.
a downvote has to have a reason. votes are metamoderated to see if they are reasonable and if you are determined to not be reasonable, you lose moderating privileges.
Downvotes may be feedback, but they don't feel like it.
I'm copy/pasting a comment dang made not so long ago, followed by my reply:
dang's comment: "Yes, I'm a moderator here. Sorry about all those scoldings and chidings. I know they're annoying, and if it helps at all, they're even more tedious to write than to read [1]. But unfortunately the system can't regulate itself without feedback from some dedicated component—this is very clear. If we went by upvotes alone, the site would be dominated by indignation and sensationalism [2]. It's interesting to ask why. I thought about that for years and I think I found an answer. It's because although the community has many smart and well-intentioned people, each is giving only a fragment of their attention to HN (at least I hope they are). Some critical functions, like optimizing the site globally rather than just reacting to specific stories or comments, require someone whose job it is to give full attention to HN [3]. It's not that we're better—except in the sense that one gets better at anything with practice—it's that we play the role of looking out for the community as a whole.
Actually the system has three components: community and moderators, but also software. That's interesting too, because it has always been a property of HN that the core moderators were also the programmers. We rely heavily on software to help manage the portions of the problem that can be handled that way, with the intention of freeing more of our attention for the optimization problem. It only works up to a point, but without it we'd be doomed.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:da...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dan...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209"
My reply:
'Re: "... each is giving only a fragment of their attention to HN"
Yet even based on this "you" think downvotes are a good idea to keep them, compounding the issue of partial attention with laziness by allowing a single click for a dopamine hit to satisfy someone's half-or-less attention interpretation of something - not required to spend the mental effort to actually qualitatively reply (that you/HN are seeming to strive for) where they'd be forced to pay more attention or their lack of attention will be exposed for fair ridicule via getting responded to; or the qualitative reply will help educate or cause the author being responded to hopefully learn something (that a downvote won't teach them) even if that is that they weren't clear enough with their writing and it's being misinterpreted. I'd implore you to do a multi-month to year trial of no downvotes on comments - I'm sure it'll piss off those who like to think they're right at half-or-less attention and regularly downvote click for that sweet sweet dopamine - and ironically those who normally downvote may actually comment their grievances/complain that there aren't downvotes.
I'm not trying to pick a fight, though I'm really curious how you see these truths I explained above? Having downvotes seems to support a lower quality, less discussion, and less requirement for attention - which seems contrary to what you seem to be working towards?'
Re: “If we went by upvotes alone, the site would be dominated by indignation and sensationalism [2].”
dang offers no evidence of this, however I imagine anecdotally he sees how many upvotes/downvotes all comments receive. In reality what happens is those the upvoted comments at the top would already be at the top simply with the upvote mechanism - and the "lower quality" comments would move to the bottom anyway.
If indignation truly is a problem - have that as a Flag option. If reviewing that is too much for the paid moderators, then find volunteers who will review and confirm - and then manually suppress anger, hate, and whatever else qualifies. Adding that Flag mechanism in to solve that problem would then undo the pitfalls of having downvotes.
It’s odd too to me that dang/HN or anyone would allow a “mob” of people who you know will upvote angry commentary, meaning they’re reactive emotionally - getting a sweet hit of dopamine to reenforce the crowds anger - and then you’d also allow those same people the power on the other end of the spectrum, for them to unleash that reactiveness to downvote/suppress comments as well.
No downvote option + have a “Flag for indignation” option to then require review by paid or volunteer mods would be a precision weapon compared to crowdsourcing this mob, expecting them to do a rational job of moderation duties. If it ends up being substantial more work that gets created then start asking for monthly contributions to pay to support for more moderators.
Finally, is it really a good idea to allow people to get a reward for downvoting - just like giving the people who heavily upvote indignation a reward? Obviously it’s necessary to keep upvotes - I’ll hope that the precision moderation option I mention above will be implemented instead of downvotes.
I don't think this is satire, but I have seen it here.
Believe it or not, I once had a very high karma here on HN. Over time it has dwindled and been withered away by downvotes. Nearly every post I make these days seems to get downvotes now, even for fairly innocuous posts. I don’t get it. I am almost certain that I have now been targeted by some downvotes cabal, and perhaps the same individuals continue to downvotes my posts and then dig into my post history to find even more posts to downvote.
In my opinion, downvotes should not be anonymous. If someone disagrees with you then you should know their name. Instead, we have these forums where people hide like cowards while inflicting harm.
Most of your downvoted comments (usually one liners) have comments under them (usually paragraphs) disagreeing with you and explaining why.
Meanwhile, your downvoted comments that have no explanation added are simply out of place for the HN community. Swear words, short controversial statements, very political messages, etc.
Do you truly believe this comment was downvoted because of a cabal and not because of its content?: "I’m tired of trashy Chinese tastes gaining so much influence in the world." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25527391
People with opposing worldviews simply stop commenting after receiving downvotes (and especially when banned from commenting for some time because of downvoting). Currently HN is very progressive, although there is a lot of people with conservative views, who simply don't comment.
It could the the opposite: conservative majority with quiet progressives. It would be equally bad.
Currently, HN has a robust (though definitely skewed in ways one would expect of a forum dominated by people who are, if not always currently well-off, in possession of excellent economic prospects in first-world economies) mix of views, though the meme about conservatives being suppressed in tech is well-represented among HN’s conservatives, so we see lots of HN conservatives commenting about how HN conservatives don't comment.
Also, we see lots of them commenting about other things, too.
(In fact, others have argued—though I think this is also, but only equally, wrong—that the dominant viewpoint on HN is right-libertarian.)
Don’t forget the fact I used to have close to 1000 karma on HN. So clearly something changed at some point and my decline in popularity picked up momentum. I really wish I could see data on my upvotes and downvotes history.
When you know you’re going to be downvoted regardless of what you post, it’s easy for your writing to take on a bitter and cynical tone. That said, most of my comments aren’t even like that and still get inexplicable downvotes.
I believe that you hit the nail on the head there. If your reaction to feedback from your peers is to turn bitter you are creating a vicious circle.
When I get a downvote, I analyze my comment and try to detect the mistake or social faux pas I commited. For example, most *chan or Reddit lingo is frowned upon so I avoid them.
This is an account I created 4 months ago because my previous account was named after a domain I no longer own. I am already at 811 karma. My previous account, created in 2013, had 5930 karma with long periods of inactivity. Karma is meaningless if you do not use it as a metric to detect how your peers perceive you. It's points without a scoreboard and no one is keeping track.
This does not mean I bend backward and follow the opinions of others. I do stand by my comments that are downvoted and would repeat them verbatim if the same conversation arise. But that's an exception and it's usually about controversial topics.
Remember that the words you write are going to be read by someone (or what's the point?). So make sure you are either helpful to other users or that you bring the discussion forward. Otherwise you are simply wasting someone's time and they will quickly click on the downward triangle.
This is not an attack, I am genuinely trying to help you get out of that catch-22.