Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrvc | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com