Why no downmod for links? | Hacker News Reader

Why no downmod for links?

10 pointsglobalrev16 comments

Didn't think I'd be the one to say this since my first reaction to Hacker News was that I was very turned off and offended by downvotes without motivations.

My rule is: * Upvote good posts that you agree with. * Comment on posts you disagree with or want to add something significant to. * Downvote only when people write racist stuff etc.

But lately the forum has been filled with links that are irrelevant, blog posts with very low quality etc and the only way I can disagree with them is to answer them but I don't want to because that brings attention to them in the form of many replies plus it makes me waste my time on them which is what I don't want to.

So why isn't there a downvote for OPs/links?

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I'll repeat here what I've heard PG say before: If you want to improve the quality of HN, focus on upvoting. Find good stuff and upvote it.

Try reading the top links on the "new" page. If you click on an article and it's no good, write a comment explaining why you think so. It'll be one of the first comments on the article, and will serve as a sort of mini-review for those of us who tend to skim comments before reading articles.

Incidentally, reading comments before articles is a great way to help filter out the stuff you won't like.

If you find a good, relevant link on the new page, upvote it! This is one of the most important things you can do. Lots of decent articles disappear from HN without ever getting their first upvote.

Oddly, despite having seen an untold number of complaints about the lack of downvoting, I can never remember the stated rationale for not having it. But I think it has to do with the ease with which gangs of people could organize to downvote articles out of existence.

(You might think that claques of upvoters would also be a problem, but it occurs to me that artificial upvoting is a problem that gets noticed very quickly -- everybody sees what makes it to the top -- and can then be fixed, whereas the swift, silent, and unfair disappearance of articles can be harder to detect and reverse. It's a much easier problem to detect bad links that accidentally hit the front page than it is to detect good links that accidentally get banished to the gigantic, spam-filled garbage heap.)

> Find good stuff and upvote it.

The problem is that there is potentially way more junk than good stuff. In a good stuff only site, there would simply be less stuff, and at times, big gaps for lack of good stuff. That is IMO better than filling in those gaps with junk.

There are editors that remove obviously off-topic posts...but sometimes it takes a while for them to kill stuff. And lately, the new page is pretty heavy on the spam and off-target links--obviously folks just throwing their site against the Web 2.0 community news wall and hoping something sticks.

I'd be content with a maximum of one OP downvote per week, or something. If it's precious and rare, then I need to really mean it to use it. Of course, that means that a few downvotes ought to be enough to keep a story off the front page. I'd also be perfectly content with it having a karma requirement (if you do more than lurk or submit spam, it's impossible not to rack up reasonable karma in a short period of time, so that's a pretty low impact restriction on regular users).

Perhaps downvoting shouldn't actually change the post's position, but rather should just be stored as a separate stat that only the mods can see, and perhaps use to determine what posts should be more carefully reviewed.

I don't upvote anything until I've actually read it.

Assuming this is the default behaviour of most users it shouldn't be a problem to comment on bad links.

If I see a new link with a couple of comments but only 1 point, I'll quickly read the comments to make sure it's worth clicking first.

That said, I think adding a small barrier to submitting links wouldn't be a bad thing. Even stopping anyone with 10 karma or less would mean that people have to have a small investment in the community already. Hopefully that would mean they would have a feel for what is appropriate material.

EDIT: I just want to credit ichverstehe for the karma to submit thing. My comment was a response to him

Suggestion: A certain amount of karma is needed to submit links! It's easy enough to get karma through comments. That would probally help a lot on the signal-to-noise ratio.

I don't think low-karma users are the reason for a "bad" signal-to-noise ratio in submissions. I think that with more users, there is simply less consensus on what constitutes signal and what constitutes noise. A karma threshold for submitting wouldn't help with this.

So the real questions are: how do you get a bunch of anonymous people who don't know each other in real life to decide on the purpose of an already-existing website, and once you've done that, how do you keep the influx of new users in line with the site's stated purpose?

Wouldn't that stop a lot of people from getting involved here too?

Is a large number of people involved a good thing?

I'm a little surprised that PG hasn't already capped the number of users.

I think it would be great if user registration happened in seasons. I.e. every three months, there's a 48-hour period during which new people can sign up. The purpose of this would be to allow the site to retain a unique personality. If you constantly add new people, it's hard to know who's who and what we're doing here. Treat it more like a large and semi-exclusive collective, and give it a chance to center itself for a while before expanding again.

I like that idea. It would preserve the egalitarian internet spirit by allowing anyone to join, but prevent waves of new people from joining every time Hacker News gets publicized.

Not necessarily. I'm quite a newbie here, but have enjoyed the discussion already. Then again, I do specifically try to ignore your typical trolls/spammers.

I think mechanical_fish is probably right. Having down-voting suddenly changes the focus from solely looking for good articles to groups looking for bad articles (bury brigade, anyone?).

Keeping the site positive does wonders for my perception of the articles, and quite honestly, the signal-to-noise seems much better here than most news sites, even with the occasional garbage link. I think it goes without saying that the "community" is certainly better.

I agree... I've seen a lot of very poor quality links making it to the front page and (I guess because I'm a jerk) I'd like to be able to downvote stuff thats clearly off topic/low quality.

So long as this site doesn't become an Obama/McCain spam site like digg and reddit have become then i'll live without down vote.

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