Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I would be interested in knowing how much of your description is deduction on your part, and how much is received fact from definitive sources. I would be interested in knowing how and why your comment was deemed "bad."

I don't know of any definitive cases where someone made a comment that was appropriate, got vast numbers of down-votes, and then got banned because of it. I know of many people who have complained about being banned, only to discover that it wasn't the case.

I do know of many people who present dissenting views, but present them carefully and constructively, and who do not attract down-votes because of their comments. They work hard to get people to think first, and not to react with a jerk of the knee (so to speak). It is possible. I've seen it. It's not easy, and I suspect not everyone can do it.

In short, it's unclear that your beliefs about the situation are accurate - there are many ways to get these things wrong. I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying that your view about down-votes may not be accurate.

And no, I don't think down-votes should be removed, although I frequently don't understand how they are being used.

I'll give you one example. Recently, someone posted a link to the new update for Python 2.7.2. At the time, on the python website itself, it stated that this was not a production release and specifically said something along the lines of upgrade at your own risk (I quoted it word for word from the site).

I then made a personal statement saying "I guess I won't be upgrading". I felt that it may help those who didn't scan the page and may miss the quote. And the specific comment I made was one about me, that affects only me reflecting the statement I quoted off the python site. I started getting downvotes for no apparent reason (at least none that I could see reasonably). To avoid it, I just deleted the comment.

If others felt like they didn't care, they were more than welcome to download 2.7.2. I never said anything about why people shouldn't have downloaded it. All I wrote was literally what I just said above.

For the record, it now looks like the site has been updated to reflect that it is a full production release.

Here's one way to think about it, based purely on what you've said. I didn't see your comment, so I don't know for sure:

Did you say anything unobvious? You quoted from the site that they declared it not to be a production release, and you said "OK - not for me." (I paraphrase)

We can easily deduce that, as it's not a production release, then not everyone will want it. Fine. What did your comment really add? It was a personal, conversational, largely content-free, throw-away observation.

This isn't a criticism, I'm merely trying to present a way of thinking that makes it less unreasonable for people to have down-voted a comment.

HN was always intended to be unlike other sites, strongly encouraging meaty content, strongly discouraging light and fluffy comments and submissions. It's been drifting away from that, so people are starting to feel that there's more space for conversational-like comments. There is something of a back-lash from some of the older hands who remember what it was like. Or what they think they remember it was like. More content, less conversation. Discussion, not throw-away remarks.

I can see what you mean and I do understand that vantage point of view. However, I think downvoting something just because it doesn't necessarily add obvious value (which is relative) to the conversation is a mistake. Maybe it's just me but I would think it would make people more hesitant to speak freely just because others may perceive no value from it and getting downvoted as a result. It's very different than downvoting something because it's wrong (like 2+2 is not 5) or because the behavior was unacceptable.

As the grandparent says, this is a purposeful decision in this community. There's a goal of encouraging useful conversation, not just conversation. I do a lot less posting than I might otherwise and I make sure my comments have content before posting them. This hesitation helps ensure that I'm providing value, not just rambling opinion. Having an online community built around presenting value really is a feature, not a bug.

It may be a fine line with some fringe comments being downvoted when perhaps they shouldn't be, but without this it spirals out of control pretty quickly and the entire site becomes useless. Look at the transition that happened to Digg and subsequently Reddit.

These were sites that originally had thoughtful or interesting users that would often be more informative then the content link itself (it's currently like this on HN).

It seems for a while the bad comments get downvoted and removed, but once enough of the community is diluted with a critical mass of 'useless' users, bad comments start being upvoted and the site eventually only consists of the same bad one line jokes, completely devoid of content. At this point most of the old users move somewhere else.

Your comment doesn't add anything to the conversation, you don't supply information on why you wouldn't be upgrading, or what the advantages/disadvantages are to you (or anyone else). You just added meaningless noise to the thread. I'd have downvoted it myself.

It does. As I've said previously, I quoted the line that states its not production release and upgrading is at users own risk. I would think its self explanatory as to why I wouldn't upgrade. As for why it matters... as I've said, some people don't bother to scan the page. They simply click download. It's nice to have a reference pointed out. Maybe it's just me but I don't see it as meaningless as others do. That said, see my other reply above. I think it's bad to discourage people from speaking freely just because its subjectively not adding value to the overall conversation. It's one thing to downvote something that is deserving of a downvote, its another to discourage people from stating their opinions.

Take as an example some comments I made prior to making this post in the climate change thread currently on the frontpage (ice age). Although I have now deleted these, I simply stated that climate change prediction was uncertain due to the number of factors involved. A simple 2 line or so comment in reply to a poster asking why conflicting views existed on the subject. I believe it was of value (it answered his/her question, yet was of course an unpopular opninion to hold. A few minutes later it hit -1.

I won't be repeating the mistake of thinking I can discuss a matter openly here and believe downvoting adds nothing to a discussion (in contrast to upvoting which can be very useful for sorting comments).

That is not a very valuable comment, though. You may have received a better score if you posted a not-so-valuable comment defending a popular position, but that doesn't mean that well-argued defences of unpopular positions receive the same treatment.

Being downvoted has a much higher emotional impact than being upvoted, but it does help with sorting comments, obviously.

It does help in sorting, but i'd suggest it sorts by popularity, not by quality as we tend to assume.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm here to read interesting perspectives on interesting topics. I don't really care to reaffirm a popular opinion, irrespective of quality or substance.

In that case, why do you care about the voting? You will always get the group-think out-voting the carefully reasoned but unpopular. All you need to do is read - perhaps simply skim - all the comments. Find users whose opinion seems to be worth reading, and then seek out their comments.

Removing down-votes won't help the problem you've identified.

That's what I increasingly find myself doing. The downside is that you get less and less exposed to new material; "old" HN would usually surface e.g. tptacek's comments, but there would also be some highly-voted and insightful comments by relative nobodies who were experts in the particular field being discussed. This still happens, but reading the highest-voted comments is becoming less and less worthwhile.

The problem is that down-votes have account consequences. They aren't the mirror opposite of an up-vote. Ten upvotes and a post is just popular, ten downvotes and you might get banned.

If moderation was a flag that some people cared about but that left everything intact then people could ignore it if they wanted.

Do you think you get banned for the downvotes, or for the comment? I don't think anybody (here) is proposing removing the "flag" button...

"Popularity, not quality" is the big problem of any social site. However, removing downvotes doesn't help: "anti-canonical" opinions won't gather many upvotes either. [EDIT: well, hopefully they will. But the trend is that they increasingly don't.]

I remember seeing it, and remember thinking - well, that's pretty content-free.

    I simply stated that climate change prediction was
    uncertain due to the number of factors involved.

Exactly - you didn't really add anything useful to the discussion. We all know it's complicated. We all know there are lots of factors.

I didn't down-vote it, but I can see why others did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com